Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6012. The seven deadly sins are among the most famous religious ideas in the world: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. They appear in Dante, in medieval art, in films and quiz shows, and most people assume the list must be somewhere in the Bible. It is not. So where did the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3052. The historical Jesus is a phrase you will meet in television documentaries, paperback bestsellers and undergraduate courses, usually delivered with a knowing tone: behind the Christ of the church’s faith, we are told, stands a rather different figure, the real Jesus of Nazareth, whom scholarship must excavate from beneath layers of legend. The…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1019. Higher criticism has generated strong reactions in the church for more than two centuries, and having watched its effects on ordinary congregations over the years, I think those reactions are largely warranted. It is worth understanding precisely what this discipline is, where it came from, what conclusions it has reached, and why those…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 12029 The transgender movement did not emerge from nowhere. It has intellectual roots, ideological commitments, and a traceable history that stretches back further than most people realise. Understanding where the movement came from is not an exercise in conspiracy thinking. It is essential for the church to engage the ideas critically rather than simply…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60083 Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) was a German New Testament scholar at the University of Marburg whose influence on twentieth-century theology was enormous and, from an orthodox evangelical perspective, largely destructive. His programme of demythologisation, set out most directly in his 1941 essay “New Testament and Mythology,” argued that the New Testament is embedded in…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 13013 The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century was not a theological invention but a recovery. When Luther posted his theses and Calvin worked through Geneva, what drove them was the conviction that Scripture’s teaching on salvation had been buried under layers of tradition, sacramentalism, and institutional authority. The Five Solas that emerged from…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60082 The Word of Faith movement is one of the most widely diffused streams of popular Christianity in the world today, with roots in mid-twentieth century America and branches now extending across every continent. Its central teachings about health, wealth, confession, and the power of spoken faith are encountered across television networks, megachurches, and…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60087 The claim that Constantine created the Bible appears regularly in popular sceptical discussions, was given wide circulation by Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, and resurfaces periodically in online conversations as though it were settled historical fact. It is not. The claim is historically wrong in virtually every detail, and Christians should…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60081 A Christian student entering a university biblical studies department for the first time can find the experience genuinely disorienting. Lecturers who have devoted their academic careers to the subject treat the multiple authorship of Isaiah, the post-exilic composition of Daniel, and the legendary character of the patriarchal narratives not as contested positions but…