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.