Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60066. British Israelism is the claim that the Anglo-Saxon and related peoples of north-western Europe are the physical descendants of the ten northern tribes of Israel, lost after the Assyrian deportation and rediscovered, as it happens, in ourselves. It sounds harmless enough at first, a piece of Victorian eccentricity. It is not harmless, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60087. The biblical canon is supposed, in a story that circulates endlessly online and was given a huge push by Dan Brown’s novel, to have been assembled by the Emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicaea in 325, with inconvenient gospels burned and a divine Jesus voted into existence. It is a marvellous story….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60104. The Nicolaitans are one of the small mysteries of the New Testament. They appear twice, both times in the letters to the seven churches in Revelation, and nowhere else in Scripture or in any document we can date with confidence to the first century. That has not stopped people writing confidently about them,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60065. The practice of praying to Mary and to the saints is one of the sharpest points of difference between Rome and the churches of the Reformation, and it is one where I find the Catholic explanation and the Catholic practice do not always match each other. I want to state the case for…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60103. Divine hiddenness is the polite name philosophers give to a complaint most of us have made at some point, usually at two in the morning. If God is real and wants to be known, why does He not simply appear? One unmistakable public demonstration and the argument would be over. I do not…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60086. Lot’s daughters are the subject of one of the ugliest sentences in the Bible. The men of Sodom have surrounded the house demanding that Lot hand over his two visitors, and Lot answers by offering his two virgin daughters to the mob instead, telling the crowd to do to them as they please….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60064. Reports of Catholic miracles put an evangelical in an awkward spot, and I think we should admit that rather than reaching for a stock answer. Healings at Lourdes, weeping statues, incorrupt bodies, the medical dossiers assembled for canonisations. Are they real, and if some of them are, what follows? I want to avoid…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60063. The assumption that faith and education pull in opposite directions is so widespread that it barely gets stated, it just hangs in the air. Get educated and you will grow out of religion. Stay religious and you will have to keep your head down in a seminar. I do not accept the framing,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60081. Higher criticism is the working assumption of almost every university theology and religious studies department in this country, and if you are a believing student walking into that lecture theatre for the first time, it can feel as though the floor has tilted. Isaiah arrives as the work of two or three hands….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60061. Church abuse scandals are the objection I find hardest to answer, not because the answer is complicated but because the objection is so often justified. Somebody has been hurt, badly, by people who claimed to speak for God, and now they are asking me why they should trust an institution that did that…