Library of Articles

Philip preached Christ, cast out devils, healed the lame, and baptized a city — and he could not give the Holy Ghost. Jerusalem had to send apostles. That one limit explains Acts 8, answers Acts 19, and exposes what is being claimed today.

Paul says there is one baptism. The usual answer is that he means one chief baptism among several. This study tests that reading against every place the word one stands in the Bible, and then against the sentence Paul actually wrote.

Ask ten believers what spiritual means and you will get atmosphere, feeling, and fervency. Paul wrote twenty-three of the Bible's twenty-six occurrences of the word, and he never once uses it of a feeling. This article traces what it actually marks — a source and a realm — and what that settles about a brother who has fallen.

Make a careful distinction from the text and the answer comes back as a prefix — hyper, ultra, too far. Then a verse arrives to enforce it. But Paul never wrote strive not about words, and the sentence used to forbid precision commands it in the very next breath.

There is an old way to get rid of a doctrine you cannot answer: go after the man who said it. Scripture answers it plainly. God published His own messengers' failures, kept using them, and never once made a man's record the test of his message. Weigh what was said, not who carried it.

A hymn written by a convert to Rome for the Catholic martyrs of England became the anthem of Protestant loyalty to inherited belief, and it travels that easily because it names no doctrine at all. Paul had a faith of his fathers too. He was exceedingly zealous of it, and he counted the whole inheritance loss.

A graphic circulating online asks how a man never under the first covenant could be redeemed from transgressions under it. The question carries a premise it never states: that the only redemption there is, is redemption from covenant transgressions. Paul says guilt reached men who never had a covenant to break, and so does the remedy.

Believers ache for a past that was more moral and more Christian, and grieve a covenant they believe the nation broke. But the remembered age never existed as remembered, no Gentile nation was ever in covenant with God, and Scripture rebukes the longing itself. A look at nostalgia, the Christian nation, and the post God actually gave you.