Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 10101 The intermediate state refers to the condition of human beings between physical death and bodily resurrection. This period—which for some has already lasted thousands of years—raises important questions: Where are the dead now? Are they conscious? What are they experiencing? Scripture provides clear answers that should comfort believers and warn unbelievers about what…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10200 What happens to a person in the time between death and the resurrection? It is a question that has occupied Christian thinkers across the centuries, and it is one that touches everyone who has stood at a graveside. Scripture gives more guidance on this than is often realised, though it does not answer…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 5000 The word anthropology appears intimidating at first glance, but it points to one of the most practical questions theology addresses: what, exactly, is a human being? Not in the sense that evolutionary biology or social science would frame the question, but in the sense that asks what the Creator says about His own…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 5001 Few questions sit at a more genuinely interesting intersection of science and Scripture than this one. Neuroscience has made extraordinary advances in mapping brain function, tracing the neural correlates of emotion, memory, and decision-making, and treating conditions of the mind with increasing precision. None of this, however, settles the deeper philosophical and theological…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 05043 Artificial intelligence is no longer a theoretical concern for the future; it is a present reality reshaping how people work, communicate, and think. The questions it raises are genuinely new in some of their particulars, but the underlying issue is as old as Genesis: what is it that makes a human being distinctively,…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 05044 Few pastoral situations press harder on theological convictions than watching someone disappear behind advancing dementia. The face is familiar; the body is present; and yet something that once defined the person — their memory, their personality, their capacity for recognition or conversation — is gone. What does Scripture say is actually happening to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 05045 Few theological questions about human nature have generated more sustained discussion than how many genuinely distinct elements make up a human person. The debate between dichotomy and trichotomy — between the view that human beings consist of two elements (body and soul/spirit) and the view that they consist of three (body, soul, and…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 5028 The relationship between the body and the soul is one of the oldest questions in human thought, and one that Christianity answers very differently from the surrounding culture in almost every age. The ancient Greek world tended to regard the body as a prison, the soul as the real person temporarily trapped in…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 05030 Few words are used more freely in religious conversation, and understood less precisely. “Soul” appears in hymns, in everyday speech, in philosophical debates about consciousness and identity, and throughout Scripture. Yet what the Bible actually means by the word is more specific, and more interesting, than most people assume. The Biblical Word for…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 05019 The question of whether animals have souls is one that comes up more often in pastoral contexts than in academic ones. It tends to surface when someone has lost a beloved pet, or when a child asks whether their dog will be in heaven. But it is also a question with genuine theological…