On Saturday, Mike Carlton criticised our Archbishop. Writing in his weekly column, he lampooned the Archbishop’s defense of school scripture classes. Carlton thinks it is ridiculous to hold the Bible up as an ethical guide for our children - after all, it tells you to execute people who work on Sunday, and other silly things like that.

Carlton is a perennial critic, so we might be tempted to ignore him. But his question is one that I see pop up time and again in the media. It’s essentially this - what is a Christian to do with the Old Testament law? Obey it? Apologise for it? Ignore it? This is not a new question, of course. It is actually the very oldest question that the Christian church has grappled with. Much of the New Testament concerns this question, and plenty more has been written on the subject since then.

So there are answers. But it seems that our answers have not penetrated the popular consciousness. You can point to the stubbornness or laziness of our critics, but I actually think we need to do a bit more work in this area, and to come up with a response that is easily digested and understood. Now there is a challenge for our apologists…