Examining the doctrine of Scripture—its inspiration, inerrancy, authority, canon, and interpretation.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01169. Greek manuscript families are the framework textual scholars use to make sense of the more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament that survive today, ranging from tiny papyrus fragments to complete parchment codices spanning many centuries of careful copying. No single manuscript reads identically to every other, which is exactly what…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01168. Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are the two oldest complete, or nearly complete, manuscripts of the Christian Bible that we possess, and anyone wanting to understand how confident we can be in the text of the New Testament sooner or later has to reckon with what these two documents actually say and where they came…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01167. Latin Vulgate authority is one of the most instructive parallels available when a church member insists that the King James Version alone is the preserved, authoritative Bible in English. For roughly a thousand years, the Latin Vulgate held almost exactly that place in the Western church, and watching how that claim was made,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01165. KJV-Only members turn up in most Bible-believing churches sooner or later, and how a pastor responds to them says a great deal about the health of the congregation. I want to be honest from the outset: I do not hold the KJV-Only position myself, and I think it rests on claims that do…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1163. The documentary hypothesis has dominated critical Old Testament scholarship for a century and a half, and I think the evidence uncovered since its heyday has quietly eaten away at its foundations far more than most textbooks admit. I want to walk through what the hypothesis actually claims, what the Dead Sea Scrolls and…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1159. Progressive revelation is not simply a compatible partner to a dispensational reading of Scripture, it is the exegetical foundation the whole approach is built on. I want to unpack what both terms actually mean here, because I find that a great many objections to dispensational teaching come from people who have never been…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1157. The plain reading of a biblical passage is where I always start, and I have learned over the years in the pulpit that it is also where I should usually end up, even when a scholar somewhere is telling me otherwise. I get asked this question more than almost any other, usually by…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 21. Doctrine and worship are not two separate compartments of church life, one for the mind and one for the heart, running along parallel tracks that occasionally intersect. Every act of corporate worship, every song, every prayer, every sermon, teaches something true or false about who God is, whether or not anyone in the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 01156. Imprecatory psalms sit among the most uncomfortable passages a preacher ever has to handle from the pulpit, because verses that call down destruction on enemies, and in one notorious case pronounce a blessing on whoever dashes Babylonian infants against the rocks (Psalm 137:9), sit awkwardly beside Jesus’s plain command to love our enemies…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01154. Wisdom literature, Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes chief among the poetic and reflective books of the Old Testament, can feel like an odd fit within the larger redemptive story running from Genesis to Revelation, because none of these three books mentions the promised offspring of Genesis 3:15, the covenant with Abraham, or the coming…