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: 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: 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: 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…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 3066 This question assumes something that is not quite accurate, namely that Jesus, as God, ceased to exist or ceased to function during His death. To answer properly, we need to understand what happened when Jesus died and how His divine and human natures relate to one another. The answer reveals something wonderful about…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 3067 Throughout history, people have tried to enlist Jesus for their political causes. Some have portrayed Him as a social revolutionary, fighting against Roman oppression and the wealthy establishment. Others have claimed Him for conservative causes, emphasising His respect for tradition and authority. So who is right? Was Jesus a political revolutionary? The answer…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 3068 This might seem like a strange question, but it is worth thinking through carefully. The answer tells us something important about who Jesus was and how we should understand the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Put simply: Jesus was a Jew. He was not a Christian. And yet Christianity is rightly named after…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01205 Anyone who reads John’s Gospel and then turns to Revelation notices something immediately. The Gospel and the epistles flow in relatively polished, elegant Greek. Revelation does not. Sentences break grammatical rules. Case endings that should follow standard Greek convention do not. Scholars have catalogued dozens of what are technically called solecisms — violations…