Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60062. Asking whether Roman Catholicism is Christian is a question that needs unpicking before it can be answered, because it is really two questions wearing one coat. Are individual Roman Catholics Christians? And does the Roman Catholic system, as officially defined, teach the gospel of the New Testament? Those questions have different answers, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 13013. The five solas are the shorthand history has given us for what the Reformers recovered about salvation. Sola is simply Latin for alone, and each one is a small word with a very large fence around it, because in every case the argument was about what else might be allowed to stand alongside….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09017. Ask most people what divides the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches and you will hear about statues, the Pope and whether priests can marry. Those are real differences, but they sit on the surface. The things that actually separate the two are older and deeper, and they come down to two questions that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7095 Freedom from shame is one of the least advertised benefits of the doctrine of justification, and for many believers it is the one they need most. Guilt and shame are not the same thing, and a gospel presentation that deals only with guilt will leave a great many Christians still bowed under something…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7093 Union with Christ is the most frequent way the New Testament describes a Christian, and one of the least discussed in ordinary church life. Paul uses the phrase in Christ, or its equivalents, well over a hundred times. It is his shorthand for what a believer is. Yet ask most Christians to explain…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7092 The doctrine of adoption is one of those truths that gets quietly folded into justification and lost. Preachers mention it in passing, systematic theologies give it a short paragraph, and the believer walks away with the impression that being adopted is simply another way of saying being forgiven. It is not, and the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7083. Old Testament believers were saved in exactly the same way we are, by grace through faith, and it is worth saying that plainly at the outset because a good deal of confusion surrounds this question. Some assume they were saved by keeping the law, which would make the Old Testament a different religion…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 07069 The Catholic and Protestant accounts of salvation differ at the point where it matters most: whether a sinner is declared righteous once and for all on the basis of what Jesus has done, or is gradually made righteous through a process the church administers. Everything else in the debate follows from that. I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07026. Imputed righteousness is the answer to a question that ought to keep every honest person awake: how can a guilty man stand in front of a holy God and not be destroyed? Imputation is the accounting word Scripture uses for what God does about that, and once you grasp it you will never…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 07025. The relationship between faith and works is where a great many Christians tie themselves in knots, and I understand why. Paul says a person is justified by faith apart from works of the law. James says faith without works is dead. Put those two sentences side by side without care and you have…