Bibliology

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The study of fulfilled biblical prophecies is a book in itself. We’ve looked at Jeremiah’s “70 years” prophecy of Judah’s exile in Babylon; in this post we’ll look at a prophecy that came during the Babylonian Captivity from a prophet living in Babylon.

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So one evidence that the Bible is an extraordinary book is its literary coherence absent a human editor. Back in Part 1 I said there were at least two verifiable evidences—what’s the second?

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I’ve argued (Part 3) that the Bible is a coherent work of literature. But that’s obviously not true if it contradicts itself. You can find all kinds of collections of supposed biblical contradictions; there’s a well-designed site that lists 140 of them, and the Skeptics Annotated Bible identifies 496.

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And so we come to the evidence: objective evidence that the Bible is, um, unnatural, extraordinary, not like any other books. I’d suggest two lines of such evidence; we’ll look at the first one today, and a related topic later in the week. Next week, we’ll get to Door Number 2.

In my previous post, I noted that anyone who claims that the Bible is God’s Word should be expected to support that extraordinary claim with hard evidence—for the sake of his reputation, certainly, but more importantly for his own integrity; no one should order his life around a falsehood.

In this post I’d like to begin by defining exactly what the statement “The Bible is God’s Word” claims. No sense in proving something that nobody’s advocating. If we’re going to evaluate the claim, we need to know accurately and precisely what it is.

As a conservative Christian, I talk a lot about what the Bible says. Sometimes I even try to settle arguments with it (graciously, of course ????).

There’s a reason for that: conservatives believe that the Bible is the Word of God—that the words in the original languages of the Old and New Testaments are the very words that God spoke through the human authors, through a process called inspiration. In fact, the very first line of the doctrinal statement for the college where I teach is “I believe in the inspiration of the Bible, both the Old and the New Testaments.”

Why do people reject the Bible? Is it because it makes extravagant claims which can be easily debunked? At one stage I thought so. But as I got older I slowly began to realize that such wasn’t the case.

When I was fishing around the New Age, I deliberately avoided reading my Bible. It was only after I found myself in a spiritual desert that God said, “Enough is enough,” and took over. I avoided the Bible because I suspected it contained truth. If that was the case, I would be compelled to change my lifestyle. So I kept looking elsewhere.