Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7089 “Born again” is perhaps the most widely used and widely misunderstood phrase in the Christian vocabulary. It has been reduced to a cultural label, adopted as a denominational identifier, and stripped by popular usage of almost all its theological content. Which is unfortunate, because what Jesus actually said to Nicodemus in John 3…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4073 One of the persistent challenges in Trinitarian theology is maintaining the genuine distinction of the three Persons without tumbling into tritheism — the error of thinking that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three separate gods rather than three Persons sharing one divine being. The problem is most acute when it comes to…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4074 When theologians speak of the “eternal counsels of the Godhead,” they mean the purposes, plans, and decisions that exist within God’s own being before any act of creation — the eternal agreement between Father, Son, and Spirit regarding what they would do and how they would do it. The language of “counsel” risks…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4070 Pneumatology — the doctrine of the Holy Spirit — cannot be properly understood in isolation from Trinitarian theology, and the reverse is equally true. The two disciplines are so closely intertwined that to study one without the other is to distort both. The Spirit is not an appendix to Christian theology or a…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07030 The question of whether there is a point beyond which the gospel can no longer reach a person is one that pastoral ministry cannot avoid. It surfaces in conversations about hardened relatives who have heard the gospel repeatedly and seem impervious to it, about people who once appeared to be close to faith…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4086 One of the most significant pastoral and theological questions in evangelism concerns what actually happens in a person when they hear the gospel. Is the Spirit’s work of conviction something that genuinely opens the possibility of response, or is it an irresistible divine action that produces a predetermined outcome? And if the conviction…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4087 The question of how to distinguish a genuine prompting from the Holy Spirit from one’s own reasoning or from an external spiritual influence is one of the most practically pressing questions in the Christian life. It is easy to claim, and equally easy to dismiss — and both errors have consequences. Claiming the…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04097 The relationship between biblical sanctification and what contemporary psychology calls character formation or psychological maturity deserves careful handling. There are genuine points of contact, observations from psychology that illuminate what Scripture has always said, and areas where the two frameworks diverge at a fundamental level. The task is knowing which is which, rather…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04098 Paul had other options available to him when he wrote Galatians 5. He could have described the qualities he was commending as virtues, drawing on a framework that every educated reader in the Greco-Roman world would have immediately recognised. He could have presented them as the disciplines of the Christian life, the practices…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04102 John 20:22 sits in the Gospel of John like a question mark. On the evening of resurrection Sunday, Jesus appears to the gathered disciples, breathes on them, and says “Receive the Holy Spirit.” The same disciples will be in Jerusalem fifty days later when the Spirit falls with wind and fire at Pentecost….