Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07014 Justification is the word the New Testament uses to describe what happens legally and relationally when a sinner is accepted before God. It is not the whole of salvation, but it is its judicial heart. Getting a clear understanding of it matters enormously, because what you believe about justification determines what you believe…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07025 This question sits at the very heart of the Protestant Reformation, and it is not merely a historical or academic debate. How a person answers it shapes how they understand the gospel, how they relate to God, and what they think Christian discipleship actually involves. The apparent tension in the New Testament between…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07026 Imputation is a theological term that may sound abstract but describes one of the most personally significant realities in the whole of Scripture. It answers the question of how a guilty person can stand before a holy God without condemnation, and it does so by pointing to a transaction that took place at…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07023 Baptism is a significant and serious act of Christian obedience. It is also one of the most debated subjects in Christian theology, with genuine disagreement not just about its mode but about what it actually does. The question of whether baptism is necessary for salvation goes to the heart of the gospel itself:…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion Q07092 In evangelical circles, the doctrine of justification rightly receives enormous attention. It is the declaration by which a sinful person is pronounced righteous before God on the basis of Christ’s atoning work received through faith. But there is a danger that in rightly emphasising justification, other dimensions of what happens at salvation receive…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion Q07093 Of all the soteriological categories the New Testament uses, union with Christ may be the most comprehensive and the least understood. Justification describes the believer’s legal standing; sanctification describes their moral transformation; adoption describes their relational status. Union with Christ underlies all of these without being reducible to any one of them. Whether…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 7046 Union with Christ is one of the richest and most comprehensive concepts in the New Testament, and it functions as the theological foundation on which virtually every other aspect of salvation rests. It is also among the most underappreciated. Believers who have sat under solid Bible teaching for years can sometimes be unfamiliar…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 7047 The phrase “in Christ” appears in Paul’s letters more frequently than almost any other expression, and yet it tends to wash over readers without registering its full weight. It is not filler language or pious decoration. It is Paul’s most concentrated shorthand for the most fundamental thing that is true of a person…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07032 The phrase ordo salutis is Latin for “order of salvation,” and it refers to the logical sequence of the various elements involved in a person coming to salvation and continuing in the Christian life. It is a theological framework rather than a biblical phrase, but the question it addresses is thoroughly biblical: does…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 07087 The Five Solas are the foundational principles of the Protestant Reformation, expressed in five Latin phrases that summarise what the Reformers recovered from Scripture in their challenge to the teaching and practice of the Roman Catholic Church. They are not five separate doctrines so much as five facets of one great truth: salvation…