Going Deeper
Learn how to read
Knowing the story is the beginning. This hall holds three shelves: the tools for working with a text, articles that take one topic and work it through, and the questions Christians genuinely disagree about. Where traditions differ, we present each at its best and let you decide: the fairness is the teaching.
Study tools
How to work with the text: the habits, the scholarship behind the footnotes, and the words worth knowing.
How to Read the Bible
Genre, context, and what a passage meant to the people who first heard it. Seven habits with worked examples, eight kinds of writing, and the ladder from observation to application.
Open →Think Like a Scholar
What the footnotes mean. Manuscripts and variants, why translations differ, and how the canon was recognized, with real side-by-side comparisons you can check yourself.
Open →Theological Vocabulary
Justification, propitiation, hypostatic union, eschatology. What each word means, where it came from, and where traditions use it differently.
Open →Topics
One subject, worked through properly. What the words mean, what is settled, and what is not.
The Names of God
What each name means, where you meet it, and why English Bibles print LORD in small capitals. Including which of the famous compound names turn out to be names of altars.
Open →The Angels
What Scripture actually says about angels, cherubim, seraphim and the divine council — and where the nine ranks, the seven archangels and the wings came from instead.
Open →The Holy Spirit
Ruach means wind and breath, and the ambiguity is used on purpose. What the Spirit is said to do, why the first person Scripture calls filled with the Spirit is a craftsman, and the one live disagreement.
Open →The Temple
The four buildings, the graded courts and the warning inscription archaeologists have actually found, why the second temple's most holy place was empty, and where the New Testament takes the language.
Open →Heaven
The word means the sky, and where God is, and a way of not saying God. What every tradition agrees about the end, and the real disagreement over what happens between death and resurrection.
Open →Creeds & Councils
The creeds in full, with every clause annotated by what it was answering, and the councils that produced them. The rejected view is stated as fairly as the accepted one.
Open →The Denominations
The six questions that actually divide, the great splits and what each was over, and every family described the way its own members would describe it.
Open →The Appointed Times
Mo'ed does not mean festival, it means appointment: fixed meetings God set on the calendar. Each one with its command, its reading, and what it is understood to point at.
Open →Ways Christians See It
27 contested questions. Each view gets its best case, the texts it stands on, the traditions that actually hold it, and the hardest question it has to answer. Common ground is stated first, and nobody steers.
How salvation works
The cross, what Adam did to us, and the long argument about grace and choosing
How does the death of Jesus save?
6 views, each at its strongest.
Isaiah 53, Romans 3:21-26, Colossians 2:13-15
Read it →What did Adam do to us?
4 views, each at its strongest.
Romans 5:12-19
Read it →Does God choose us, or do we choose God?
4 views, each at its strongest.
Romans 9, Ephesians 1:3-14, John 6:37-44
Read it →Can a believer fall away?
4 views, each at its strongest.
Hebrews 6:4-8
Read it →The church and its practice
Baptism, the table, the gifts, images, and who may serve
Who should be baptized, and what does it do?
4 views, each at its strongest.
Acts 2:38-39, Romans 6:3-4, Colossians 2:11-12
Read it →Is baptism in the Spirit a second experience after conversion?
3 views, each at its strongest.
Acts 2, 8, 10 and 19; 1 Corinthians 12:13
Read it →What happens at the Lord's Supper?
4 views, each at its strongest.
1 Corinthians 11:23-29, John 6:51-58, Luke 22:19-20
Read it →Are the miraculous gifts still given today?
3 views, each at its strongest.
1 Corinthians 12 to 14, Acts 2
Read it →What roles may women hold in the church?
4 views, each at its strongest.
1 Timothy 2:11-15, Galatians 3:28, Romans 16
Read it →Are images of Christ permitted?
4 views, each at its strongest.
Exodus 20:4-6
Read it →Last things
What we are made of, the end of history, and the fate of the lost
Do we have an immortal soul?
4 views, each at its strongest.
1 Corinthians 15:51-55
Read it →What happens to a person between death and the resurrection?
3 views, each at its strongest.
Luke 23:43, Philippians 1:23, 2 Corinthians 5:6-8, Ecclesiastes 9:5, 1 Corinthians 15:16-23
Read it →What is the thousand years of Revelation 20?
4 views, each at its strongest.
Revelation 20:1-6
Read it →How should Revelation be read?
4 views, each at its strongest.
Revelation 1:1-3
Read it →What are Daniel's seventy weeks?
4 views, each at its strongest.
Daniel 9:24-27
Read it →What happens to those who are finally lost?
3 views, each at its strongest.
Matthew 25:31-46, 2 Thessalonians 1:5-10, Revelation 20:11-15
Read it →Scripture and its world
Where authority comes from, where Israel stands, and how to read the first page
Where does the church's authority come from?
4 views, each at its strongest.
2 Timothy 3:16-17, 2 Thessalonians 2:15, Acts 15
Read it →Israel and the church: one people or two?
4 views, each at its strongest.
Romans 11:17-29
Read it →How should Christians read Genesis 1?
4 views, each at its strongest.
Genesis 1:1-2:3
Read it →Should Christians keep the biblical feasts?
4 views, each at its strongest.
Colossians 2:16-17, Acts 15:1-29, Romans 14:5-6, Zechariah 14:16-19
Read it →Which of God's laws still bind a Christian?
4 views, each at its strongest.
Matthew 5:17-20, Romans 6:14, Galatians 3:23-25, Acts 15:1-29, James 2:8-12
Read it →The questions people actually arrive with
Assurance, those who never hear, what God has promised for this life, and who decides in a church
Can you know you are saved?
4 views, each at its strongest.
1 John 5:13, 2 Peter 1:10, Philippians 2:12-13, Matthew 7:21-23
Read it →What about those who never hear?
4 views, each at its strongest.
Romans 1:18-20, Romans 2:12-16, Acts 4:12, 1 Timothy 2:3-6
Read it →Does God promise us good things in this life?
4 views, each at its strongest.
Psalm 73, Deuteronomy 8:11-18, John 16:33, Romans 8:18-28
Read it →Who decides, in a church?
4 views, each at its strongest.
Acts 6:1-6, Acts 15:1-29, 1 Timothy 3:1-13, 1 Peter 5:1-4
Read it →Who God is
The questions the church settled early, with the rejected answers given their strongest case
Looking for the book briefings?
They ended up where they belong. Every book of the canon now has its own briefing on its page in the Library: who wrote it and when, how it is shaped, what it keeps coming back to, a verse to carry, and the passages that trouble readers.
Walk the shelves →EKLI serves Christians across traditions. On questions where churches differ we explain how each one sees it and leave the deciding to you.