Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1205. The Greek of Revelation has puzzled and occasionally embarrassed readers since the earliest centuries of the church, because John writes sentences that any first year Greek student would be marked down for. Cases fail to agree, participles hang without a clear subject, and in one notorious verse a preposition governs a nominative instead…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1170. Concursive inspiration is the term theologians use for the way God produced Scripture through human authors without either overriding their personalities or leaving the outcome to human judgement alone. Moses, David, Isaiah, Luke and Paul were real people, writing in real historical circumstances, with their own vocabularies, temperaments, and concerns. Yet what they…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1102. The dual authorship of Scripture is one of those doctrines that sounds like a contradiction until you actually sit with it, because we are so used to thinking of authorship as a single, exclusive category. Either Paul wrote Romans or God wrote Romans, surely, not both at once. But Scripture itself insists on…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1101. I hold to verbal plenary inspiration without embarrassment, and it is worth being precise about what the doctrine actually claims, because plenty of people, believers and sceptics alike, picture something closer to the Islamic doctrine of the Qur’an than to what Scripture says about itself. Did God dictate the Bible word for word,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1071. Biblical infallibility is a close cousin of biblical inerrancy, but the two words are not simply interchangeable, and getting the distinction right matters if we want to speak carefully about what kind of trust Scripture actually deserves. When we say the Bible is infallible, we are making a statement about its complete trustworthiness…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1070. Biblical inerrancy is the conviction that Scripture, in its original manuscripts, is entirely true and without error in everything it affirms, and I want to give this doctrine the fuller Deep Dive treatment it deserves, because it sits underneath almost every other confidence a Christian holds. If the Bible cannot be trusted in…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 01069. Verbal plenary inspiration is the technical name for the historic evangelical doctrine of Scripture, and I hold it with real conviction, because I think it is the only view that actually matches the way Jesus and the apostles treated the biblical text in practice. The phrase packs two distinct claims into two words:…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 01068. Biblical inspiration means something far more precise than the loose, everyday sense in which we might call a piece of music or a great novel inspired. It is a technical theological term describing exactly how God produced Scripture through human authors, and getting biblical inspiration right matters enormously, because it determines what kind…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01066. Whether the Bible is really God’s Word is, I think, the single most foundational question anyone can ask about the Christian faith, because everything else depends on the answer. If Scripture is not what it claims to be, our faith rests on nothing sturdier than human opinion and inherited tradition. If it is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1060. Form criticism is not a phrase you will hear from the pulpit very often, yet its fingerprints are all over the seminary training that shaped a great many ministers now standing in British and American pulpits. I want to explain plainly what it is, where it came from, and why I regard it…