Examining the doctrine of Scripture—its inspiration, inerrancy, authority, canon, and interpretation.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1033. Scripture interprets Scripture is one of those phrases preachers use so often that it risks sounding like a slogan rather than a method. In practice it names something quite specific. When a passage is unclear, ambiguous, or genuinely difficult, I let clearer passages elsewhere in the Bible set the boundaries for how the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1032. When I say Scripture is my final authority, people sometimes hear something I have not actually said. They hear a claim that Scripture is the only source of guidance a Christian ever consults, as though reason, experience, and the accumulated wisdom of other believers count for nothing. That is not the claim, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1031. biblical sufficiency is the settled conviction that Scripture provides everything a believer genuinely needs for faith and godly living, and I want to be precise about exactly what that claim covers, because it is regularly misunderstood in both directions at once. Some treat biblical sufficiency as though the Bible should directly answer every…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1029. Hebrew poetry does not work the way English poetry does, and readers who go looking for rhyme or a regular metre come away thinking the Psalms and Proverbs are simply prose with unusual line breaks scattered through them. Once you know what to look for, Hebrew poetry becomes far more accessible, and its…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1023. The ESV translation philosophy is worth understanding on its own terms rather than assuming it works exactly the same way as every other modern English Bible, because the ESV was built around a deliberate, clearly stated set of translation commitments from the outset. I use the ESV as my standard text for preaching,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1022. formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence describe two competing philosophies of Bible translation, and understanding the difference will genuinely change how you read the footnotes and prefaces of whatever translation currently sits on your shelf. This is not an argument about which translation is somehow holier than another. It is a careful question about…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1021. How you interpret the book of Revelation shapes an enormous amount of what you go on to believe about the last days, and it is worth being honest from the very outset that faithful, Bible-believing Christians have read this book in several quite different ways across church history. I hold a futurist, literal-grammatical-historical…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1019. Higher criticism has generated strong reactions in the church for more than two centuries, and having watched its effects on ordinary congregations over the years, I think those reactions are largely warranted. It is worth understanding precisely what this discipline is, where it came from, what conclusions it has reached, and why those…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1018. Textual criticism can sound alarming when you first hear the phrase, as though scholars are sitting in judgement on the Bible and finding it wanting. The reality is nearly the opposite. Textual criticism is the disciplined comparison of ancient manuscripts in order to establish, as closely as possible, the original wording of the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1017. Spiritual understanding of the Bible is not the same thing as being able to read it, and the difference has real implications for how we do evangelism, how we engage non-Christian friends around Scripture, and how we understand the Holy Spirit’s own work in a person’s life. Whether an unbeliever can understand the…