Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 2013 The phrase ‘eternal generation of the Son’ appears in no single verse of Scripture in those exact words, and that immediately raises a legitimate question: is this a doctrine the church developed to explain what Scripture teaches, or is it an addition that goes beyond what Scripture says? The answer matters, because the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04015 The phrase ‘the procession of the Holy Spirit’ sounds abstract enough that most Christians assume it belongs to the world of academic theology and has little to do with their daily experience of God. That impression is understandable but mistaken. What is at stake in this doctrine is the Spirit’s genuine identity as…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 2015 Theology has a way of making apparently abstract questions surprisingly practical, and this is one of them. The question is whether the pattern we observe in salvation – the Father planning, the Son dying, the Spirit applying – tells us something permanently true about who God is, or whether these were roles adopted…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 2017 The question tends to arrive from one of two directions. Some people ask it because they have read the Old Testament and noticed that God appears to deal very differently with different people – choosing Israel over the nations, calling Abraham while seemingly overlooking his contemporaries, appearing to prefer Jacob to Esau before…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 2018 Few theological questions carry more emotional weight. Behind the abstract formulation often lies something very personal: a parent who died without faith, a sibling who walked away from the church, a friend who never responded to the gospel no matter how many conversations took place. The question asks why an all-loving God would…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 2019 The doctrine of divine impassibility holds that God cannot be affected by anything external to Himself, that He does not suffer or experience pain, and that nothing in creation can move Him emotionally. It has a long and serious history in Christian theology, but it stands in considerable tension with how the Bible…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 2027 “Three persons but one God” sounds, on first hearing, like a straightforward contradiction. If there are three persons, surely there are three gods? If there is only one God, how can there be three persons? The objection is natural, and it deserves a direct answer rather than a retreat into vague appeals to…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 2028 The doctrine of the Trinity is the Christian teaching that the one God eternally exists as three distinct persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Each person is fully and completely God, not a partial expression or a proportion of the divine being. There are not three gods and not one person manifesting in…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 2029 The answer is yes — though it requires careful qualification. The full, explicitly articulated doctrine of the Trinity belongs to the New Testament, where the personal identities of Father, Son, and Spirit are disclosed with a clarity that was not available in the earlier revelation. What the Old Testament contains is not the…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 02031 Paul told the philosophers in Athens that God “is not served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:25). If that is true — and it is — then a reasonable question follows: why does God command worship? What…