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: 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: 9 minutesQuestion 1145. The dating of Daniel is, more than almost any other Old Testament question, a straightforward test case for whether you believe God can tell the future. Conservative scholarship places the book in the sixth century BC, written substantially by Daniel himself during and shortly after the Babylonian exile, exactly as the book claims…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1144. Isaiah authorship became a battleground topic the moment nineteenth century scholars noticed that chapters 40 through 66 read differently in tone, vocabulary, and historical setting from chapters 1 through 39, and concluded that at least two, and often three, separate writers must be responsible for the finished book we call Isaiah. I want…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1143. Mosaic authorship of the first five books of the Bible is one of those questions that sounds academic until you realise how much rests on it. If Moses did not write the Pentateuch, and instead a handful of anonymous editors stitched it together centuries later from borrowed sources, then every place where Jesus,…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 1136. Bible contradictions are one of the first objections most Christians run into once they start talking about their faith outside the safety of church, and I have lost count of the number of conversations that started with someone reciting a list they found online. Two different genealogies for Jesus. Two different numbers for…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1135. Women teaching and preaching generates more heat in contemporary Christianity than almost any other practical question I am asked, and I understand why. Positions range from full egalitarianism, where no ministry distinctions exist between men and women at all, to a strict complementarianism that some apply so broadly it silences women’s voices well…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1133. The deconstruction movement has become impossible to ignore in Christian conversation, whether you first met the word on social media, in a bestselling memoir, or in the empty seat of someone who used to sit near you on a Sunday. Social media is full of stories of people, often raised in evangelical homes,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1131. Biblical authority sounds like an old-fashioned phrase to defend in a culture that has largely stopped agreeing there is such a thing as truth to be authoritative about. “Post-truth” was named the Oxford English Dictionary word of the year back in 2016, describing a climate where appeals to emotion and personal conviction carry…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1122. The amillennial hermeneutic is the method of reading Scripture, particularly Revelation 20, that leads a great many sincere and careful Christians to conclude there is no future, earthly, thousand year reign of Jesus. I want to walk through how that method actually works, because it is not laziness or unbelief that produces amillennialism….