Examining the doctrine of Scripture—its inspiration, inerrancy, authority, canon, and interpretation.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01153. The Dead Sea Scrolls represent one of the single most important archaeological discoveries in the history of biblical studies, because they allowed scholars for the first time to compare our modern Old Testament text against manuscripts a thousand years older than anything previously available, and the results overwhelmingly vindicated the accuracy of the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 01151. Biblical authority runs into the same objection almost every time I discuss it with a thoughtful sceptic: is it not simply circular reasoning to say the Bible is true because the Bible says it is true? It sounds like a genuinely decisive objection the very first time you hear it stated plainly, and…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 01150. Personal experience is one of the trickiest pastoral challenges I deal with, because the person raising it against me is very rarely being dishonest. They have genuinely felt something, whether healing, direction, liberation, or spiritual encounter, and when I gently point out that Scripture seems to say something different, I can watch the…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1149. The Spirit’s inspiration of Scripture and His work helping us interpret it are two acts of the same Person, separated by many centuries but joined by the same purpose, and I think keeping that connection in view changes how you approach Bible study. The Spirit who breathed out the text through Moses, Isaiah,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1148. Ongoing revelation is the phrase I want to handle carefully here, because the Spirit’s genuine, active work in a believer’s life gets confused constantly with the very different claim that God is still adding new binding content to Scripture. Illumination and ongoing revelation sound similar enough that people slide between them without noticing,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1147. The sufficiency of Scripture is a claim that sounds simple until someone asks you to define exactly what it does and does not cover, and I find most confusion about this doctrine comes from people assuming it means something the historic Protestant position never actually claimed. It does not mean the Bible tells…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1146. Textual corruption is the accusation I hear most often from people who have never actually looked at how the Bible was copied, only heard somewhere that thousands of years of hand copying must have hopelessly garbled the original text. It is a fair question to ask, even if it usually arrives with an…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1142. General revelation is God’s self disclosure through the created order, through history, and through the human conscience, available in principle to every person who has ever lived, whether or not they have ever held a Bible in their hands. From the intricacy of a single living cell to the voice of conscience that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1141. Misunderstood Bible phrases circulate everywhere, in sermons, in devotionals, on inspirational graphics shared across social media, and popular culture has never been particularly careful about accuracy when it borrows from Scripture. The result is a collection of widely repeated phrases that sound biblical, and sometimes bear some real resemblance to biblical language, but…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1140. Filthy rags is the phrase most Christians know from Isaiah 64:6, quoted in countless evangelistic sermons, including plenty of my own over the years, to prove that even our best efforts before salvation are worthless to God. “All our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment,” the ESV renders it. We use it…