Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10028 Most Bible readers have had the experience of a passage opening up with a clarity and personal directness it had never carried before — something has changed, though not in the text itself. And most have had the opposite experience too: reading words that are technically comprehensible but which carry no weight, no…
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 01142 God has not left Himself without witness. From the intricacy of a living cell to the voice of conscience that will not be entirely silenced, something of God presses in on human awareness at every turn. Yet that universal witness does not, in itself, bring anyone to saving knowledge of God. Understanding why…
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 01148 One of the most practically significant questions in contemporary Christianity concerns the difference between the Holy Spirit opening a person’s mind to understand what Scripture already says, and the claim that the Spirit provides fresh revelation that goes beyond or supplements the biblical text. Getting this distinction right matters enormously for how Christians…
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 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…