Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1030. The word of God makes some remarkable claims about itself, and I think the place to start is simply to listen to them before we start assessing them. That is not circular reasoning. It is the same courtesy you would extend to any significant witness in a courtroom, hearing the testimony in full…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1028. The Holy Spirit’s role in understanding Scripture is something I have watched play out in my own reading more times than I can count. I will sit with a passage I have read a dozen times before, and suddenly it is not the same passage any more. Nothing has changed on the page,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1016. Biblical coherence across roughly fifteen centuries of writing, in three different languages, by more than forty human authors in wildly different circumstances, kings, shepherds, fishermen, priests, prisoners and statesmen, is one of the most striking evidences for Scripture’s divine origin that I know, and it rarely gets the attention it deserves in ordinary…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01004. The question of scriptural reliability becomes very pointed when we ask whether the apostles’ fallen nature corrupted the doctrines they taught. It is a fair thing to wonder. Peter, Paul, John and the rest were sinners like us. Paul had been a Pharisee. Peter was impulsive and once had to be rebuked to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01000. To say that Scripture is infallible means that it cannot fail, cannot deceive, and cannot lead astray in anything it sets out to teach us. The word itself reaches back to the Latin for that which does not deceive or fall short, and applied to the Bible it makes the bold claim that…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 3. What does it mean that Scripture is breathed out by God? Few verses carry more weight for understanding the Bible than 2 Timothy 3:16, where Paul writes, ‘All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.’ At the centre of that sentence…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04033. Ask where the Bible comes from and you cannot answer well without speaking of the Spirit and inspiration in the same breath. The Scriptures did not fall from the sky finished, nor were they invented by clever men who wanted to control others. They were breathed out by God through human writers whom…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10147 The question of who wrote the book of Revelation is not a matter of idle curiosity. The authority of the book depends upon it. If Revelation was written by the apostle John, the last surviving member of the Twelve, then it carries apostolic authority and takes its place as the capstone of the…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60017 This is a question that comes from two very different directions. Some Muslims argue that the Qur’an confirms the truth of the Bible and even points people toward it. Some Christians argue that the Qur’an, by its own claims about previous scriptures, inadvertently supports the reliability of the Bible. The question is worth…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60087 The claim that Constantine created the Bible appears regularly in popular sceptical discussions, was given wide circulation by Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, and resurfaces periodically in online conversations as though it were settled historical fact. It is not. The claim is historically wrong in virtually every detail, and Christians should…