Religion

"All your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature" through the decisions you make, wrote CS Lewis. If the choices we make really have such an impact, how can Christians make sure they make the right decisions?

The Holy Scriptures call Jesus “the Lord”, that is, the Master. This was a respectful title used by slaves towards their masters in Antiquity. This is how subordinates addressed their superiors: children and their fathers; siblings, and their older siblings—or even a younger sibling who holds a high position.

Trust in God gives clarity to our thinking, so God asks us not to be obsessed with justice, but to be concerned with and delighted by grace.

There’s something lying on a massive table. It’s a huge picture. You move closer and see that the design is made up of individual pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle. But the pattern is unusual. It isn’t an immediately recognisable image, such as a Swiss mountain or a bouquet of tulips.

More than a century ago, when the social sciences were just beginning to study the relationship between religion and health, elite scholars such as sociologist Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche repudiated religion consonantly, claiming that it had a toxic effect on individuals. 

Jeddah is different, at least according to its city motto. This Saudi Arabian port city on the Red Sea is home to more than 4 million people and is a gateway to Mecca: the holiest city in Islam. Millions of pilgrims come through Jeddah to visit Mecca, some 65 kilometres to the east, and Medina, Islam’s second holiest city, 360km to the north.

Are we at risk of turning Christianity into just another consumer product?

Why couldn’t God simply have forgiven sinners? Precisely because sinners cannot be forgiven until they completely understand sin, with all its far reaching consequences, or before the wages of sin are paid.

After Jesus was born—that is, in the era we call Anno Domini (AD)—the history of mankind was different from that of Christianity. As it is known, the latter was not the history of a triumphant march of Christianity towards its universalization and the unification of the human race. On the contrary, this history can rather be characterised as a manifestation of “the great...

“Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” (John 20:17).

How can one explain that laws attributed to revelation are found in the legislation of other ancient peoples? How can the similarities between biblical thought and ancient culture be explained? How is the biblical God compared to the gods of other peoples?

Some expectations dissolve into routine or turn into despair, while others invigorate life. The former are measured in deeds and desires, while the latter are measured in faithfulness and beliefs.

I have always liked to participate in public worship and to practice some of the spiritual disciplines. I did not experience a stormy conversion. God revealed himself to me, instead, like “a gentle whisper” (1 Kings 19:12).

Jesus Christ is certainly the most fascinating and controversial person in human history, if we look at how He has been understood throughout the history of Christian thought. But how did Jesus understand Himself?

As a prophetic book par excellence, the Bible is often misinterpreted, its prophecies taking on fatalistic overtones or frightening attributes. Properly understood, the prophecies of the Bible do more than predict the future. They can also give the reader a clearer perspective on the present.