CHRISTIANNEWS.COM. – The Bible occupies an essential place in the Christian faith. The Bible claims to be, and has been recognized by the Church as, the Word of God.
The Church through the ages has recognized this status by referring to the Bible as its canon, which means that the Bible is the written standard for its faith and practice. These are extraordinary claims about a collection of ancient literature, and one that many people in today’s society have great difficulty understanding.
why Christians would place their beliefs and behavior on the authority of the Bible. I can think of five common objections I’ve heard over the years:
The Bible is full of contradictions and discrepancies.
The Bible is full of violence, genocide, prejudice, and injustice, often commanded by God, and Christians have used it to justify further violence and oppression.
Biblical descriptions of nature and natural history are hopelessly at odds with science.
The Bible was written by ancient and primitive people, and is no longer of value to modern people.
Christians can’t even agree on what it says, so who cares if it’s true or not.
Having thought about these issues over the years that I have been a biblical scholar, I would like to offer the following responses to these objections.
1. It is full of contradictions and discrepancies
It’s not very difficult to convince someone that the Bible is full of contradictions, that is, if they don’t know it very well. All you have to do is quote Proverbs, where the author tells us not to “answer back (26:4), that is, “do not answer a fool according to his foolishness” (26:5).
Or perhaps point out that Matthew places the “sermon on the mounton a mountain (Matthew 5:1), while Luke says that Jesus spoke on a “level place” (Luke 6:17). It is Abijah
a good king (2 Chronicles 13) or a bad one (1 Kings 15:1-8)?
Were humans created last (Genesis 1:1-2:4a) or first (Genesis 2:4b-25)? Of course, these are just samples of countless others that people like to mention.
However, a little research will show that the proverbs are not written to give us universally valid principles (“I would always answer a fool according to his folly”), but are true only when applied in the right situation. Depending on the “chump” you’re talking to, you need to determine which proverb is relevant to the situation.
The gospels are not intended to simply be factual reports, but instead highlight the theological significance of actual events for their intended contemporary audience.
So Matthew places Jesus’ sermon on a mountain in order to make a connection that all of his original Jewish Christian readers would immediately recognize. That is, Jesus speaking on a mountain about the law would remind them how God gave it to Moses, on Mount Sinai (Exodus 19-24): Luke writes mainly for Hellenistic Christians, and if he had done it otherwise, he would not I would pick up on that connection so easily.
The same is true regarding the account of Abijah in Kings and Chronicles. These are not just collections of data about a king named Abijah. Both stories are using the history of Israel and Judah to answer questions relevant to his time. The author of Kings writes to those who survived the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians to explain why they are in exile.
They and their kings violated God’s law and suffered the consequences. Chronicles, on the other hand, was written to the post-exilic community and, among other things, is interested in choosing events in the lives of their kings that show their devotion to God.
As for the two creation accounts: while both are interested in telling us who created everything, neither is interested in telling us how he did it. Neither tells us the actual sequence of creation, but rather describes the creation in figurative language. We can turn to science and ask questions about how God did it.
As I have shown, alleged “tensions and contradictions” in the Bible are often cases where someone misunderstands the genre and purpose of a certain passageor you are measuring the Bible by an inappropriate standard.
In my more than forty years as a professional Biblical scholar, I have yet to hear such a claim that actually holds up once I dig a little. I suggest others do as well.
2. It Is Full Of Violence, Genocide, Prejudice And Injustice, Often Commanded By God, And Christians Have Used It To Justify More Violence And Oppression
Yes, the Bible is full of prejudice, violence, attempted genocide, and injustice. The Bible, after all, gives us the brutal truth about sinful human beings.
Of course, the people bringing this charge against the Bible do not have these cases of human violence and injustice in mind, but are thinking of those many stories in which God brought violence upon people, either directly or through force. agency of his followers.
Think about the story of the flood (Genesis 6-9), the murder of Egyptian soldiers in the Red Sea (Exodus 14-15), or the Conquest (Joshua 1-12). But, hard as it is to get our 21st century Western minds around it, these are stories of justice, bad people getting the judgment they deserve.
God brings the flood against violent humanity (Genesis 6: 11-12); he closes the Red Sea against Egyptian soldiers trying to kill the Israelites, and orders Joshua to fight the Canaanites because his sin had reached “its full measure” (Genesis 15:16).
Only people living in relatively peaceful circumstances have the luxury of being “uncomfortable” by such stories. The harsh truth of the Bible is that people who reject God and hurt other people will eventually be punished for them. That is also the message of the New Testament, in the teaching of heaven and hell.
The divine violence of the Bible is part of God’s battle against evil. And this battle unfolds as time goes by.
When Jesus comes, he actually escalates and intensifies the battle, so that now he heads straight for the spiritual powers and authorities, and these enemies are defeated not by killing them but by dying on the cross, where Christ “triumphs” over them (Col. 2:15).
For this reason, the followers of Jesus, the Christians, must realize that “our fight is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 6:12).
This battle is won with spiritual weapons (truth, justice, peace, faith, the word of God), not physical ones. Any use of violence today to promote or even defend the gospel is sinful.
Even so, this move from physical to spiritual warfare in the Old Testament does not entail a criticism or a rejection of what happened in the Old Testament. In fact, the war against evil humans and dark spiritual powers come together in the Bible’s picture of the final judgment (for example, in Revelation 19:11-21).
That being said, I have to admit that there are things in the Bible, both in the Old and New Testaments, that I also find difficult to understand. In particular, Moses’ instruction that Israel should not leave alive “anything that breathes” (Deuteronomy 20:16).
It’s hard for me to understand, particularly when Joshua implements this after the battle of Jericho, when the Israelites “completely destroyed everything in the city, both men and women, young and old, and oxen, sheep, and donkeys with the edge of the sword.” (Joshua 6:21).
Perhaps, as some scholars suggest, “man and woman, young and old,” is just a way of saying “everyone there,” but there weren’t really any young people there, but why mention young people if they weren’t included? ?
Perhaps, as others suggest, Jericho right now is a military garrison with few if any children, but even if one of them died, it’s still worrisome. Perhaps, and this opinion is very likely, in my opinion, the Canaanite culture was so corrupt that it needed to be totally eradicated.
In the final analysis, I find myself, like Job at the end of the book of Job, bowing down to God despite his inexplicable suffering. For others, the image of God killing or allowing the death of particularly non-combatants will continue to be an obstacle, but I think we must resist the temptation to explain it away.
3. His descriptions of nature and natural history are hopelessly at odds with science
The Bible is not at odds with science in its descriptions of nature and natural history. Biblical truth and scientific truth will never conflict.
Genesis 1-2, the main biblical account of cosmic and human origins, describes these events using figurative language, which should be obvious to all readers and has been obvious to most throughout the centuries. Church Fathers like Origen and Augustine recognized that real days with mornings and evenings must have sun, moon, and stars. Therefore, the days in Genesis 1, where the sun does not appear until the fourth day, must not be actual days. When Genesis 2:7 describes the formation of the first man as God blowing on the dust, that too is figurative language. After all, does God have lungs?
So we don’t need science to tell us that Genesis 1-2, while vitally interested in the question of who created everything (God!), is not at all interested in how he created everything.
Therefore, we can turn to God’s other book, nature, to answer that question. And through the tools of science, we see that natural history is best understood as a long, slow process of cosmic and biological evolution, leading to the creation of human beings. This does not pose a real threat to the teaching of the Bible.
4. It was written by ancient and primitive people, and it no longer has value for modern people
The Bible was written by ancient people, no doubt. The earliest writings come from the second half of the 2nd millennium BC and the most recent parts from around 300 BC.
That was a long time ago. The New Testament is more recent, but even those books were written nearly 2,000 years ago. They were written in ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek by people who were culturally different from us.
In fact, we often misunderstand the Bible’s message if we don’t remember our temporal and cultural distance from those who wrote it. But it is one thing to say that the Bible was written by ancient people and another thing to say that they were written by…