Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60097. Few events in the Old Testament have attracted more attempts at naturalistic explanation than the parting of the Red Sea. Wind setdown models, tsunami theories, and the argument that the Hebrew means Sea of Reeds and therefore a shallow marsh: all of them try to preserve something of the event while removing what…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60113. Spiritual not religious has become the standard British answer to a question about faith, and you will hear it at work, at the school gate and at funerals. It signals openness to something beyond the material world combined with a firm distaste for institutions, doctrines and anyone telling you what to believe. I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60096. The book of Jonah divides readers more sharply than almost any other short piece of the Old Testament. A prophet runs from God, is thrown overboard, is swallowed by a great fish, survives three days inside it, and is vomited onto dry land to preach to a city that repents. Many scholars treat…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60077. Peter tells us to be prepared to give an answer to anyone who asks for a reason for the hope that is in us, and I suspect that verse has produced more guilt in ordinary Christians than almost any other. We read it and picture a debate we would lose. But look at…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60095. Firmament is a word most people meet only in the King James Version of Genesis 1, and it has generated a surprising amount of argument. Critics of the biblical account claim it reveals a primitive cosmology in which the sky was a solid metal dome holding back an ocean, with the stars fixed…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60112. Those who suffer are usually surrounded, at least at first, by people who want to help and have no idea how. I have watched kind Christians make a bereavement worse with a sentence, and I have said things at gravesides in my twenties that I would give a good deal to take back….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60075. The cover-up culture that has come to light across parts of the charismatic and independent church world over the last decade is one of the saddest things I have had to think about as a minister. Case after case has followed the same shape, and the shape is what interests me here. I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60111. Chronic illness is a different kind of suffering from the sudden crisis, and the church is often better at the crisis. When somebody collapses there are meals, visits and prayer chains. When somebody has been unwell for eleven years, the casseroles stopped a decade ago and the phone rings less than it used…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60093. Cain’s wife has been produced as a knockout blow against Genesis since at least the seventeenth century, and she is still being produced today, usually with an air of having settled the matter. Cain kills Abel, is driven out, goes to the land of Nod, and there he knows his wife. Where, the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60073. The Turning revival began in Reading in 2016 and for a while it was the most talked about thing in British evangelicalism. Reports of hundreds and then thousands of people praying to receive Jesus on the streets travelled quickly, and churches across the country wanted to know how to get it. I want…