Reading Time: 10 minutesBible & Society | 31 August 2026 Over the weekend of 22 and 23 August a conference called Make Great Britain Christian Again gathered at Emmanuel Free Church of England in Morecambe. There were addresses on the state of the nation and prayers offered as a kind of spiritual warfare, with patriotic hymns sung between…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60202. Few sentences have done more damage than the claim that the Jews killed Jesus. It has been shouted outside synagogues, painted on walls, preached from pulpits, and used to justify expulsions, massacres and, eventually, an attempt to exterminate a people. So the question deserves a careful answer rather than a slogan in either…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60079. Fulfilled prophecy is the one line of evidence that Scripture itself puts forward as a test, which makes it different from every other argument in the apologist’s bag. God does not say prove me by philosophy or by archaeology. He says look at what I said would happen and see whether it happened….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60097. Few events in the Old Testament have attracted more attempts at naturalistic explanation than the parting of the Red Sea. Wind setdown models, tsunami theories, and the argument that the Hebrew means Sea of Reeds and therefore a shallow marsh: all of them try to preserve something of the event while removing what…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60109. Antisemitism is rising again in Britain, and I do not write that as a rhetorical flourish. Synagogue attacks, harassment of Jewish students on campuses, conspiracy theories that would have been recognised in 1930s Germany, and a great deal of it circulating among people who would be appalled to be called racist. So it…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60091. The Canaanite conquest is the passage in the Old Testament I am asked about more than any other, and it deserves better than the two standard responses. One is to explain it away until nothing troubling remains. The other is to shrug and say God can do what He likes. Neither is honest,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60071. Christian Zionism has become a term of abuse in a good deal of Christian writing, used to describe a caricature that almost nobody actually holds. Before I defend anything I want to say clearly what I do and do not mean by it. What I hold is that God made unconditional promises to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60067. Filipino Israelism is the claim that the Filipino people are the descendants of ancient Israel, that the Philippines is the land promised in Scripture, and that the prophecies of restoration point to the islands rather than to the Middle East. It is less familiar in Britain than its Victorian cousin, but it is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60066. British Israelism is the claim that the Anglo-Saxon and related peoples of north-western Europe are the physical descendants of the ten northern tribes of Israel, lost after the Assyrian deportation and rediscovered, as it happens, in ourselves. It sounds harmless enough at first, a piece of Victorian eccentricity. It is not harmless, and…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 60042. The Western Wall stands in Jerusalem today, some fifty courses of ancient stone, and every year millions of people place prayers into its cracks. Sceptics point at it and ask a reasonable question. Jesus said that not one stone would be left upon another, so how is that wall still there? Either the…