Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7086. The scapegoat theory of atonement is a way of understanding the cross that draws on the ritual of Leviticus 16 and, in its modern form, on sociological accounts of how communities discharge their violence onto a chosen victim. It has become influential in academic theology over the last fifty years, and it contains…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7085. If God has already set me apart, why pursue holiness at all? It is a fair question and a common one, and it usually arrives from somebody who has just grasped the doctrine of positional sanctification for the first time. If my standing cannot improve, what exactly is the effort for? The New…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7084. Whether the worst sinners imaginable could be forgiven is a question people ask in two very different tones of voice, and the tone matters. Some ask it as a challenge, expecting Christianity to flinch. Others ask it because of somebody in their own family, and they need to know whether there is a…
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: 6 minutesQuestion 7082. The antinomian error is the conviction, held openly or lived out quietly, that because a Christian is under grace, God’s moral commands no longer have any claim on him. The word is built from two Greek pieces meaning against law, and it names the opposite ditch from legalism on the same narrow road….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7079. Physical healing as a guaranteed benefit of the atonement is taught confidently in a good many places, and the proof text is almost always the same. Isaiah says that with his stripes we are healed, Peter quotes it, and the conclusion drawn is that sickness in a believer indicates either unconfessed sin or…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7078. To believe on Jesus is the single condition Scripture attaches to salvation, and it is worth being precise about it, because the English word believe has grown thin. In ordinary speech we believe things we are fairly confident about and nothing follows from it. I believe the train leaves at ten past. That…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7077. The place of confession in salvation is one of those subjects where a single verse has been made to carry more weight than it can bear. Romans 10:9 mentions the mouth, and a whole practice of guided prayers and public declarations has been built on it, sometimes with the implication that a person…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7076. That demons believe correct theology and remain lost is one of the more unsettling statements in the New Testament, and James makes it deliberately. He is arguing with somebody who thinks that holding the right ideas about God is sufficient, and he produces the most damaging counter example available: the demonic realm is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7075. The gospel message can be stated in a sentence, and it needs to be, because most of the conversations in which it matters will not give you twenty minutes. At the same time a summary that leaves out something essential is not a shorter gospel but a different one. So the task is…