The Bible and Me Part VII - The Supernatural

[I've struggled for a long time with my relationship with the Bible. It has been a rich source of insight and spiritual nourishment to me, but also at times, a source of deep doubt and confusion. My intention in this series is to share a little of how that relationship has developed over time. If you're a Christian and you're trying to work out your own approach to the Bible then it won't give you all the answers, but it may give you some questions and insights that could help you along the way. If you're not a believer, but you're interested in the Christian faith - or in Christians in particular - then it may give you a little insight into how some of us tick!]

[The Bible and Me Part I - Beginning to Question]
[The Bible and Me Part II - Creation]
[The Bible and Me Part III - Inerrancy]
[The Bible and Me Part IV - Scripture vs Tradition]
[The Bible and Me Part V - Job]
[The Bible and Me Part VI - The Difficult Bits]

So far in this series, I've taken what many hard-line evangelicals might see as a rather "liberal" approach to the Biblical text. I've pointed out that some parts of it - e.g. the creation narratives and the book of Job - don't appear to me to be intended as literal historical accounts. I've also suggested that even some of the parts that are written in a more "factual" style, may not be entirely and perfectly historically accurate.

For many who take such an analytical approach to the Bible, it often seems that the next logical progression is to doubt anything in it that smacks of the supernatural. In the modern western world we have little time for alleged phenomena that seem to defy scientific analysis and explanation. If it can't be explained scientifically then it can't really have happened - or at least, not quite the way it was recorded to have happened anyway.

In my view though, if you're going to try and strip out all the miracles from the Bible just because you find them hard to believe, then you might as well just go the whole hog and strip God out as well! Apart from the very existence of an omnipotent deity, the miraculous is right at the heart of the Christian faith, which includes two essential truths that are impossible to believe if you're not willing to believe in the supernatural:

1. That in some mystical way that no theologian ever seems to have completely got their head round, Jesus was "the Son of God" - i.e. He was God and came from God at one and the same time - He wasn't just an ordinary man.


2. That on the third day after He was crucified, Jesus miraculously rose again from the grave!

These truths are what make the Christian faith unique, and are at the heart of the power that it has to change people's lives and to turn this world upside down. These truths tell us:

1. That God is interested in us and our world.


2. That God is humble: He was happy to be treated as one of us, with no special airs or graces. In fact, more than that, He was willing to be mocked, ridiculed, persecuted and - ultimately - even tortured and executed by those He created.


3. That God cares - deeply and intensely - about His creation, hence His willingness to go through all of that in order to make a way for us to be reconciled to Him.


4. That death is not the final word. Jesus did something crazy - stupid even - He met violence and power with ... love and self-sacrifice! He taught His followers to love your neighbour and turn the other cheek and set the ultimate example in doing so Himself, and the result was ... death and defeat!! D'oh!!! But no! Just when they thought it was all over, on the third day Jesus appeared to His followers, risen from the dead, and a rag-tag bunch of defeated and disillusioned disciples were transformed into the most powerful evangelistic movement the world has ever seen: one which thrived under intense persecution as it followed Jesus' example, spread throughout the world, and 2,000 years later - in various forms (some more compromised than others!) - is still going strong today!

To deny the Resurrection or the Deity of Christ is to rip out the very heart of the Christian faith and to destroy the reason for the hope that we profess, and yet you can't believe in either of these things without also believing in the miraculous.

Apart from this, the miraculous was at the very heart of Jesus' life and ministry on earth. His miracles were often referred to as "signs", which is what they were; of who he was and what he had come to do. The miracles indicated that God and His kingdom - which Jesus, the "Messiah" had come to inaugurate - were breaking into the world in a real and tangible way; that God had literally come to dwell among His people. Some of the miracles were about healing and setting people free from physical and spiritual bondage. Others were about God's abundant and miraculous provision. Still others - seen only by Jesus' closest followers to whom He was ready to fully reveal Himself - spoke directly of His power and His Lordship, even over nature itself.

The myriad miracles in the gospels make up such a large, central and inseparable part of the accounts, that it isn't possible to strip them all out without emptying the gospels of most of their content, or radically altering the character, and massively reducing the potency of the Jesus who we Christians profess.

The miracles say that God is involved, God can be involved, and He's able to be involved in your life in a real and tangible way. And if you're willing to lift your eyes just a little higher - above what you think is possible and what you are able to explain, then you might just be surprised to discover that the God of miracles can still show Himself to you today...!

[The Bible and Me Part VIII - Noah and the Flood]

The Bible and Me Part IV - Scripture vs Tradition

[I've struggled for a long time with my relationship with the Bible. It has been a rich source of insight and spiritual nourishment to me, but also at times, a source of deep doubt and confusion. My intention in this series is to share a little of how that relationship has developed over time. If you're a Christian and you're trying to work out your own approach to the Bible then it won't give you all the answers, but it may give you some questions and insights that could help you along the way. If you're not a believer, but you're interested in the Christian faith - or in Christians in particular - then it may give you a little insight into how some of us tick!]

[The Bible and Me Part I - Beginning to Question]
[The Bible and Me Part II - Creation]
[The Bible and Me Part III - Inerrancy]

As I've discussed in my previous posts in this series, evangelical Christians tend to have a very high view of scripture, often including the idea that it is inerrant - i.e. free from even the tiniest mistake or untruth. This perspective was quite a big part of my evangelical upbringing, but it wasn't until some time later that I started to wonder where this belief had come from. The Bible doesn't make this claim about itself, and in any case it wouldn't be able to because - as I pointed out in my previous post - the Bible isn't a single book; it's a library of many different books, the full list of which wasn't agreed until a long time after they were written. The authors of most of them were not even aware that all of the others existed! So if the Bible doesn't teach inerrancy, then where does this belief come from? To answer that question, we need to go back about 500 years to the 16th century Protestant Reformation. Here is a very brief overview of those events:

At that time there was basically only one church - The Roman Catholic Church - in Western Europe, but it had become apparent to many of its members that in many ways it had become very corrupt. The reformers wanted to challenge this and to change the church from within, but the church basically decided that it didn't want to be de-corrupted, thankyou very much, so it kicked them all out. And so, the Protestant church was born! This took different forms in different parts of Europe and produced - among others - Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists and - for fairly strange and dubious personal/political reasons - the Church of England in the UK. Over the centuries, many more denominations have spun off from these original roots, including all of those that we would now generally bracket under the term "evangelical" (for a pretty good definition of the word "evangelical", see here).

Prior to the Reformation, authority/legitimacy in the church had basically derived from 3 sources: the Bible, church tradition (i.e. the accumulated wisdom/teachings of the church) and the church hierarchy, in particular the Pope, who the church believed was the spiritual successor to the apostle Peter (Peter was the first leading elder in the early church, who had been effectively entrusted with this responsibility by Jesus himself). But since the reformers had now been cut off from "the church", this left them with a bit of a problem: they could no longer appeal to the church hierarchy (which they didn't trust anyway), and some of the church's teachings seemed to have diverged a long way from, and in places to be very much at odds with, what the Bible taught. At least partly (and perhaps mostly) in reaction to this, the reformers developed the doctrine of "Sola Scriptura", which states that the Bible alone is the supreme authority in all matters of Christian doctrine and practice. This became one of the founding principles of the early reformation movement, from which all forms of evangelical Christianity are ultimately derived.

Sola Scriptura does not automatically imply inerrancy - the doctrine of inerrancy was developed and formalised at a much later date - but it's easy to see the appeal - perhaps even the necessity - of inerrancy, once the Bible has been elevated to such a lofty place. There are a couple of problems with this though:

Firstly - as I mentioned at the beginning of this post - the doctrine of inerrancy is itself extra-Biblical, and so fails the Sola Scriptura test! There are certainly passages in the Bible that refer to "scripture" (meaning The Old Testament or parts thereof, as the New Testament was not compiled until much later) in glowing terms, but no claims anywhere within the Bible itself that it or any of its constituent parts are completely error free.

Secondly though, and perhaps even more importantly, Sola Scriptura fails its own test! It is itself a doctrine about how the Bible should be used, which originates in church tradition (albeit Protestant, rather than Catholic), and is not found anywhere in the Bible!

To add to this, there is the problem of the Biblical canon - i.e. the accepted list of books that make up the Christian Bible. Based on my somewhat limited knowledge, there seem to me to have been some very sensible rational and historical reasons why some books have ended up being included and others excluded, but the fact remains that the canon has been chosen by the church! So the Biblical canon, which Protestants - and particularly evangelicals - seek to elevate above church tradition, is itself a product of that tradition! If you want to go a step further, it wouldn't be unreasonable to make the point that the entire contents of the Bible are themselves a part of Christian and Jewish tradition, to which those traditions have decided to assign a special significance! To further compound matters, there are 66 books in the Protestant Bible, 73 in the Catholic Bible, 76 in the Eastern Orthodox Bible, and 81 in the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible - so all of those traditions have come to their own conclusions about which books "the Bible" ought to consist of! Martin Luther - who is widely acknowledged to have started the Protestant Reformation, and who was one of the leading proponents of Sola Scriptura - wanted to drop the book of Revelation from the list (but was unsuccessful in doing so) because he didn't believe it was inspired by God!

So if the doctrines of Sola Scriptura and Biblical inerrancy, and even - at least to an extent - the Bible itself, are no more than a product of historical circumstance and (varying) church tradition, where does all that leave us in our attitude towards the Bible? What principles should we apply when deciding how to use it and how much weight to give to it?

Well, first and foremost, Christians are followers of Christ. If we can't take Jesus' teaching seriously and at least try to do what he says, then we cannot in all honesty carry that label. The best approximation we have of his teaching is in the 4 gospel books which are contained in the New Testament. The rest of the New Testament consists mostly of the deeds and letters of his early followers as they both lived out Jesus' teaching, and further developed it in the light of his death and resurrection, under the power and influence of the Holy Spirit. Without them - and obviously without Jesus - there would be no Christian faith and no church, and their accomplishments - if we choose to take them seriously - are a powerful testimony to the Spirit of God at work in their lives. With all this in mind we cannot help but hold in very high regard the writings that they have left behind.

Secondly - as I mentioned in my previous post - both Jesus himself and his early followers held the Old Testament in extremely high regard, and interpreted Jesus' life and mission in the context of the over-arching story that it contains. In which case - as Jesus' followers - we are also compelled to do the same.

Thirdly, we could take some advice from one of the passages in the Bible that is often quoted in support of the doctrine of inerrancy. This is found in the New Testament book of 2 Timothy, which is a letter written by the apostle Paul to the early church leader of that name:

"... from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." - 2 Timothy 3:15-17

This is undoubtedly very good advice! Just in case we should be tempted to read too much into it though, there are a few things we should take note of: First of all, Paul says that scripture is "God-breathed", but he doesn't clarify what he means by this. He doesn't say it is God-dictated, and he doesn't say it is error free, but certainly we should expect to find and encounter God through its pages. Secondly, he is not trying to make a definitive doctrinal statement here; he is giving Timothy some practical advice about the importance and usefulness of scripture in his day to day life and ministry. Thirdly, when Paul says "All Scripture", he is referring to the Jewish scriptures which Christians now refer to as The Old Testament (since the New Testament didn't exist at this point), although given the comments I've already made about the New Testament it doesn't seem unreasonable to extend the principle. Fourthly, the Old Testament Paul is referring to is probably not quite the same one we have today. Paul and Timothy were from outside of Israel and would probably have been most familiar with the popular Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures known as the Septuagint (which the New Testament often quotes from). This contains several books which are not in the Protestant Bible, but are included in the Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. So if we're going to claim inerrancy on the basis of this passage, then we probably also need to claim it for several books that we've subsequently decided to leave out!

Finally, it was noted in a comment on my previous post that the Holy Spirit has a very important part to play in all of this. This is probably the most important, and perhaps the least tangible factor in properly understanding and applying scripture, and of course in knowing God and living out the Christian faith. In the end Christianity is about a relationship with God, made possible by Jesus, and facilitated by the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who leads us into truth and who teaches us - through scripture and in many other ways besides. But this is something that I do not think I can fully explain, and which I suspect can only fully make sense to those who have experienced the leading and prompting of the Holy Spirit for themselves.

[The Bible and Me Part V - Job]
[The Bible and Me Part VI - The Difficult Bits]
[The Bible and Me Part VII - The Supernatural]
[The Bible and Me Part VIII - Noah and the Flood]

The Bible and Me Part III - Inerrancy

[I've struggled for a long time with my relationship with the Bible. It has been a rich source of insight and spiritual nourishment to me, but also at times, a source of deep doubt and confusion. My intention in this series is to share a little of how that relationship has developed over time. If you're a Christian and you're trying to work out your own approach to the Bible then it won't give you all the answers, but it may give you some questions and insights that could help you along the way. If you're not a believer, but you're interested in the Christian faith - or in Christians in particular - then it may give you a little insight into how some of us tick!]

[The Bible and Me Part I - Beginning to Question]
[The Bible and Me Part II - Creation]

One of the arguments often given by Christians - usually to other Christians - in favour of Biblical inerrancy (the idea that the Bible is perfectly accurate in every literal detail), goes something like this:

If you believe there are inaccuracies in the Bible, then you no longer have any way to reliably determine which bits of the Bible are true and which aren't. This means you can't really trust any of it, so maybe none of it is true and therefore your whole faith ends up collapsing. (I am obviously paraphrasing, and there are many versions of and approaches to this, but from my personal experience this more-or-less captures the general gist.)

This argument basically just boils down to scare tactics. It doesn't prove anything of course - it says nothing about whether or not the text is actually reliable - it just gives Christians a very strong reason for not asking too many questions about it! But is this really something Christians need to be worried about? I think there are a number of good responses to this:

First of all, if the Christian faith is basically true, then we have nothing to fear. And if we're really that worried that it might not be, then perhaps we already have a somewhat bigger problem...? We shouldn't be afraid of honest questions and honest answers. We should also be aware though, that our answers will never be perfect and are likely to mislead us at times. Being a Christian is about putting your trust in Someone who is much bigger than all your questions and all your attempts to answer them, and who will lead you gently into truth if you look to Him for guidance. To quote from the Bible itself, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding" (Proverbs 3 verse 5). But note that the author doesn't say, "don't use your understanding", he (probably male!) just says, "don't lean on it". Our intellects are God-given and can be useful and powerful tools, but they're not big enough to understand everything, we certainly can't depend on them absolutely, and they are likely to mislead us badly if we're proud enough to think we don't need God or have it all figured out!

Secondly, the nature and size of the problem is massively over-stated. For example, if we discovered an error in one of our history books, we wouldn't then suddenly decide to throw the whole book away, or conclude that none of the rest of it could be trusted! It might lead us to question other parts of the book and - depending on the nature of the error - to hold parts of it a bit more lightly, but we would probably have to encounter quite a few very serious errors before we would consider abandoning it altogether.

Thirdly, the Bible is not a single book! It is a whole library of different types of books, written by different people, over many hundreds, if not thousands of years. Part of the problem when trying to read these books sensibly, is figuring out - in each case - what type of book it is that we're dealing with. Some of these books are obviously meant to be taken literally, others are a bit less clear. There are letters, stories (historical or otherwise), books of poetry, books of prophecy, books of wisdom, and apocalyptic books. None of the Bible is really "history" in the straightforward sense of that word - all of it is written with an agenda. This isn't a bad thing and doesn't necessarily mean it can't be trusted, but it does affect the material it contains and how that material has been presented. The Biblical authors are not just presenting facts, they are telling stories in a way that is intended to make some kind of point. If that wasn't the case then it wouldn't have become the central textbook of the Christian faith!

Given the varied nature and history of the different books that make up the Bible, there is no reason to assume that every book is equally historically reliable. For example, we know quite a bit about the four gospel books in the New Testament. We have good reason to believe they were written within a few decades of the events they describe. We know the early church grew massively under intense persecution, both during and after this period, as a result of the message they contain. We know that those who lead the early movement and spread this message, including the authors of these books, put their lives on the line - and often lost their lives - in order to do so. These are all good reasons for accepting the basic truthfulness of their contents. We know a lot less about the Old Testament books though. Are they reliable historical accounts (at least the ones that present themselves in this way), or are they handed down stories that have been told and retold until the details have become confused? Do they even include fiction presented as fact in a deliberate attempt to deceive? We know that the authors of the New Testament, including Jesus himself - if the words attributed to him are to be believed - held the Old Testament in extremely high regard. We also know that Jesus and his followers understood his whole life and message in the context of - and as a fulfilment of - the bigger story of the Old Testament, which all those different books contribute to. So if we take Jesus seriously, then we have good reason to take the Old Testament seriously as well, but from a historical perspective we may not be able to lean on it quite as heavily as we do on the New.

I think perhaps the strongest appeal of the inerrancy theory - and hence why so many Christians are so wedded to it and so fearful of undermining it - is the claim to "certainty". If the Bible is the perfect and unadulterated words of God, then we have unparalleled access to truth. Nothing in those books can ever be contradicted, so we know exactly where we stand. We (meaning those of us who believe the Bible) have a monopoly on truth. We have a perfect yardstick against which to measure the beliefs and behaviour of ourselves and others. All we have to do is decipher it and we will have everything important that we need to know about life all figured out. In fact a great many of us seem to feel like we've already achieved this, since applying the Bible is (apparently!) simply a matter of believing and/or obeying the "literal meaning" of the text!

Generally speaking though, life is not like this - and even if the Bible were inerrant, understanding the Bible would not be like this either. There are many different English translations of the Bible which all differ slightly from one another over minor details, because it is not straightforward to translate from one language to another (in fact it's usually impossible to do so perfectly), especially as languages evolve and change all the time, and the languages it was written in are thousands of years old. Then there is the issue of culture and context. Spoken and written language is full of idioms and assumptions, and the Bible is no exception. If you're not completely familiar with the world view of the speaker, then you're not going to be able to fully and correctly understand everything they're trying to say. The authors of the Bible are from various long-dead cultures that were very different from ours, and which we now have only very limited access to. Then there's the fact that we have multiple copies of the source texts to work with, and they don't all perfectly agree with each other either! Deciphering which is (or is closest to) the "original" is a significant scholarly exercise, which is often dependent on educated guesswork.

So we are dependent on common sense, best guesses, and the expertise of others - as with so much of life! We cannot completely "know" everything, but we can live our lives on the basis of what we think we know and - in submission to the Holy Spirit and in co-operation with others - what seems to us to make the most sense. This is the kind of obedience I believe God wants from us - an obedience of the heart which pursues truth and attempts to live by it, rather than what might appear to be a more "perfect" kind of obedience, which can only be achieved by those who have perfect knowledge (which none of us do!).

[The Bible and Me Part IV - Scripture vs Tradition]
[The Bible and Me Part V - Job]
[The Bible and Me Part VI - The Difficult Bits]
[The Bible and Me Part VII - The Supernatural]
[The Bible and Me Part VIII - Noah and the Flood]

The Bible and Me Part II - Creation

[I've struggled for a long time with my relationship with the Bible. It has been a rich source of insight and spiritual nourishment to me, but also at times, a source of deep doubt and confusion. My intention in this series is to share a little of how that relationship has developed over time. If you're a Christian and you're trying to work out your own approach to the Bible then it won't give you all the answers, but it may give you some questions and insights that could help you along the way. If you're not a believer, but you're interested in the Christian faith - or in Christians in particular - then it may give you a little insight into how some of us tick!]

[The Bible and Me Part I - Beginning to Question]

As I started to consider the idea that the Genesis creation account was a myth, I started to notice other things about the story that began to make a lot more sense. For example, God intially places Adam and Eve in a beautiful garden where all their needs are provided for, but as a result of Adam's sin, they are banished to the harsh world outside where he has to "work the ground from which he had been taken". But if the whole world was perfect, how come one bit was less perfect than the other? Had God been planning this "banishment" all along? Or does it make more sense to see the garden as a symbol of the goodness of a perfect relationship with God, which we are then excluded from when it all goes horribly wrong? Also, why is there a river flowing from Eden which separates out into four other major rivers? Rivers usually run into, not out of one another. Unless again, this is making some sort of symbolic point about the potency of this place - representing a perfect relationship with God - which is a source of the goodness of so much of the surrounding area. And where is the garden now, and what happened to the "cherubim" and "flaming sword" that God put there to guard the way back to the tree of life? There have been various speculations about its location, but it seems pretty clear that neither the tree of life, nor the sword, nor the cherubim have ever been found.

And what of the snake? Most Creationists seem to overlook this point, but if you're going to read the story literally, then read it literally! Adam and Eve were not tempted by the devil, they were tempted by a talking snake! And it is consistently referred to as "the snake" (my emphasis), so apparently there was only one of them - it didn't even have a mate! (This bit really does read like something from one of Aesop's fables!) And it seems like it must've had legs (although the text doesn't say so), or else God's subsequent curse - to "crawl on your belly" - wouldn't have counted for very much. Oh and also, as well as crawling on its belly, God told the snake it was going to "eat dust all the days of [its] life". But I don't know of too many snakes that do that...!

Or perhaps you could look at all this a different way...?: It is a common thread in Jewish and Christian literature and thought, that there are unseen and sometimes very powerful, non-human spiritual entities that play an important part in human life and history. The snake represents Satan - the adversary - who stands opposed to all of God's plans and purposes. Most Creationists accept at least this much anyway because even by their standards it makes more sense than the "literal" explanation given by the text for the snake's interference, which is simply that it was "the most clever of all the wild animals"! But when you begin to treat the whole story as more symbolic than literal, it suddenly begins to offer up other new layers of meaning. "Crawl on your belly" might not be much of a curse to a snake, but it is to a proud and powerful spiritual being - and it rings true! There are no depths to which the Adversary will not stoop. He has no honour - he abandoned all that when he decided to oppose God - hence the reason he is depicted as a snake in the first place. As for eating dust - snakes don't do that, but Satan does. There is no pleasure or fulfilment in a life devoted to destroying everything that is good and true. He is driven by jealousy and hatred and will never find satisfaction in anything he does. These are the kinds of important lessons that I think people are prone to miss, if and when they try to take the text too "literally".

There are actually two creation accounts in Genesis - a fact that is also easily missed when attempting to read this book as a straightforward historical narrative. The first account runs from the beginning of chapter 1, through to chapter 2 verse 2 (the chapter and verse divisions were added much later by Christian editors and unfortunately often bear little relation to the structure of the original text). The second account follows on from there. The distinction between the two can easily be seen by noting the different writing styles, the fact that the accounts overlap with one another chronologically, and the fact that they contradict each other in the detail (in the first account God creates plants on day 3 and mankind on day 6, but in the second account God creates Adam before any of the plants have appeared).

The second account (as just discussed) deals with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the story of the temptation, but the first is a beautiful chiastic poem describing the 6-day creation of the world. Chiastic poems represent the subject material in a symmetrical form, and are heavily used throughout the Old Testament. This may be done for effect, or to make a story easier to remember, or possibly both. This could be an indication that a story has been passed down orally for some time before being committed to paper.

The creation poem starts with 3 days of "separating" - the light from the dark, the water from the sky, and the land from the sea (and plants appear on the land). These are followed by 3 corresponding days of "filling" - the day and night are filled with the sun and the moon, the sea and sky are filled with fish and birds, the land is filled with animals and with man (who are given the plants for food). This is the reason for the rather strange order of events, in which light is created before the sun, which is its source! It really isn't necessary (or desirable!) to invoke strange cosmological arguments in order to try to interpret this in a "literal" fashion!

[The Bible and Me Part III - Inerrancy]
[The Bible and Me Part IV - Scripture vs Tradition]
[The Bible and Me Part V - Job]
[The Bible and Me Part VI - The Difficult Bits]
[The Bible and Me Part VII - The Supernatural]
[The Bible and Me Part VIII - Noah and the Flood]

The Bible and Me Part I - Beginning to Question

[I've struggled for a long time with my relationship with the Bible. It has been a rich source of insight and spiritual nourishment to me, but also at times, a source of deep doubt and confusion. My intention in this series is to share a little of how that relationship has developed over time. If you're a Christian and you're trying to work out your own approach to the Bible then it won't give you all the answers, but it may give you some questions and insights that could help you along the way. If you're not a believer, but you're interested in the Christian faith - or in Christians in particular - then it may give you a little insight into how some of us tick!]

I was brought up as an evangelical, Bible-believing Christian and the Bible has always been a central - indeed crucial - part of my faith. Without the Bible I would probably have a completely different view of God - if I even believed in God at all. Without the Bible I would probably have no idea who Jesus was and I wouldn't be calling myself a Christian. My faith is based on mine (and others') experience, as well as on the Bible, but without the Bible I would have no framework for that faith and would probably not have had the chance to encounter, or respond to God - or Jesus - in the way that I do today.

I was taught from a very young age that the Bible was "The Word of God". Although I didn't know the technical term at the time, I was also taught that it was essentially "inerrant" - i.e. because it was The Word of God, it contained no mistakes, factual inaccuracies or inconsistencies. It was to be believed unequivocally and without question. To disobey anything the Bible told me was to disobey God himself.

As I grew up it gradually became apparent that things were not quite this simple. There were some bits of the Bible for example - mostly in the Old Testament - that didn't apply to me. The old Levitical laws about things like not eating shellfish or not mixing together 2 types of fabric, applied only to those under the old Jewish Covenant and were not rules that I was expected to follow today. OK, so that made sense - so far so good!

I also started to notice that there were some events that were recorded in the Bible more than once, and that the accounts of these didn't always seem to match up. For example, there are some quite big differences in the way the story of Jesus' resurrection is recorded across the 4 different gospels. We did an exercise once in a church youth group that I belonged to, where we attempted to reconcile the 4 accounts by taking them all apart and putting them back together again in a way that made them all fit - in order to demonstrate the fact that they were actually compatible, just told from different angles with different bits missing. To my mind though, we had to work so hard in order to do this, that it was almost as though the accounts weren't really fully compatible with one another at all...

And then there was the whole question of creation and/or evolution. It was probably in my early teens that I first started to become aware of this potential dichotomy. At that time, a popular view on this (and fairly acceptable, in the Christian circles that I moved in) was that the "days" in the Genesis creation account could just as well refer to millions of years. This was justified on the basis that, "with the Lord, a day is like a thousand years" (the Bible, 2 Peter 3:8), and also on the fact that since there was no sun right at the beginning, then who could say how long a day was?! And the order of events in the Genesis creation account more-or-less corresponds to the scientific account anyway, so they're perfectly compatible! - except that when you get right down to it, it actually doesn't...

Then when I went to University I was introduced to a rather radical idea - and because it came from a visiting speaker at our Christian Union, who otherwise seemed to believe in and know the same God that I did, and because he was also quite a high up member of the London Bible College (I think he might've been the president, but I can't remember now), I was able to treat it with a little more credence than I might've done otherwise. The idea was this: What if the Genesis creation account is actually a myth? What if it isn't even intended to be treated as a literal account? What if it's just there to teach us stuff about God and about ourselves and about how we relate to Him and to the world? What if it isn't - and isn't meant to be - a scientifically accurate, historical account?

This idea made quite a lot of sense to me. After all, it seemed very unlikely that there was anyone actually there, that far back, who was able to write - and certainly no-one who was there before Adam and Eve to witness the first 5 days! If the Genesis creation account did come directly from God himself (the only other possibility!), then it had to have been somehow revealed to someone so they could write it down. But how would God explain something like that to someone who had none of the scientific knowledge that we have today? Surely the point of it wasn't to teach science in any case, it was to teach us about our relationship with God and with the world?

This was probably the first time I seriously entertained the idea that perhaps the Bible wasn't all meant to be taken entirely literally after all (apart from things like Jesus' parables, which were obviously just stories that he told in order to make a point).

[The Bible and Me Part II - Creation]
[The Bible and Me Part III - Inerrancy]
[The Bible and Me Part IV - Scripture vs Tradition]
[The Bible and Me Part V - Job]
[The Bible and Me Part VI - The Difficult Bits]
[The Bible and Me Part VII - The Supernatural]
[The Bible and Me Part VIII - Noah and the Flood]

Why would anyone believe the Bible?

I've recently re-written this post, because it consistently gets more hits than any of my other posts and I'm not sure I did a particularly good job the first time around. The comments below this post - at least those  posted in 2011 - relate to the original version which can still be accessed here.

For various reasons, lots of people believe the Bible. I obviously can't cover all the reasons here even if I knew what they all were. As a (pretty much) Bible-believing Christian myself though, I can give some of the reasons why I think the Bible is worth taking seriously.

To start off with, I think it's important to emphasise the fact that the Bible isn't really a single book. It actually consists of 66 separate books¹ written by a wide variety of different authors for different reasons in different places and at different times, which for various historical reasons (generally good ones in my opinion) have ended up in the collection we use today. Many people - Christian and otherwise - seem to think that if anything in the Bible is found to be imperfect or inaccurate, the whole thing is therefore thrown into question and none of it can be trusted. To my mind, this attitude does an enormous disservice to the complexity and diversity of the text. Because of this attitude, many Christians read the Bible wearing blinkers, refusing to see anything that might contradict their preconceptions, while many non-believers dismiss the Bible outright because they've read something they don't agree with or which seems contradictory or implausible in the face of logical analysis.

Unfortunately, I don't have space to cover the whole Bible in this post (I lack the knowledge to do so in any real depth anyway!), so I'm just going to focus on a couple of areas:

1.  The Gospels

The gospels are the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which appear at the beginning of the New Testament (i.e. Part Two of the Christian Bible). These books were written by Jesus' early followers, in the decades immediately following his death, resurrection and ascension into heaven. They tell the story of Jesus' life and ministry, in particular the last 3 years which is when He did most of his preaching and teaching.

I personally have a lot of faith in the gospels. I don't assume though, that they are factually perfect in every detail, because they were written a little while after the events they describe, and have been re-assembled from personal and collected, written and verbal memories. We can see small differences between some of the accounts which show that in some cases events have been remembered slightly differently.

The gospels and the message they contain - which was being preached long before the gospels were written down - had an explosive effect, and the early Christian church grew at a phenomenal rate in spite of intense persecution from the Roman Empire. There is much in the gospels to provoke scepticism in an enlightened 21st century mind - for example, Jesus healing people or walking on water or rising again from the dead - but it is because of stories like these, in particular the story of Jesus' resurrection, that the Christian message had such an incredible early impact. It is possible of course, that all these stories were made up, but I find it hard to see why Jesus' early followers, who lived and travelled with him, would have committed themselves so completely to such an obvious and enormous lie, a) given that such a deception would be the antithesis of the message itself and, b) in the face of the hardships, persecution, torture and violent deaths that so many of them suffered as a result.

2.  The Torah

The Torah is the Jewish name for the first five books of the Old Testament, which Christians traditionally refer to as the Pentateuch. (The Old Testament is Part One of the Christian Bible and is known to Jews as the Tanakh - this is the Bible as it was known to Jesus and His early followers, before any of the New Testament was written).

The traditional Jewish belief is that the whole of the Torah was written by the prophet Moses (who is the central human character in books 2 to 5), but this seems unlikely for at least 2 reasons:

1. Deutoronomy - book 5 of the Torah - describes Moses' death in the past tense. (some Orthodox Jews explain this by claiming that God revealed to Moses the exact nature of his death so that he could write it all down beforehand as though it had already taken place.)


2. Even a fairly basic analysis of the text reveals a mixture of interspersed literary styles. The modern scholarly consensus is that the Torah is composed of extracts from a number of earlier sources which have been spliced and edited together into the account we have today. No-one knows exactly when this took place, although there are a number of theories, and no copies of any of the earlier sources remain.

Because the Torah was written so much longer ago than the gospels, and we know so much less about its origins, its authenticity is much more difficult to determine. In some places its contents seem to resonate with and affirm what we read in the gospels, but in some other places the God of the Torah seems stricter or more vengeful or bloodthirsty than the God that Jesus seems to represent.

For Jews, the Torah is the most important part of their scripture, and Jesus - who was born and raised a Jew - quoted from it frequently and seemed to identify His own life and mission with many of the stories that it contains. In a nutshell, and for the most part, the Torah tells the story of how God chose a group of people (the Jews) and made an agreement with them whereby He would take care of them and protect them, in return for which they would learn to live His way and be faithful to Him and obey his commands. When they kept their promise to God, God kept His promise and things went well with them but when they were rebellious or wilfully disobedient, things tended to go rather badly!

Jesus drew both on the Torah and also on the Old Testament prophets (see next section). The Torah includes God's promises to Abraham, the father of the Jewish faith, an important part of which was that through Abraham all nations would eventually be blessed. Later on, the prophets predicted that God was going to form a new agreement/relationship with His people to supercede the one He had previously made with the Jews. This relationship wouldn't just be based on a set of rules though, it would go much deeper and would be able to change people's hearts. Jesus and his followers believed that Jesus came to initiate this relationship through His life, sacrificial death and subsequent resurrection, and that this new relationship was for everyone and not just for the Jews.

Getting back to the Torah though, I find it very hard to know how much of it I should treat as historically true, but it was and remains a central part of Jewish identity,  played a central role in Jesus' own life, and because of this and because He drew so heavily from it, it is also very important to other Christians and to me. I have often found it a source of great wisdom and comfort, but at other times I wrestle with some of the confusing or contradictory things it sometimes seems to say.

A Quick Bible Summary

So far I've only covered 2 small parts of the Bible. To Christians and Jews respectively, these are the most important bits, but there is so much more to the Bible which I just don't have room to do any justice to here. As a very brief summary, the Bible also includes:

• The story of the Jews from when they first entered the land of Israel, throughout their time there, through their exile in Babylon, and their eventual repatriation in Israel about 400 years before Jesus. This whole story is about the outworking of the Torah - when things go well and when they don't go well as the Jews more or less cyclically reject and return to God.


• Various books of prophecies - the records of those who spoke on God's behalf, often urging the Jews to turn back to God and away from their wicked ways. These books often have a strong emphasis on social justice as well as on trying to repair whatever damage the Jews have done this time to their relationship with God.


• Books of wisdom and poetry.


• Letters - found in the New Testament part of the Bible - written by the early Christian leaders to various different parts of the Christian church. These give us an invaluable insight into the beliefs and practices of the early Christians, before Christianity became institutionalised and tainted by political power to the extent that we often see today.

A Religion of the Heart

If you're not a believer, I'm not sure that I'll have said much so far to convince you of the truth of the Bible, although perhaps I might have said something to make you think it a little more worthy of your consideration. In the end though, there's probably quite a lot in there that won't ever be scientifically verified. How do you prove for example, that 2,000 years ago a man was raised from the dead? (Or, for that matter, that he wasn't?).

The Christian faith isn't based entirely on the Bible though - if it was it would be a religion of the head and not of the heart. In the end, the Christian faith is based on an encounter - through Jesus - with the living God. The Bible may help to facilitate this, but unless you encounter God in some way for yourself, then debating its truth is little more than a logical exercise. It might make a difference in your head, but in the end the truth of the Bible is only really worth anything if it also succeeds in changing your heart.