Examining the doctrine of Scripture—its inspiration, inerrancy, authority, canon, and interpretation.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1046. When I open my Old Testament, I am reading a translation of ancient Hebrew manuscripts, and the Masoretic Text is the specific textual tradition standing behind almost every English version on my shelf, including the ESV. But it is not the only ancient witness to the Old Testament, and understanding how it relates…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1045. Biblical archaeology occupies an unusual place in my ministry, because it sits right at the boundary between faith and physical evidence, and I find that boundary endlessly interesting rather than threatening. In 1868 a German missionary named Frederick Klein discovered a black basalt stone in Jordan bearing an inscription from Mesha, king of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1191. Reading Psalms well requires a different approach from reading Paul’s letters or the Gospels, since the Psalms were composed as poetry for prayer and worship rather than as doctrinal exposition, and treating them as though they were straightforward propositional teaching misses much of what they were actually written to do. I want to…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1044. Cultural and historical context is not an optional extra for serious Bible readers, it is the very air the text was written to breathe. When Paul wrote to the Corinthians about head coverings, was he addressing a timeless principle or a local custom peculiar to that city? When Jesus told the rich young…
Reading Time: 8 minutesQuestion 1043. Eisegesis and exegesis sound like a pair of obscure Greek terms you could safely ignore, but the difference between them decides whether a sermon, a Bible study, or your own private reading actually hears God or simply hears an echo of your own opinions dressed up in religious language. Have you ever heard…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1030. The word of God makes some remarkable claims about itself, and I think the place to start is simply to listen to them before we start assessing them. That is not circular reasoning. It is the same courtesy you would extend to any significant witness in a courtroom, hearing the testimony in full…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1028. The Holy Spirit’s role in understanding Scripture is something I have watched play out in my own reading more times than I can count. I will sit with a passage I have read a dozen times before, and suddenly it is not the same passage any more. Nothing has changed on the page,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1027. The unity of Scripture across sixty-six books, more than forty authors and roughly fifteen hundred years of composition is, on reflection, a genuinely remarkable fact, and it is worth pausing to ask directly how a collection this large and this diverse manages to read as a single, coherent book rather than a loosely…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1026. The continuity of Scripture across the Old and New Testaments is one of those questions that sounds academic until you actually try to read the Bible straight through and hit the jarring transition from Malachi’s closing warnings to Matthew’s opening genealogy, and find yourself wondering how these two halves of one book actually…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1025. Biblical perspicuity, the historic term for Scripture’s own clarity, asks a genuinely practical question every ordinary reader eventually faces: is the Bible clear enough for me to understand on my own, or does its meaning stay locked behind specialist training and expert interpretation. The classic Reformation answer, and the one I hold, is…