Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1073. The canon of Scripture, the settled collection of sixty-six books that make up our Bible, did not come together the way many people imagine, as though a committee somewhere sat down centuries after the events and voted particular books into existence. Understanding how the canon of Scripture actually formed reveals something wonderful about…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1072. Bible contradictions are one of the first objections any believer meets once they start talking about their faith with a sceptical friend, and I think we do ourselves no favours by either dismissing the question too quickly or panicking as though the whole edifice of Scripture rests on winning every single one of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1071. Biblical infallibility is a close cousin of biblical inerrancy, but the two words are not simply interchangeable, and getting the distinction right matters if we want to speak carefully about what kind of trust Scripture actually deserves. When we say the Bible is infallible, we are making a statement about its complete trustworthiness…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1070. Biblical inerrancy is the conviction that Scripture, in its original manuscripts, is entirely true and without error in everything it affirms, and I want to give this doctrine the fuller Deep Dive treatment it deserves, because it sits underneath almost every other confidence a Christian holds. If the Bible cannot be trusted in…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11114. Scripture describes several genuinely distinct types of fasting, and knowing the differences between them will help you approach the discipline with realistic expectations rather than simply assuming every fast recorded in the Bible looked and functioned the same way. I want to walk through the main categories Scripture actually records in some detail,…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 01069. Verbal plenary inspiration is the technical name for the historic evangelical doctrine of Scripture, and I hold it with real conviction, because I think it is the only view that actually matches the way Jesus and the apostles treated the biblical text in practice. The phrase packs two distinct claims into two words:…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 01068. Biblical inspiration means something far more precise than the loose, everyday sense in which we might call a piece of music or a great novel inspired. It is a technical theological term describing exactly how God produced Scripture through human authors, and getting biblical inspiration right matters enormously, because it determines what kind…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01067. Knowing the Bible is true, rather than just claiming it, requires a rather different kind of evidence to the question of whether it is God’s Word, and I think it can bear the weight of honest scrutiny very well indeed. In a sceptical age, people rightly ask how we can trust a set…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01066. Whether the Bible is really God’s Word is, I think, the single most foundational question anyone can ask about the Christian faith, because everything else depends on the answer. If Scripture is not what it claims to be, our faith rests on nothing sturdier than human opinion and inherited tradition. If it is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01065. The Jesus Seminar is the name given to a group of scholars who, through the 1980s and 1990s, made headlines by literally voting on which sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels they considered authentic, using coloured beads, red for certainly authentic down to black for certainly not, and concluding that only around…