Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7096 The Calvinist system is the most influential account of salvation in English-speaking evangelicalism, and it is also the one most often described inaccurately by both its friends and its critics. If we are going to disagree with it, and I do, then we owe it an accurate description first. Caricature is cheap and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07034. Predestination and foreknowledge are two words that make many Christians flinch, and the flinching usually has more to do with what they have heard about the words than with what the Bible does with them. Predestination sounds like fatalism. Foreknowledge sounds like a divine spreadsheet. Neither impression survives an honest look at the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07033. The doctrine of election is one of those subjects where people arrive with their minds already made up and their defences already raised, and I do not blame them. Few doctrines have caused more heat, more caricature and more pastoral damage when handled carelessly. Yet the word is in the Bible, it is…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 2005. God’s providence is one of the most misunderstood doctrines in the whole of Theology Proper, largely because two opposite errors keep pulling the conversation off balance. One error makes God the direct author of literally everything that happens, including sin and atrocity, as though every act of cruelty, every natural disaster, every child’s…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 02033 The question has a sharp edge to it. If God knew before the world was made exactly what every person would ever choose, in every circumstance, across all of time — then in what meaningful sense are those choices really free? When you sat down this morning and decided what to have for…