Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 03017 Most Christians use the names “Jesus” and “Christ” interchangeably, and there is nothing wrong with that. But the two words are doing very different things. One is a personal name; the other is a title of office. Understanding the distinction opens up something genuinely rich about who he is and what God was…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11073 When suffering comes—and it will come—what we believe about God, about His purposes, and about His promises becomes either an anchor or an afterthought. Doctrine is not abstract theology for comfortable times; it is the solid ground beneath our feet when everything else gives way. Job understood this. After losing his children, his…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7064 In 1937, the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer published Nachfolge, translated into English as The Cost of Discipleship. Writing against a German church that had largely surrendered its integrity in the face of National Socialism, Bonhoeffer drew a distinction that has echoed through Christian thinking ever since. Cheap grace, he argued, is the preaching…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7085 The question arises naturally for anyone who takes the New Testament seriously. Paul can write to the Corinthians and call them “those sanctified in Christ Jesus” (1 Corinthians 1:2), and yet the same letter spends considerable energy addressing a congregation with serious moral and relational problems. If they are already sanctified, what is…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07073 One of the most liberating and yet most misunderstood aspects of the Christian life involves the relationship between who the believer already is in Christ and who they are still becoming in daily experience. The New Testament holds these two realities in constant and deliberate tension, and failing to distinguish them produces either…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 07074 The question of whether a Christian can reach a state of sinless perfection in this life has been debated with considerable energy across church history, and it continues to be a live issue in certain theological traditions. The claim is made with evident sincerity and spiritual earnestness, which is part of what makes…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60072 Few movements in modern church history have proved more persistently influential or more theologically problematic than the Latter Rain revival of the late 1940s and the doctrine of the Manifest Sons of God that grew from it. Though the names may be unfamiliar to many Christians today, the ideas continue to circulate widely,…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 7069 The question of salvation divided Western Christianity in the sixteenth century and has not been formally resolved since. The Protestant Reformation turned fundamentally on the question of how a person is justified before God, and the Council of Trent, convened by Rome between 1545 and 1563, responded by issuing specific condemnations of the…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60083 Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) was a German New Testament scholar at the University of Marburg whose influence on twentieth-century theology was enormous and, from an orthodox evangelical perspective, largely destructive. His programme of demythologisation, set out most directly in his 1941 essay “New Testament and Mythology,” argued that the New Testament is embedded in…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 03014 The resurrection of Jesus Christ is not an optional extra attached to the Christian faith for those who find it encouraging. It is the event on which everything stands or falls. Paul is blunt about this in 1 Corinthians 15:17: “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you…