Topic Archives: Scripture

I like to read a book about the Bible every year. Although I’m often reading what I already know, I still find it deeply beneficial to regularly remind myself what the Bible really is, how it came to be, and how I should read and interpret it. That’s especially true in a day when the […]

The great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, infamously referred to the book of James as ‘an epistle of straw’ in his preface to the German New Testament. What is less well known or talked about, is that Luther also praised the book of James in the same preface. Luther said about James, ‘I praise it and […]

Why would anyone in their right mind believe the Bible, believe Jesus Christ, and believe that belonging to a Christian church was a sane and sensible thing to do? Reason 1 why you shouldn’t believe. The Bible! It is simply unbelievable. Who today in this modern, scientific, rational world believes in creation out of nothing […]

It ranks as one of the wickedest acts of a Jewish king, it has had many parallels, and the end result of them all is a failure to destroy the Word of God. Here’s the story. King Jehoiakim of Judah was listening as the words of a scroll were read to him – a scroll […]

Eugene Peterson published The Message: The New Testament in Contemporary English in 1993. A whole Bible version was finally completed in 2002. The casual shopper in the average Christian book shop today could be forgiven for thinking that it is yet another of the veritable flood of English translations of the Bible that have been […]

You may be an evangelical and be an Anglican, Baptist, Presbyterian, Brethren or other. You may be Calvinist or Arminian. But we generally need more agreement on points of theology and worship if we are to live and serve together as a church. One of the ways in which churches identify themselves is by calling […]

Introduction Even before the Scofield Reference Bible became so popular, the notion that God chose different ways of saving sinners at different times in man’s history was rife. Under this notion – known as Dispensationalism – the world is seen as a household administered by God at several stages of revelation, each stage placing on […]

The short answer to this question is ‘Yes’, says J. C. Ryle, the well known Church of England minister. In this small paperback, first published in 1877, he gives reason after reason why the Bible is truly the word of God. Written in a popular rather than academic style he outlines the internal evidence and […]

And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12). In our pluralistic, post-modern, western world few things irk people more than the gospel message of exclusivity. After all, absolute truth statements have caused major […]

PART I Thy word is truth. (John 17:17) So many today have so many different views about Jesus. Who is the contemporary Christ? Some view him as a mythical figure, a sort of modern day Robin Hood or Santa Claus, one akin to the tooth fairy. Others believe that he was a wonderful, compassionate man, […]

I want to focus on three influences which shaped the so-called ‘Authorised Version’: King James himself, the translators, and the printers. Such attention to the human aspect of the making of a Bible translation in no way conflicts with belief in the Bible as the infallible and inerrant Word of God (Isa. 40:8). The Bible […]

The concluding part of a paper delivered at the 2009 Theological Conference of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. See here for the first part of this paper. 3. Echoes of the downgrade movement The echoes we can hear of the downgrade movement which destroyed the orthodoxy of the old Free Church, and indeed brought […]

The first part of a paper delivered at the 2009 Theological Conference of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The concluding part can be found here. Attacks upon the doctrine that there are no errors in the Bible are not new. As the history of the Scottish Church in the late nineteenth century demonstrates, they […]

In Geneva, 450 years ago, a new version of the Bible in English began to come off the printing presses. For the first time, English-speaking people in the British Isles could purchase a Bible in their own tongue translated, in its entirety, directly from the original Hebrew and Greek – a notable milestone on the […]

In 1821 a young clergyman’s son matriculated at Worcester College, Oxford. Amongst the cleverest of his generation, he knew nothing of the wisdom which can only be imparted by the work of the Holy Spirit in the soul. Just previously, another young man, of similar academic capabilities, had graduated with an unexpectedly low third-class degree. […]