Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01149 There is a beautiful coherence to the doctrine of Scripture that is sometimes missed in debates about inspiration and interpretation. The same Holy Spirit who oversaw the production of the biblical text is the Spirit who opens the minds of believers to receive it. The Spirit who breathed out the words is the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01150 The claim that personal experience overrides biblical teaching is one of the most pastoral challenges the church faces today, precisely because it is often made by sincere believers who have genuinely experienced something real and who interpret Scripture’s silence or apparent tension as permission to place their experience in the driving seat. Understanding…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01146 The claim that the Bible has been corrupted through centuries of copying and translation is perhaps one of the most commonly heard objections to biblical authority. It sounds plausible to people who know that ancient documents were copied by hand, that translations involve interpretive choices, and that errors can accumulate over time. A…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01147 The doctrine of Scripture’s sufficiency touches something that matters deeply in practice. It is the difference between the church that looks to the Bible as its final word on everything that matters, and the church that treats Scripture as one voice among several, to be supplemented by tradition, contemporary experience, or ecclesiastical authority….
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01153 The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, beginning in 1947, was one of the most significant archaeological finds of the twentieth century for anyone who cares about the reliability of the Old Testament text. Before Qumran, the oldest complete Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament dated to approximately the tenth and…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01154 The wisdom books of the Old Testament — Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes — sit at an oblique angle to the great redemptive events of Scripture. There is no exodus here, no covenant ceremony, no prophetic oracle pointing to the coming Servant. These books engage the texture of human existence in a world where…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01156 The imprecatory psalms are those passages in the Psalter that call down divine destruction on enemies — “Let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow” (Psalm 109:9); “O daughter of Babylon… blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock” (Psalm 137:8-9). The discomfort these…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 01159 Progressive revelation and dispensationalism are not merely compatible positions that can be held alongside each other without difficulty. Progressive revelation is the exegetical foundation on which the dispensational understanding of Scripture is built. To understand why, it is necessary to be clear about what both terms actually mean and how they relate to…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01157 The relationship between scholarly consensus and the plain reading of a biblical text is not a straightforward hierarchy in either direction. Neither blanket deference to scholarship nor reflexive dismissal of it serves the text well. When the two appear to conflict, the question of how to weigh them requires more careful reasoning than…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01163 The Documentary Hypothesis, also known as the JEDP theory, was the dominant critical framework for understanding the origin of the Pentateuch throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. In its classic form, articulated by Julius Wellhausen in 1878, it proposed that the first five books of the Bible were not written…