Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60040. Faith deconstruction has become the standard word for what happens when a believer starts pulling their inherited Christianity apart to see what, if anything, holds. It is worth noticing that the church has a much older word for a similar process, and that word is reformation. The two are not the same, and…
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 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: 9 minutesQuestion 13001. The Protestant Reformation was the sixteenth-century movement that recovered the gospel of justification by faith and, in the process, broke Western Christendom apart. That sentence contains both the glory and the tragedy of it, and any honest account has to hold the two together. I am a Baptist, which means my own spiritual…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 09066. Consubstantiation is the term commonly used for the Lutheran understanding of the Lord’s Supper, in which the body and blood of Jesus are truly present in, with and under the bread and wine, while the bread and wine remain fully bread and wine. Both are there together, which is what the prefix is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09047. What makes a true church true? It is not a theoretical question. People move house and need to find somewhere to worship. Believers watch a congregation drift and wonder whether it has crossed a line. Somebody starts a fellowship in a front room and asks whether it counts. Behind all of those situations…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09017. Ask most people what divides the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches and you will hear about statues, the Pope and whether priests can marry. Those are real differences, but they sit on the surface. The things that actually separate the two are older and deeper, and they come down to two questions that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7087. The Five Solas are the five Latin slogans that summarise what the Reformers recovered from Scripture in the sixteenth century: Scripture alone, faith alone, grace alone, Christ alone, and to the glory of God alone. Every one of them is a statement of exclusion, which is the point of the word sola, and…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 07069 The Catholic and Protestant accounts of salvation differ at the point where it matters most: whether a sinner is declared righteous once and for all on the basis of what Jesus has done, or is gradually made righteous through a process the church administers. Everything else in the debate follows from that. I…