More from Questioning the Bible

We are going through Jonathan Morrow's book called Questioning the Bible. At this point I'm working through his first chapter entitled "Is the Bible Anti-Intellectual?"

He has mentioned two spiritual dead ends – that we can believe anything we want about God and that all religions are basically the same. He then takes on the third dead end, that God is a psychological crutch that humans have invented to feel better. We can thank Sigmund Freud for popularizing this idea. He claimed we were projecting the existence of God based on a human need that we had for him. There's a big problem with this claim though. It can be flipped on its head – maybe it was the atheist who had a human need for no God (to free them up to live without any divine oversight?).

So, is the Bible anti-intellectual? At this point Morrow says Christianity is falsifiable, a characteristic of something in the cognitive realm. It has very public truth claims. Christianity is not about whether it will work for people or help them feel better, but whether it is true. Christianity claims there is objective truth out there, not subjective truth in the minds of individual people.

Morrow then points out something about biblical faith. He says there is great confusion about that word all through society. The most common assumption is that faith is a blind leap in the dark which is opposed to reason and evidence. But is this the kind of faith we encounter in the Bible? No. The author gives several examples where blind faith is not used. In Exodus the people first saw the great power of the Lord being used against the Egyptians, which led them to a belief. They had some real-world evidence and then belief followed. In the New Testament the apostle Paul talks about the resurrection of Jesus. He says, "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you're still in your sins." He is talking about the historical nature of Christianity. Its claim is that the living God acted in history, especially in the life story of Jesus.

The author talks about the importance of arguing for the truthfulness of Christianity. The key verse is in 1 Peter, where the author says believers are always to be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks them the reason for the hope that they have. All through the book of Acts, Paul reasons with people about Christianity.

So, the key idea here is that Christianity is not a fairytale for grown-ups. The Bible does not claim it is giving personal significance or meaning without knowledge. People are invited to rationally consider the claims of Christianity as a knowledge tradition.

A second blog on Questioning the Bible

This is the second in a series of blogs dealing with a book called Questioning the Bible. The author, Jonathan Morrow, is taking on some of the most difficult challenges facing the Bible today.

Toward the end of his introduction, the author points out something that a lot of people don't seem to understand. He says seeking is hard work. It will require courage, effort, and diligence. He warns the readers that some of the items he will be covering may make them a bit uncomfortable. But he quotes C. S. Lewis, who said, "If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort, you will not get either comfort or truth – only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair." His point here is that we need truth rather than wishful thinking to build our lives upon. So many people are quick to declare there is no truth out there--an easy copout so they don't have to think and weigh alternatives.

So let's start with the first major challenge he deals with – is the Bible anti-intellectual? I love his opening comments where he says today our society has an over emphasis on emotion and the devaluing of reason. One of my favorite sentences says, "Our culture worships at the altar of sound bites, slogans, and quick updates." He is so right. Whether it's advertisements or politics, everything is aimed at our hearts and not our heads (remember "Hope and Change"?). This results in making it difficult to have sustained thought and critical reflection. We spend way too much time on the trivial and dismiss the meaningful.

Morrow says there are three spiritual dead ends we must avoid as we start on our search for spiritual truth. The first is, "People are free to believe whatever they want about God." Of course, our society reveres religious liberty and freedom of conscience. We talk much about tolerance in our society, but we have it all mixed up. Real tolerance, he says, is where we extend to each other the right to be wrong. He compares that to false tolerance, which naïvely asserts that all ideas are created equal. We are not allowed to disagree anymore. His main point is that simply believing something doesn't make it true. People are entitled to their own beliefs, but not their own truth. The author indicates belief is not what ultimately matters – truth is.

A second spiritual dead end is this – "All religions basically teach the same thing." This statement, of course, is an attempt to avoid offending people. But if we are trying to find the truth out about God or ultimate reality, then he believes this myth has to be dispensed with quickly. He claims the differences between religions are worth debating because they are huge. Just think about how religions see God, Jesus Christ, sin, the solution to our problems, the afterlife, what makes a moral life. They each have very different answers, and it belittles them to suggest they're pretty much the same. The truth is that religions of the world make exclusive and mutually contradictory claims.

More to come in a future blog.

I'm back!! A new series of blogs coming your way . . .

I took a break over the holidays, but I want to explore in the upcoming blogs an important issue. This spring at our church we are going to be reading a book for our apologetics class – Questioning the Bible: 11 Major Challenges to the Bible's Authority by Jonathan Morrow. We're living at a time when the Bible is under attack from a lot of different directions, so the author takes on the most common challenges. I'd like to use several blogs going through this important book.

In the intro Morrow talks about some of the claims raised against the Bible. For example, we don't have the originals of any of the books of the New Testament, so how can we trust it. Or, scribes along the way deliberately changed the New Testament manuscripts so that we can no longer know what the original authors of Scripture wrote. Or, the Bible's authors are not who we think they are with the result that many of the New Testament books are forgeries. Then there's this – the Bible is anti-intellectual and unscientific. Or how about this one – the Bible is full of contradictions and historical inaccuracies.

The author says we live in a time when people have questions about life but no place to find answers. One person put it this way:

"Very many emerging adults simply don't know how to think about things, what is right, what is deserving for them to devote their lives to. On such matters, they are often   simply paralyzed, wishing they could be more definite, wanting to move forward, but      simply not knowing how they might possibly know anything worthy of conviction and dedication. Instead, very many emerging adults exist in a state of basic indecision, confusion, and fuzziness. The world they have inherited, as best they can make sense of it, has told them that real knowledge is impossible and genuine values are illusions."

Of course, this is very discouraging, but Morrow believes the Bible can provide the answers we are all looking for. But first we have to decide if the Bible can survive the attacks on it. That's what his book will be all about. Hope you enjoy these blogs coming up.