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 13012. Noah’s nakedness is one of those passages people read quickly and hope nobody asks about. A righteous man plants a vineyard, gets drunk, lies uncovered in his tent, and his grandson ends up cursed. Even by the standards of Genesis it is an odd few verses. It has also attracted some of the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 13011. Gnostic teaching is the ancient heresy that refuses to die. It surfaces in the second century in developed form, it is answered in seed form inside the New Testament itself, and it turns up again every few decades wearing new clothes and promising the same thing: secret knowledge for a special few. I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 13008. Church history has a reputation problem. It sounds like the sort of thing you take up once the children have left home and you have run out of hobbies, a matter of dates, councils and men in unlikely hats. I want to argue the opposite. Church history is the record of how Jesus…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 13004. The Protestant Reformation is one of those events everybody has heard of and very few of us could actually describe. Mention it at a church coffee morning and you will get Luther, a hammer, a door, and then a rather polite silence while somebody refills the teapot. So let me tell you what…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 13003. John Calvin was a French lawyer turned theologian who became the most systematic mind of the Reformation and gave his name to a movement he would probably have found embarrassing. I am not a Calvinist, which means I have to work harder than most to write about him fairly, and I want to…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 13000. The Church Fathers are the Christian writers of roughly the first five centuries whose works have survived, and for a lot of Baptists they occupy a strange middle ground. We suspect them of being Catholic, we cannot name more than two, and we have a nagging sense that we ought to know something…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12064. The phrase love the sinner and hate the sin has become one of those sayings that everybody quotes and nobody examines. It is not in the Bible, which surprises people. It comes closest to a line of Augustine’s about loving people and hating their faults, and it reached English through Gandhi of all…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 12063. Assisted dying is no longer a theoretical question in Britain. Parliament has debated it repeatedly, opinion has shifted, and a good many Christians find themselves uneasy without being able to say exactly why. This article is my attempt to give the why. I want to write it carefully, because behind the policy debate…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12061. Scripture does not endorse any of the economic systems human beings have devised, and I think that disappoints people on all sides. Christians keep hoping the Bible will bless capitalism or socialism outright, and it stubbornly refuses to do either. What it does give us is a set of convictions about property, work,…