Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 10030 Before assessing what the Bible is, it is worth listening to what it claims to be. This is not circular reasoning — it is the same approach you would take with any significant document. A witness’s self-testimony may ultimately be accepted or rejected, but it has to be heard before it can be…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10027 By almost every external measure, the Bible should not hold together as a single coherent work. Sixty-six books. More than forty human authors. Three languages. A composition period spanning roughly fifteen centuries. Multiple literary genres — poetry, history, prophecy, law, wisdom literature, biography, letters, apocalyptic vision. Yet the Bible presents itself, and has…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10025 The Bible is a large, complex, ancient document. It contains poetry, prophecy, law, history, biography, letters, and apocalyptic vision. It was written across fifteen hundred years in three languages, addressed to people in vastly different cultural and historical situations. Christians claim it is the word of God for all people in all ages….
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60090 The assumption that faith and reason are opposed to each other is deeply embedded in popular culture, and it has done significant damage to Christian witness. The image of the credulous believer who parks their brain at the church door, set against the sharp-minded rationalist who has outgrown any need for religion, is…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01149 There is a beautiful coherence to the doctrine of Scripture that is sometimes missed in debates about inspiration and interpretation. The same Holy Spirit who oversaw the production of the biblical text is the Spirit who opens the minds of believers to receive it. The Spirit who breathed out the words is the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01150 The claim that personal experience overrides biblical teaching is one of the most pastoral challenges the church faces today, precisely because it is often made by sincere believers who have genuinely experienced something real and who interpret Scripture’s silence or apparent tension as permission to place their experience in the driving seat. Understanding…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01146 The claim that the Bible has been corrupted through centuries of copying and translation is perhaps one of the most commonly heard objections to biblical authority. It sounds plausible to people who know that ancient documents were copied by hand, that translations involve interpretive choices, and that errors can accumulate over time. A…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01147 The doctrine of Scripture’s sufficiency touches something that matters deeply in practice. It is the difference between the church that looks to the Bible as its final word on everything that matters, and the church that treats Scripture as one voice among several, to be supplemented by tradition, contemporary experience, or ecclesiastical authority….
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01153 The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, beginning in 1947, was one of the most significant archaeological finds of the twentieth century for anyone who cares about the reliability of the Old Testament text. Before Qumran, the oldest complete Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament dated to approximately the tenth and…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01157 The relationship between scholarly consensus and the plain reading of a biblical text is not a straightforward hierarchy in either direction. Neither blanket deference to scholarship nor reflexive dismissal of it serves the text well. When the two appear to conflict, the question of how to weigh them requires more careful reasoning than…