In September of 2022, the magazine Christianity Today ran a story called, “Top 5 Heresies Among American Evangelicals https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2022/september-web-only/state-of-theology-evangelical-heresy-report-ligonier-survey.html)." In the story, Stefani McDade looked at a study conducted by Ligonier Ministries about the state of the average person’s theological understandings.
The main find of the study was that, “Overall, adults in the US are moving away from orthodox understandings of God and his Word year after year.” If you don’t know, orthodox simply means the teachings that Christianity has held to from the beginning. What we’re talking about when speaking about being orthodox, we’re talking about the core of the Christian message. You might have heard of the Apostles’ Creed:
I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, God's only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again;
he ascended into heaven,
he is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and he will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.
The Apostles’ Creed was agreed upon as the core of the Christian faith. There are a lot of differences between denominations, but at the core, every person who is a part of the Jesus’ Church, should hold to these core beliefs. Not because a pastor or priest says so, but because these theological truths have been the bedrock of the Church since the Apostles were commissioned by Jesus.
But it all starts with this, is the Bible true? The Ligonier study asked if a person agreed with this statement or not. “The Bible, like all sacred writings, contains helpful accounts of ancient myths but is not literally true.” The study found that 53% of the average person in the US agreed with the statement, and 26% of Evangelicals did as well. If you’re wondering, Evangelicals are the branch of Christianity that our denomination is a part of. Basically the term comes from a desire to evangelize or share the Gospel message.
What this survey reveals is that a little over the adult population surveyed believe that the Bible does contain helpful information, but is not wholly true. I’m not surprised by this, looking at our culture, I would think it would actually be higher.
But what I am surprised at is the 26%. Now that might not seem that high, it’s only about 1/4 of the evangelicals surveyed, but it’s the uptick that’s concerning. This survey was conducted in 2022, just two years earlier in 2020, that percentage was at 15%. That means within two years the disbelief in the total truth of the Bible went up by 11 percentage points.
Now, we can’t be too much of an alarmist, these things do fluctuate. From 2016 to 2018 there was a 6% increase; whereas from 2018 to 2020 there was a 8% decrease. But what happened in-between 2018 and 2020? The US, and the world, was in a panic over the pandemic. People were turning into Church services left and right, and so, people put more stock into the Bible. But now, we’re getting back to normal life, and the Bible is going right back where it was before on the shelf, and even people who say they follow God, don’t trust his word.
Since the trend is that Evangelicals are not trusting God’s word to be wholly true, how then are they going to hold to orthodox beliefs like, Jesus is fully God and not a created being, or that Jesus is the only way to salvation? Or that the Holy Spirit is a personal being and one with the Trinity, or that humans are sinful and not just good natured?
At the core of this I think there are two reasons why the trend is to not believe the Bible is wholly true. First, pastors and church leaders, on a micro scale, haven’t done a good job in showing that the Bible is God’s true word. Pastors aren’t perfect, and should not claim to be, and there will always be people who will defame, ridicule, and lie to destroy a pastor’s reputation. I know because in the last year, this has happened to me, but there is a growing trend in our society that sees pastors as corrupt and less trustworthy. There’s the Anglican Bishop who is accused of spiritual abuse (https://ministrywatch.com/acna-bishop-stewart-ruch-accused-of-spiritual-abuse-ends-voluntary-leave/), or there’s the New Orleans pastor charged with laundering $900,000 dollars (https://ministrywatch.com/pastor-accused-of-money-laundering-admits-to-acquiring-almost-900k-in-fraud/). Then there’s the Georgia Pastor who was charged with multiple sex offenses with a minor (https://ministrywatch.com/georgia-pastor-dies-by-suicide-while-on-trial-for-multiple-sex-offense-charges/). And these are just in the last few months. If the Bible isn’t real in the lives of the church “leaders”, then how will it be real in the lives of people? Now I don’t believe these examples are the norm, but exception. Yet when this things happen it reinforces the idea that pastors don’t believe what they preach.
Second, pastors and church leaders haven’t done a good job at explaining why the Bible is wholly true and trustworthy. A lot of pastors are giving 20 minute sermons that make you feel good, but have no substance. They treat the Bible like a self-help book rather than the Word of God. So what does that tell the people? Or on the other side, young believers are not allowed to ask questions, or wrestle with the harder issues of life. I don’t know if it’s because pastors’ feel like their authority would be threatened, or it’s because they don’t know the answers and don’t want to look stupid. I have been asked by a member of our church to speak with a girl who rejects Christianity because when she attended a church, they wouldn’t allow her to ask any questions.
It’s not a wonder why people, even Christians, reject the Bible as wholly true, it’s wonder why more don’t. That’s why I share my struggles with you. If you don’t know I’m not perfect, stay a few Sunday’s, it will become clear. But I share it with you, because I don’t want you following me, I want you following Jesus who is perfect. It’s also why we do these fall apologetics series; to tackle these issues and to make clear why we need to hold orthodox beliefs. Not because they have been believed by the Church for almost two-thousand years, but because God spoke them, and we who follow him are to believe what he says.
So, let’s tackle this first issue, is the Bible Wholly True? There’s two parts to this: the Bible is internal true, and it’s externally true.
When I say the Bible is internal true, I mean that it is consistent with itself, and what it speaks on. A common attack on the Bible is that there are just too many contradictions. I tackled three of these supposed contradictions three years ago (https://youtu.be/Fkot6bs7ypI), in a sermon series where a person said that Christians don’t talk about the subject. What I found is not that the Bible is contradictory, but that we don’t understand it. Here’s an example: in Proverbs 26:4-5 we read, “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be just like him. 5 Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.”
Seems contradictory, but if we take a moment and think through it, what the the writer of Proverbs is saying, is that there are times to answer a fool, and there are times when not to answer a fool. The Bible calls this discernment. We have to know when answering a fool will be foolish for us, because it will just take us down a path of foolishness with the person. This is when no matter how well thought out our argument is, they’ll never accept it. That’s a toddler who just wants to ask, why?
On the other hand, there are times when answering a fool isn’t foolish, and they will take correction, or it’s needed to not speak to them, but to the crowd that is gathered. There have been tons of times, when I talk with someone, not trying to convince them, but to convince the people around them. This isn’t a contradiction, but a Jewish proverbial way to help us see the need to discern situations.
So when contractions have been brought up to me, I have found that the supposed contradiction falls into either the category of misunderstanding the context, history, or culture, or into the category of outright misconstruing the information.
Another way the Bible is internal consistent is that the information it presents about its subjects is unchanging. Take God for example, he is always seen as separate from his creation, because he is uncreated, yet is active in dealing with it. He is also loving, seeking to mend his relationship with his creation, yet at the same time, holy and in opposition to sin. We see this in the Old and New Testaments, with the New merely flushing out the ideas in the Old. One of these ideas is the thought that God, though monotheist, meaning on one deity, is more than that. In places such as Genesis 1:26 we read, “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and they shall rule over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the heaven and over the animals and over all the earth and over all the creeping things that creep upon the earth (https://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/aid/8165).’” Or Moses’ encounter at the burning bush where we see this interaction in Exodus 3:2-4, “An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire from within the thorn bush, and behold, the thorn bush was burning with fire, but the thorn bush was not being consumed. So Moses said, ‘Let me turn now and see this great spectacle why does the thorn bush not burn up?’ The Lord saw that he had turned to see, and God called to him from within the thorn bush, and He said, ‘Moses, Moses!’ And he said, ‘Here I am!’ (https://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/aid/9864)”
These passages, and many more like them, point to something more than a strict monotheistic deity. There’s a type of plurality that is hinted to, but never explained. It was something that Jewish teachers before Jesus were struggling with, and they’re still struggling with it today. Yet we see in the New Testament that flushing out of this mystery when Jesus says things like this from John 10:27-30, “27 My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand. 30 I and the Father are one.” Right after this the Jewish leaders that heard what Jesus said, picked up stones to kill him. When Jesus asked them why they were picking up stones, they replied with, “We are not stoning you for any good work…but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God (John 10:33).”
The plurality that is hinted to in the Old Testament, is flushed out in the New. God is monotheistic, one deity, but there is a divine plurality there as well. Something that we’ll address in the coming weeks.
Now we could spend more time on the internal consistency of the Bible, but let’s leave it there and look at the external consistency.
One of the big things that is brought up to me is that you can’t trust the Bible, because it started at the council of Nicaea and it’s been changed hundreds of times since then. This is easily debunked when you look at history. First, let’s talk about when we got the New Testament. Scholar David A. deSilva writes of the four Gospels, “Tatian, a student of Justin Martyr, conflated all four Gospels into a single continuous narrative called the Diatessaron (die-ates-ter-an) in the mid-to late second century, providing further evidence for the circulation of all four Gospels by the middle of the secondary century (deSilva, David A. An Introduction to the New Testament: Contexts, Methods and Ministry Formation [Westmont: InterVarsity Press, 2012), page 4.]).” DeSilva then goes on to say of the Epistles, “The apostolic fathers, (church leaders active between 95 and 150 CE) quote many of the texts that became part of the New Testament…Even where direct quotations are not made, these authors show themselves to be significantly informed by and familiar with these texts, their writings very recently resonating with identifiable passages in the Gospels and epistles (deSilva, David A. An Introduction to the New Testament: Contexts, Methods and Ministry Formation [Westmont: InterVarsity Press, 2012), page 5.]).”
In other words, the New Testament was almost universally seen as authoritative a century before the Council of Nicaea met. In response to the accusations that the Bible has been changed hundreds of times, we have both the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the complete Bible, Codex Vaticanus. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1970s and come from a sect of Judaism. In the collection was found scrolls that are identical to what we have today. It goes the same for the Codex Vaticanus, which is from around 300 AD. This Bible is both the same as we have today, and came before the Council of Nicaea.
So we can trust that what we have in the Bible is textually unadulterated, but we also have archeology. Last year I did a research paper on the conquest of the land of Canaan that is found in the book of Joshua. There are many theories about how Israel came to be known in the land of Canaan, yet when one steps back and looks at the whole of the Joshua account and the archeological data, the two fit succinctly together. An example of this is the city of Jericho. Scholars Tremper Longman and Dillard concluded that Jericho fell in the Late Bronze Age, or between the 13th and 12th centuries, which is consistent with the biblical timeframe for Joshua’s campaign (Longman, Tremper, and Raymond B. Dillard. An Introduction to the Old Testament. 2nd ed. [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006], 125).
For the New Testament, scholars Köstenberger and Patterson, write about the discovery of Gallio, which is a Roman Governor mentioned in the Bible, but only recently was found to have existed, due to an inscription. They write “This includes important sites such as Ephesus and Corinth. Particularly important is the Gallio Inscription, which allows us to date Gallio’s governorship in the province of Achaia to between the summer of the year 51 and summers 52 (Köstenberger, Andreas J. and Richard D. Patterson, Invitation to Biblical Interpretation: Exploring the Hermeneutical Triad of History, Literature, and Theology. [Grand Rapids: Kregel, 201], page 116).” This is important because it confirms people and places of the New Testament, helping solidify its trustworthiness.
These are just a few examples of both the internal and external constancies of the Bible. We could spend several hours and write several books detailing how the Bible is the most trustworthy of any other sacred text. This is because it’s not just another sacred text, it is the very word of God, given to humanity to point them back to him.
This is why Paul tells his apprentice Timothy in the third chapter of the his second letter, “In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, 13 while evildoers and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. 14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, 15 and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work (v12-17).”
We need to and can stand firm on God’s word, because it is both consistent with itself, and with history at large. And that’s because the God of Creation moved to have it penned, so that we may have it for our lives.
My challenge for you is this: pick one book of the Scriptures and do some research. Find out who God used to write it down, which is the author, when it was written, the date, and what was the historical moment in which the book referenced. Do your own research, seek God to solidify the trustworthiness of his Word in your life.
Let us be a people who stand firm on the foundation of the Word of God, that we would not be swayed to fall to the false teachings of the world around us. Amen.
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