Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4192. Few subjects make a congregation more uneasy than church discipline, and almost no one stops to ask what the Holy Spirit has to do with it. We tend to picture discipline as a grim, legal business, a committee with folded arms removing a name from a roll. Scripture paints something altogether warmer and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10060 The Bible’s story doesn’t end with souls floating around in heaven forever. Instead, it culminates in “a new heaven and a new earth” where God dwells with His people in physical bodies on a renewed creation. This is the biblical vision of eternity, and understanding it transforms how we think about heaven, our…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 09055 Church discipline is one of the most neglected functions of the modern church. Many congregations have never practised it. Many pastors have never been trained in it. And many believers would be horrified at the suggestion that a church has the right and the responsibility to confront sin in its members and, if…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 09056 Excommunication is the strongest measure the church possesses, and it is one that fills most modern Christians with deep discomfort. The word itself sounds medieval and punitive, conjuring images of papal edicts and political power plays. But the biblical practice is neither medieval nor primarily punitive. It is the final step in a…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09024 Few pastoral situations are more delicate or more important than the question of what the church should do when a member sins publicly. Get it wrong in one direction — moving too quickly, too harshly, or with the wrong spirit — and the church becomes a place of fear rather than grace. Get…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7060 The word “backslider” carries more weight in older Christian usage than it does in most modern translations, but the reality it describes is woven through the entire New Testament. It refers to a genuine believer who has withdrawn from active fellowship with God, whose spiritual life has contracted, whose once-warm faith has grown…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 05017 Genesis 1:26 contains one of the most theologically loaded sentences in all of Scripture: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” The presence of two terms has generated centuries of theological reflection. Do they refer to the same thing? Do they describe distinct aspects of what it means to be…