Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2032. Divine emotions is a phrase I use carefully, because Scripture clearly describes God loving, grieving, rejoicing and growing angry, yet these responses are not identical to the changeable, often involuntary feelings that sweep over us. Genesis 6:6 says God “was grieved… and it grieved him to his heart” over human wickedness before the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 2002. Different views on the Trinity exist even among careful believers who fully affirm Trinitarian orthodoxy, hold firmly to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, and would never dream of calling themselves anything other than mainstream evangelical Christians. This surprises people who assume the Trinity is one settled doctrine with no internal variety at all. It is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2001. Theology Proper is the branch of systematic theology devoted entirely to the study of God Himself: His existence, His nature, His attributes, His works, and the relationships within the Godhead. It is called "proper" not because other branches of theology are somehow improper, but because it studies God as the direct subject rather…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4073. The Spirit’s distinct personhood is one of those doctrines that sounds like abstract technical furniture until you try to pray, worship, or teach without a clear grasp of it, at which point you discover how much rests on getting it right. Scripture presents Father, Son, and Spirit as three who relate to one…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4070. Trinitarian pneumatology is not an optional specialism sitting alongside the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. It is the frame within which the doctrine of the Holy Spirit must be studied at all, because the Spirit is not a topic that can be understood correctly in isolation from who He is as the third…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1035. Scripture and tradition are not enemies, whatever the sharper edges of Reformation rhetoric sometimes suggest. Tradition, rightly understood, is simply the accumulated memory of how the church has read, defended, and lived out Scripture across two thousand years. The question is not whether tradition matters. It plainly does. The question is which one…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1034. Special revelation is not God’s only way of making Himself known, but it is His only sufficient way of making Himself known for salvation, and that distinction answers most of what lies behind this question. God has genuinely revealed something of Himself through creation, through conscience, and through the ordinary unfolding of history….
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1032. When I say Scripture is my final authority, people sometimes hear something I have not actually said. They hear a claim that Scripture is the only source of guidance a Christian ever consults, as though reason, experience, and the accumulated wisdom of other believers count for nothing. That is not the claim, and…