Ask · The method

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Hard questions usually sit on top of an unexamined one. This is the method every answer on Contend is built with, in five steps plain enough to use at a kitchen table: find the real question underneath, and answer that.

Worked through once, slowly, the method is worth more than a shelf of ready answers, because the next question your child or your friend asks will not be one anybody prepared you for. It will be a new one, and the method travels.

  1. 1Read the question honestlySay the question back in its strongest fair form before you touch it. Most bad answers are answers to a weaker question than the one asked, or to a different one entirely. If you cannot state the objection so that the person asking it would nod, you are not ready to answer it.
  2. 2Open the textGo to the Bible before you go to an opinion about the Bible. Find the passages that actually speak to the question, and read them in full, not as fragments. On this site, every quotation is from the verified Berean Standard Bible or King James text, so what you read is what the passage says.
  3. 3Check the contextA verse read out of its paragraph can be made to say almost anything. Ask who is speaking, who is being addressed, and what the passage was written to do. Half the hard questions soften, and the other half sharpen, when the text is read the way it was written.
  4. 4Check the sourcesWhere a claim rests on history, go to the documents: the creeds, the councils' own records, the writers nearest the events, named at the base of every page here. Treat any claim that cannot show its source as a claim still on trial, including ours.
  5. 5Follow where it leadsLet the evidence set the conclusion, even when the conclusion costs you something. Then say plainly what remains uncertain. An answer that admits its edges is worth more than a tidy one that hides them, and it is the only kind worth handing to a twelve year old.

Put it to work

The sections of this site are the method's tools, one per step.

Ask: the answered questions40 answers built by this method, each with its sources at the base of the page.How We Got the BibleStep four worked end to end: the documents behind the book, named and checkable.Bible CharactersStep three in practice: people read in their context, every fact tied to its verses.Bible MapsThe places of the story, so context is something you can see.PracticeFlashcards and quizzes that make the answers stick, so the method ends in memory, not just reading.

Review status: in-theological-review. Every Contend page passes a human theological review against the Statement of Faith before it is published as approved teaching. This section is in that queue.