The New Inklings may disagree on a lot of things, but ignorance and obnoxiousness, regardless of faith, will not be tolerated. If you’re new, refer ye to the Pub Rules before proceeding.
“Leave the charnel house and follow the lead of Nature, or of God if you like your Bible stories.”
So said the wickedly eccentric Dr. Praetorius in the 1935 horror classic Bride of Frankenstein. The line originally read, “…follow the lead of Nature, or of God if you like your fairy tales.” Censors deemed the line too inflammatory, so it was rewritten. But actor Ernest Thesiger’s delivery was so brilliantly insinuating that the result was the same.
Having grown up in church, I rather like my Bible stories. God creating the world in six days. A world-wide flood with a big boat. Jesus walking on water. Jesus rising from the dead. When you’ve believed these things all your life, it can be quite shocking when someone says, “You really believe those fairy tales?” After years of reading, researching, analyzing, and considering other points of view, I’ve come to this conclusion about the Bible and its stories:
I still believe them.
Yeah, I know Darwin supposedly blew the creation story out of the water and Dawkins has supposedly proven that people like me are deluded. So why, in the face of such “overwhelming evidence”, do I continue to believe the Bible really is divine Scripture?
- The Bible claims to be from God. Apparently I’m supposed to reject this reason because it’s cocky for a book to claim something about itself, and it’s a supposedly circular argument (“The Bible is inspired because it says so.”). I guess the next time I purchase something with “some assembly required”, I’ll ignore the instruction manual because it says that it’s, well, an instruction manual. Multiple times, the biblical authors and speakers say, “Thus says the Lord,” indicating their message was from God. The text most highlighted for the Bible’s claim for being from God is 2 Timothy 3:16-17. When Christians say they believe the Bible is inspired, this is one of the main texts they refer to. When we say the Bible is inspired, we’re not saying that it inspires us to be better people. We mean that Scripture comes from God – it is (as the above Scripture says) “breathed out by God.” I know that many people argue that the Bible is simply a product of unknown men, and most of the arguments center around passages that are hard to understand or seem to contradict each other. Without taking up any more space (and thus saving this topic for another post), I’ve examined those issues, and I’m thoroughly unconvinced.
- Bible authors made predictions that came true. Among the predictions are those in the Old Testament made about Jesus, such as his birthplace (Micah 5:2) and how he would die (Psalm 2; Isaiah 53), all written hundreds of years before his birth. Some would argue that the writers of the biographies of Jesus (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) cherry-picked those so-called predictions and applied them to Jesus to make him look like the Messiah. Possible? Sure. But that means the gospel writers made these things up about Jesus–they lied. Not a cool way to start a new religious movement, and they could have been called out almost immediately. Others say Jesus, knowing the prophecies, orchestrated his life so that he fulfilled them. Really? And you’re telling me that my view is a stretch? Who has the influence to orchestrate a life so elaborate he even controlled the events of his birth, death, and everything in between? That is a stretch. A science professor has calculated the odds of someone fulfilling just eight of the prophecies about Jesus: 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000. Those are the same odds as plucking a red silver dollar out of a sea of silver dollars two feet deep in an area the size of Texas on the first try.
- We have the same Bible today as was originally written. Even though we have very few ancient copies of Plato’s writings, experts accept that what we have can be used to accurately reconstruct what he wrote . We have thousands of ancient copies of the Bible, some of which date within a few decades of when the originals were written. Are there variant readings between copies? Yes. But we know exactly where they are, and we even know what kind of variant readings they are. Most are simply misspellings due to the copier’s error. We even know where guys tried to intentionally change the text. For example, compare 1 John 5:7-8 in the King James Version and The New International Version. The footnote in the New International Version indicates that none of the thousands of the earliest copies contains the added verse found in the King James Version. It was an intentional addition to the text. Not enough time passed between the writing of the originals and the earliest copies that we do have for legend to creep in. The claim that we cannot know what the original text of the Bible says because of intentional changes made by agenda-minded copyists just has no support from the textual evidence. We can be certain that the Bible we have today is the same Bible that was written in the first century. There’s actually a science for this: textual criticism. If you like putting together jigsaw puzzles, this could be the career for you.
- Because Jesus was raised from death. Yeah, I know. Dead men tell no tales. It is scientifically impossible for someone who was beaten to a bloody pulp, nailed to a Roman cross, declared dead by experts in capital punishment, and laid to rest in a grave for three days to come back from the dead. But if He did–if it is historically plausible–then it at least deserves our consideration (even though we don’t have to believe it). Our main source for details on Jesus’ resurrection are from his biblical biographies. If they can be shown to be historically reliable (and I think the evidence shows that they are), and thus show the resurrection of Jesus to be historically plausible, then it is a strong case for the validity of the Bible. And that would make Dr. Praetorius very, very unhappy.
These are just a few reasons. And yeah, there are arguments for not believing that the Bible is divine Scripture. I’ve seen just about all of them, and have found none of them convincing. Each argument, as I’ve sifted through it, has served to confirm the Bible as Scripture to me.
Now if Dr. Praetorius shows up on my porch on a dark and stormy night, I may have to reconsider.
The comments have been turned off for this post. Don’t worry, you’ll have your chance to join the conversation on Wednesday.