Skeptical Bible Quotes

Take all that you can of this book upon reason, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier man. (When a skeptic expressed surprise to see him reading a Bible)

Different authors have different points of view. You can't just say, 'I believe in the Bible.

All the tales of miracles, with which the Old and New Testament are filled, are fit only for impostors to preach and fools to believe.

We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant them to be the restoration of the natural order. The Bible tells us that God did not originally make the world to have disease, hunger, and death in it. Jesus has come to redeem where it is wrong and heal the world where it is broken. His miracles are not just proofs that he has power but also wonderful foretastes of what he is going to do with that power. Jesus' miracles are not just a challenge to our minds, but a promise to our hearts, that the world we all want is coming.

The natural is so awesome that we need not go beyond it.

I am now convinced that children should not be subjected to the frightfulness of the Christian religion [...]. If the concept of a father who plots to have his own son put to death is presented to children as beautiful and as worthy of society's admiration, what types of human behavior can be presented to them as reprehensible?

To stay away from Christianity because part of the Bible's teaching is offensive to you assumes that if there is a God he wouldn't have any views that upset you. Does that belief make sense?

...Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers... for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality... But I had gradually come by this time, i.e., 1836 to 1839, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow at sign, &c., &c., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian. ...By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported, (and that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become), that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost uncomprehensible by us, that the Gospels cannot be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events, that they differ in many important details, far too important, as it seemed to me, to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eyewitnesses; by such reflections as these, which I give not as having the least novelty or value, but as they influenced me, I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. The fact that many false religions have spread over large portions of the earth like wild-fire had some weight with me. Beautiful as is the morality of the New Testament, it can be hardly denied that its perfection depends in part on the interpretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories. But I was very unwilling to give up my belief... Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.

It is also worth noting that one can obtain a Ph.D. in any branch of science for no other purpose than to make cynical use of scientific language in an effort to rationalize the glaring inadequacies of tbe Bible. A handful of Christians appear to have done this; some have even obtained their degrees from reputable universities. No doubt, others will follow in their footsteps. While such people are technically "scientists," they are not behaving like scientists. They simply are not engaged in an honest inquiry into the nature of the universe. And their proclamations about God and the failures of Darwinism do not in the least signify that there is a legitimate scientific controversy about evolution.

To be skeptical of the resultant text of the New Testament books is to allow all of classical antiquity to slip into obscurity, for no documents of the ancient period are as well attested bibliographically as the New Testament.

A skeptic once said to me, 'I don't believe the Bible because it has miracles.' I said, 'Name one.' He said, 'Turning water into wine. Do you believe that?' I said, 'Yeah, it happens all the time.' He said, 'What do you mean?' I said, 'Well, rain goes through the grapevine up into the grape, and the grape turns into wine. All Jesus did was speed it up a little bit.

Older forms of indentured servanthood and the bond-service of biblical times had often been harsh, but Christian abolitionists concluded that race-based, life-long chattel slavery, established through kidnapping, could not be squared with biblical teaching either in the Old Testament or the New.

What we fail to realize is we often become like Pharisees in our ruthless attempts to identify Pharisees (and impostors). While indeed some people use the old laws of religious pride to tear down men of God, others use the new laws of anti-religious anger to tear down men of God.

Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment - an attitude that has never again left me. - Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp

In learning and argumentation, the quality brain is similar to a facility of maximum security. What passes the logic test, free of fallacy and pretense, then must pass the test of biblical accuracy in order to proceed as an adopted, reliable truth.

All the seemingly loose threads and contradictory claims of the rest of the Bible come together in Jesus.

Initially, the God of the Old Testament might seem overwhelming and domineering to you, or tyrannical, or perhaps even evil, which is good. It is the first telling that God is indeed God, by sheer definition, and not some ear-tickling fairy by which one in his depravity is guaranteed to find another form of stale romanticism or love at first sight. For such a first impression as the latter would be problematic to the essence of Christianity. Therefore the Christians are right in saying that the nature of imperfect men cannot ultimately co-exist with the nature of a perfect God; and that the hope of each man is now desperately found in God's sending of Christ.

In the selfsame day entered Noah … and every beast.” With a million or so species (There are more than a million known today.), the animals must have boarded at a rate of at least 10 pairs/second.

Now, what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? You won't! You'll have ...A God, essentially, of your own making, and not a God with whom you can have a relationship and genuine interaction. Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination. So an authoritative Bible is not the enemy of a personal relationship with God. It is the precondition for it.

The real bible is not the work of inspired men, nor prophets, nor apostles, nor evangelists, nor of Christs. Every man who finds a fact, adds, as it were, a word to this great book. It is not attested by prophecy, by miracles or signs. It makes no appeal to faith, to ignorance, to credulity or fear. It has no punishment for unbelief, and no reward for hypocrisy. It appeals to man in the name of demonstration. It has nothing to conceal. It has no fear of being read, of being contradicted, of being investigated and understood. It does not pretend to be holy, or sacred; it simply claims to be true. It challenges the scrutiny of all, and implores every reader to verify every line for himself. It is incapable of being blasphemed. This book appeals to all the surroundings of man. Each thing that exists testifies of its perfection. The earth, with its forests and plains, its rocks and seas; with its every wave and cloud; with its every leaf and bud and flower, confirms its every word, and the solemn stars, shining in the infinite abysses, are the eternal witnesses of its truth.

We tend to think of the Bible as a book of answers to our questions, and it is that. However, if we really let the text speak, we may find that God will show us that we are not even asking the right questions.

Invariably, I will be referred to Gleason Archer's massive Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, a heavy volume that seeks to provide the reader with sound explanations for every conceivable puzzle found within the Bible - from whether God approved of Rahab's lie, to where Cain got his wife. (Note to well-meaning apologists: it's not always the best idea to present a skeptic with a five-hundred-page book listing hundreds of apparent contradictions in Scripture when the skeptic didn't even know that half of them existed before you recommended it.)

Many in the church have turned their back on serious study, and have embraced an anti-intellectualism which refuses to learn anything from scholarship at all lest it corrupt their pure faith. It is time to end this standoff, and to reestablish a hermeneutic of trust (itself a sign of the gospel!) in place of the hermeneutic of suspicion which the church has so disastrously borrowed from the postmodern world.

[The Bible] has survived attack of every kind. Neither barbaric vandalism nor civilized scholarship has touched it. Neither the burning of fire nor the laughter of skepticism has accomplished its annihilation. Through the many dark ages of man, its glorious promises have survived unchanged.

There are, in the end, only two ways to read the Bible: Is it basically about me or basically about Jesus?

Expository preaching is the best method for displaying and conveying your conviction that the whole Bible is true.

In reality atheists deny not the God of the Bible but an caricature of their own imagination.

There are, in the end, only two ways to read the Bible: Is it basically about me or basically about Jesus? In other words, is it basically about what I must do or basically about what he has done?

People debate over whether or not there is a literal Hell, in the literal sense often described as fire and eternal torture, which, to many, seems to be too harsh a punishment. If men really want to fear something, they should be fearing separation from God, the supposedly more comforting alternative to a literal Hell. For separation from the authorship of love, mercy, and goodness is the ultimate torture. If you think a literal Hell sounds too bad, you are very much underestimating the pain of being absolutely, wholly separated from the goodness while exposed to the reality of the holiness of God.

Nevertheless, should you have any doubts that we are stating sound doctrines, look up the references and see exactly what the Bible says and believe it in preference to any man. You cannot go wrong with this kind of advice. But in doing this, be sure you adhere to what is written, and that you do not let preconceived ideas cause you to be biased on any point. Do not try to make the Bible conform to your ideas. Always reconcile your ideas to the Bible. Let the plain language of the references given be read and understood in the same literal way that we would understand similar statements in any other book

One of the great themes of the Christian Bible is that, whenever God asks us to do something for him, he gives us the gifts we need to do it. Knowing us for what we are, he equips us for what he wants us to do.

That Muhammad could predict certain events does not prove that he was a prophet: he may have been able to guess successfully, but this does not mean that he had real knowledge of the future. And certainly the fact that he was able to recount events from the past does not prove that he was a prophet, because he could have read about those events in the Bible and, if he was illiterate, he could still have had the Bible read to him.

The linguistic and literary reality of the biblical tradition is folkloristic in essence. The concept of a benei Israel ... is a reflection of no sociopolitical entity of the historical state of Israel of the Assyrian period

To show how a text fits into its whole canonical context, then, is to show how it points to Christ and gospel salvation, the big idea of the whole Bible. Every time you expound a Bible text, you are not finished unless you demonstrate how it shows us that we cannot save ourselves and that only Jesus can. That means we must preach Christ from every text, which is the same as saying we must preach the gospel every time and not just settle for general inspiration or moralizing.

good way is to study Bible characters—take them right from the cradle to the grave. You find that skeptics often take one particular part of a man’s life—say, of the life of Jacob or of David—and judge the whole by that. They say these men were queer saints; and yet God did not punish them. If you go right through these men’s lives you will find that God did punish them, according to the sins they committed. A lady once said to me that she had trouble in reading the Bible, that she seemed to not feel the interest she ought. If you don’t keep up your interest in one way, try another. Never think you have to read the Bible by courses. PROPER NAMES. Another interesting study is the meaning of proper names. I need hardly remark that every name in the Bible, especially Hebrew names,

Clearly, it is not simply exegesis that determines how we read the Bible; rather, it is our vested interests, our hopes, and our fears that largely determine our reading. And because the reach of the gracious God of the Bible is toward the other, we ought rightly to be skeptical and suspicious of any reading of the Bible that excludes the other, because it is likely to be informed by vested interest, fears, and hopes that serve self-protection and end in self-destruction. Palestinians’ and Israelis’ fear of the other, said to be grounded in the Bible, has been transposed into a military apparatus that is aimed at the elimination of the other. It is wholly illusionary to imagine that such an agenda is congruent with the God of the Bible who is commonly confessed by Jews and Christians.

This fuzzification of faith has developed in parallel to increasing ignorance of biblical teaching and growing skepticism as to whether that teaching as it stands may properly be called the Word of God. Is there a connection? Yes. When the church ceases to treat the Bible as a final standard of spiritual truth and wisdom, it is going to wobble between maintaining its tradition in a changing world and adapting to that world, and as the wobbles go on, uncertainty as to what is the real substance of faith and the proper way of embracing it and living it out will inevitably increase.

Pride, willfulness, and rebellion against what “is written” are the causes of the Bible being hard to understand. The hard part, then, is not understanding with the mind, but being willing to obey what he does not want to obey. If a person could not understand the truth, he could not reject it.

The True Believer ignores anything that doesn't fit his belief system. Instead, he inevitably comes to hold those beliefs at a very profound level. They can become absolutely part of his identity. It is this that brings together the religious, the psychic, the cynic (as opposed to the open skeptic) and the narrow-minded of all kinds. It is something I encountered a lot among my fellow Christians. At one level it can be seen in the circular discussion which goes as follows: Why do you believe in the bible? Because it is Gods word. And why do you believe in God? Because of what it says in the bible. At a less obvious level, it can be seen in the following common exchange: Why do you believe Christianity is true? Because I have the experience of a personal relationship with God. So how do you know you're not fooling yourself? Because i know it is real. Even as an enthusiastic believer myself I could see this kind of tautology at work, and over time I realized that it is common to all forms of True Belief., regardless of the particular belief in question. The fact is, it's enormously difficult - and you need to be fantastically brave - to overcome the circularity of your own ideologies. But just because our identity might be tied up with what we believe, it doesn't make that belief any more correct. One wishes that True Believers of any sort would learn a little modesty in their convictions.

There is no excuse for anyone to misunderstand God's Word if he will, like a child, accept the Bible for what it says, and be honest enough to consecrate himself to obey it. He must accept the Bible as God's Word. He must believe that God could not be honest if He sought to hide from man the very things He will judge him by in the end. He must accept the Bible as the final Court of Appeal on its own subjects, and forget man's interpretations and distortion of the Word. He must believe that God knows what He is talking about; that He knows how to express Himself in human language; that He said what He meant, and meant what He said; and that what He says on a subject is more important than what any man may say about it.

But when we look at Psalm 40, we see absolutely nothing to indicate that the speaker is Jesus or some messianic figure. Why would the Hebrews author assume that Psalm 40 was about Jesus? He does so because he knows what Jesus told his disciples in Luke 24, that all the Scripture is really about him. The Bible is in the end a single, great story that comes to a climax in Jesus Christ.

It’s possible to preach the New Testament and not really preach Christ and his saving work. We think our problem is how to get to Jesus out of a particular psalm or out of 2 Kings. No, the problem is bigger than that. Preaching Christ means preaching the gospel. Preaching the gospel means preaching Christ and his saving work and his grace, and we can fail to do that in any part of the Bible.

[On scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss] [Carl Friedrich] Gauss told his friend Rudolf Wagner, a professor of biology at Gottingen University, that he did not believe in the Bible but that he had meditated a great deal on the future of the human soul and speculated on the possibility of the soul being reincarnated on another planet. Evidently, Gauss was a Deist with a good deal of skepticism concerning religion.

Legalism is far more than the conscious belief that “I can be saved by my good works.” It is a web of attitudes of heart and character. It is the thought that God’s love for us is conditioned on something we can be or do. It is the attitude that I offer certain things—my ethical goodness, my relative avoidance of deliberate sin, my faithfulness to the Bible and the church—that support Christ’s work and contribute to God’s goodwill toward me.

to the world. God created both body and soul, and the resurrection of Jesus shows that he is going to redeem both body and soul. The work of the Spirit of God is not only to save souls but also to care and cultivate the face of the earth, the material world. It is hard to overemphasize the uniqueness of this vision. Outside of the Bible, no other major religious faith holds out any hope or even interest in the restoration of perfect shalom, justice, and wholeness in this material world. Vinoth Ramachandra, a Sri Lankan Christian writer, can see

[Professor Greene's] reaction to GAMAY, as published in the Yale Daily News, fairly took one's breath away. He fondled the word "fascist" as though he had come up with a Dead Sea Scroll vouchsafing the key word to the understanding of God and Man at Yale. In a few sentences he used the term thrice. "Mr. Buckley has done Yale a great service" (how I would tire of this pedestrian rhetorical device), "and he may well do the cause of liberal education in America an even greater service, by stating the fascist alternative to liberalism. This fascist thesis . . . This . . . pure fascism . . . What more could Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin ask for . . . ?" (They asked for, and got, a great deal more.) What survives, from such stuff as this, is ne-plus-ultra relativism, idiot nihlism. "What is required," Professor Greene spoke, "is more, not less tolerance--not the tolerance of indifference, but the tolerance of honest respect for divergent convictions and the determination of all that such divergent opinions be heard without administrative censorship. I try my best in the classroom to expound and defend my faith, when it is relevant, as honestly and persuasively as I can. But I can do so only because many of my colleagues are expounding and defending their contrasting faiths, or skepticisms, as openly and honestly as I am mine." A professor of philosophy! Question: What is the 1) ethical, 2) philosophical, or 3) epistemological argument for requiring continued tolerance of ideas whose discrediting it is the purpose of education to effect? What ethical code (in the Bible? in Plato? Kant? Hume?) requires "honest respect" for any divergent conviction?

Religious conservatives, like many people, cannot stand the idea that what they have believed their whole life just may be wrong, so they go to great lengths to convince themselves of their baseless doctrines. The difference between me and them is that when I realized the evidence was against me, I changed my beliefs. I went where the evidence led whether I liked it or not, yet they stick to their dogma at all cost. They push skeptics like me aside as people who are “just bitter,” or who have an axe to grind, or are living in sin and blinded by the Devil.

Peter tells Langdon that the Masons believe that the Bible is an esoteric allegory written by humanity, and that, like most religious texts around the globe, it contains veiled instructions for harnessing humanity's natural God-like qualities and is not meant to be interpreted as the commands of an all-powerful deity. This interpretation has been lost amid centuries of scientific skepticism and fundamentalist zealotry. The Masons have (metaphorically) buried it, believing that, when the time is right, its rediscovery will usher in a new era of human enlightenment.

Even from the standpoint of the skeptic, a reasonable and candid search into the unknown, by the light of what is known, will guide the unbiased, intelligent reasoner in the direction of the truth. Yet it is evident that without a direct revelation of the plans and purposes of God, men could only approximate the truth, and arrive at indefinite conclusions. But let us for the moment lay aside the Bible, and look at things from the standpoint of reason alone. He who can look into the sky with a telescope, or even with his natural eye alone, and see the immensity of creation, its symmetry, beauty, order, harmony and diversity, and yet doubt that the Creator of these is vastly his superior both in wisdom and power, or who can suppose for a moment that such order came by chance, without a Creator, has so far lost or ignored the faculty of reason as to be properly considered what the Bible terms him, a fool (one who ignores or lacks reason): 'The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.' However it happened, at least that much of the Bible is true, as every reasonable mind must conclude; for it is a self-evident truth that effects must be produced by competent causes.

Let me give you another example from the Bible of how illustrations work. God says to Cain, “Sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it” (Genesis 4:7). The Hebrew word used here connotes an animal that is coiled low, perhaps off in the shadows, ready to spring, rend, and kill. God does not simply say, “Sin will get you into trouble, Cain.” That would have been an abstraction. By likening sin to a dangerous, predatory animal, God is not only gripping the heart but also conveying a great deal of information about sin—much more than a mere proposition could do.

Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much of the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic free thinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the State through lies; it was a crushing impression. Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude towards the convictions which were alive in any specific social environment—an attitude which has never again left me, even though later on, because of a better insight into the causal connections, it lost some of its original poignancy.

Any sermon that tells listeners only how they should live without putting that standard into the context of the gospel gives them the impression that they might be complete enough to pull themselves together if they really try hard. Ed Clowney points out that if we ever tell a particular Bible story without putting it into the Bible story (about Christ), we actually change its meaning for us. It becomes a moralistic exhortation to “try harder” rather than a call to live by faith in the work of Christ. There are, in the end, only two ways to read the Bible: Is it basically about me or basically about Jesus? In other words, is it basically about what I must do or basically about what he has done?

There seems to me to have been twice as much done in some ages in defending the Bible as in expounding it, but if the whole of our strength shall henceforth go to the exposition and spreading of it, we may leave it pretty much to defend itself. I do not know whether you see that lion—it is very distinctly before my eyes; a number of persons advance to attack him, while a host of us would defend [him]. . . . Pardon me if I offer a quiet suggestion. Open the door and let the lion out; he will take care of himself. Why, they are gone! He no sooner goes forth in his strength than his assailants flee. The way to meet infidelity is to spread the Bible. The answer to every objection against the Bible is the Bible.

The Book of Mormon proposes a new purpose for America: becoming a realm of righteousness rather than an empire of liberty. Against increasing wealth and inequality, the Book of Mormon advocates the cause of the poor. Against the subjection of the Indians, it promises the continent to the native people. Against republican government, it proposes righteous rule by judges and kings under God's law. Against a closed canon Bible and non-miraculous religion, the Book of Mormon stands for ongoing revelation, miracles and revelation to all nations. Against skepticism, it promotes belief; against nationalism, a universal Israel. It foresees disaster for the nation if the love of riches, resistance to revelation, and Gentile civilization prevail over righteousness, revelation and Israel.

The inconsistencies of Christian people, who while professing to believe their Bible were yet content to live just as they would if there were no such book, had been one of the strongest arguments of my skeptical companions; and I frequently felt at that time, and said, that if I pretended to believe the Bible I would at ay rate attempt to live by it, putting it fairly to the test, and if it failed to prove true and reliable, would throw it overboard altogether. These views I retained when the Lord was pleased to bring me to Himself; and I think I may say that since then I have put God's Word to the test. Certainly it has never failed me. I have never had reason to regret the confidence I have placed I its promises, or to deplore following the guidance I have found in its directions.

Jefferson then distilled and enunciated these “essentials” in several personal works he shared with friends, his “Syllabus,” and two extracts from the Bible: “The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth,” and “The Life and Morals of Jesus,” sometimes called the “Jefferson Bible.” In these works Jefferson disputed core Christian doctrines while he omitted references to miracles and Jesus’ resurrection. Although his own spirituality apparently grew later in life, he remained a religious skeptic and on the fringes of unitarianism in his beliefs. Throughout his life he opposed religious orthodoxy and intolerance, and the government’s subversion of religion for political gain. “To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed,” Jefferson wrote Benjamin Rush, “but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself.”90

Her way of being religious was as nonconformist as her nonreligious life had been. She was skeptical about many of the practices of the institutional church. She preferred to trust in the personal relationship she had grown to experience with God. This relationship transformed her ability to be in community and enabled her to see the essence of those around her: "The longer I live, the more I see God at work in people who don't have the slightest interest in religion and never read the Bible and wouldn't know what to do if they were persuaded to go inside a church." For Dorothy [Day], the bread broken at Mass wasn't any more holy than the bread broken at shelters and soup kitchens. Church didn't happen in a building. It happened in the way people related to each other. Christ wasn't any more present in the liturgy than he was when on person listened with compassion to the pain of another.

The Bible is in the end a single, great story that comes to a climax in Jesus Christ. God created the world and created us to serve and enjoy him and the world he had made. But human beings turned away from serving him; they sinned and marred themselves and the creation. Nevertheless, God promised to not abandon them (though it was his perfect right) but to rescue them, despite the guilt and condemnation they were under and despite their inveterately flawed hearts and character. To do this, first God called out one family in the world to know him and serve him. Then he grew that family into a nation; entered into a binding, personal covenant relationship with them; and gave them his law to guide their lives, the promise of blessing if they obeyed it, and a system of offerings and sacrifices to deal with their sins and failures. However, human nature is so disordered and sinful that, despite all these privileges and centuries of God’s patience, even his covenant people—who had received the law, promises, and sacrifices—turned away from him. It looked hopeless for the human race. But God became flesh and entered the world of time, space, and history. He lived a perfect life, but then he went to the cross to die. When he was raised from the dead, it was revealed that he had come to fulfill the law with his perfect life, to offer the final sacrifice, taking the curse that we deserved and thereby securing the promised blessings for us by free grace. Now those who believe in him are united with God despite our sin, and this changes the people of God from a single nation-state into a new international, multiethnic fellowship of believers in every nation and culture. We now serve him and our neighbor as we wait in hope for Jesus to return and renew all creation, sweeping away death and all suffering.

If you are preaching on the first commandment (“Thou shalt have no other gods before me”) or Ephesians 5:5 (which calls greed idolatry) or any of the several hundred other places in the Bible that speak of idols, you could quote David Foster Wallace, the late postmodern novelist. In his Kenyon College commencement speech he argues eloquently and forcefully that “everyone worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”32 He goes on to say everyone has to “tap real meaning in life,” and whatever you use to do that, whether it is money, beauty, power, intellect, or something else, it will drive your life because it is essentially a form of worship. He enumerates why each form of worship does not merely make you fragile and exhausted but can “eat you alive.” If you lay out his argument in support of fundamental biblical teaching, even the most secular audience will get quiet and keep listening to what you say next.

It is the lessons that we disagree with that force and challenge us to grow and learn for ourselves, and though the matter of spirituality and the afterlife are VERY grey areas, I hope that the thoughts I have on the matter will enlighten you, force you to reflect on your own beliefs, or piss you off enough to go and do your own research to find out if what I am writing is more relevant to your own life that you would like to believe.        Be skeptical, ESPECIALLY of things you read and things you see on the news. Do your own research on topics you think are relevant to your life. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, at least THESE days they are. This was not so until VERY recently in human history, and it still isn't in many parts of the world. From birth, humans are trained to believe the things that their parents believe and their social group believes. There are some of us that didn't believe, and therefore didn't behave. I got into so much trouble I was no longer afraid to get into trouble, and this gave me freedom and fearlessness of thought that no one else in my school had. I am extremely grateful for the punishments I received for the crime of thinking for myself. I am thankful for being ostracized for being different. The only way to lead yourself out of the imprisonment of outdated modes of thinking and ancient beliefs is to cast away the old system, and them you can start to build.

Jackaby was still engrossed in his examination when I came back inside. “Books. Books. Just books,” he was muttering. Jenny was hovering by the window. I joined her. “How did you manage it, by the way?” I asked. “All those Bibles, all across town? It is a remarkable feat.” “It looks more impressive than it is,” she said, still not meeting my eyes. “I borrowed Jackaby’s special satchel, the one that holds anything. The whole pile took just one trip. The real trick was keeping myself solid all the way home. That’s the bit I’m really proud of—” She turned to face me. “Oh, Abigail, it was amazing. People saw me!” “People saw you?” “I was in disguise, of course. I wore my long coat and gloves, and I had that floppy white hat on, so they didn’t see much, but still—people saw me and they didn’t gasp or make a scene. Someone even mumbled Good day to me as I was crossing the footbridge! It was exhilarating! I have never been so excited to have somebody see me—actually see me—and not care at all!” She glanced at Jackaby. “Although you would think I would be used to it by now.” “Jenny, that is absolutely amazing!” I said. “It is, isn’t it?” she said wistfully. “Just a little bit, at least? Oh, Abigail, I’m exhausted, I’m not ashamed to tell you. I had planned on setting my spoils out in nice triumphant rows when I got back, but it was all I could do to hold myself intact by then. Solidity is sort of like flexing a muscle, except the muscle is in your mind, and your mind is really just an abstract concept. I was basically flexing my entire body into existence the whole way home. But did it merit so much as a Good job, Jenny from that infuriating man?” Jackaby surfaced from his perusal and looked up at last. His cloud gray eyes found focus on Jenny. From his expression, I couldn’t tell if he had been following our conversation or not. “Completely unexceptional,” he said. “Nothing at all in this batch. We will need to scrutinize them more closely, of course, just to be sure. Oh, and Miss Cavanaugh . . .” She raised an eyebrow skeptically. “You performed . . . quite adequately,” he said, “despite expectations.” Jenny opened her mouth to reply, but then closed it again. Her face fluttered through a series of potential reactions. Finally she just threw up her hands and vanished from sight with a muffled whuph of air closing into the space where she suddenly wasn’t. “What in heaven’s name was all that?” said Jackaby. “Exquisite frustration, I believe, sir.” “Ah. Right.” He slumped into the desk chair and began to fidget absently with the spine of one of the Bibles. “Miss Cavanaugh is a singular and exceptional spirit, you know.” “Only a suggestion, sir, but that is precisely the sort of thing you might consider saying when she is still present and corporeal.

When you consider the great writings of the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Greeks and the Romans, how they are saturated with mythology, superstition, and fantasy … replete with scientific blunders, surely it is impossible the Bible could escape without error. Still it stands without a single proven error after thirty-four centuries of scholarship.

Archaeological research done in Bible lands has amazingly confirmed the reliability and historicity of the Scriptures in so many areas. Every part of the Bible that could be checked by archaeology now provides the most positive proofs for the accuracy of the Bible.

Strange as it may seem, the Bible played a positive role in the development of science. … Had it not been for the rise of the literal interpretation of the Bible and the subsequent appropriation of biblical narratives by early modern scientists, modern science may not have arisen at all. In sum, the Bible and its literal interpretation have played a vital role in the development of Western science.

Jesus’s miracles in particular were never magic tricks, designed only to impress and coerce. You never see him say something like: “See that tree over there? Watch me make it burst into flames!” Instead, he used miraculous power to heal the sick, feed the hungry, and raise the dead. Why? We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant them to be the restoration of the natural order. The Bible tells us that God did not originally make the world to have disease, hunger, and death in it. Jesus has come to redeem where it is wrong and heal the world where it is broken.

Don’t walk away at the first sign of a contradiction or a problem. Sometimes scientific study needs to play catch-up to the Bible.

The point Jesus makes is that faith is proven by its action. If there is no response derived from the will and the knowledge, then there is no faith either. In other words, according to the teaching of the Bible, to qualify as legitimate, faith must consist of all three components: knowledge, will, and response.

The book of Genesis is a window into what cultures were like before the revelation of the Bible. One thing we see early on is the widespread practice of primogeniture—the eldest son inherited all the wealth, which is how they ensured the family kept its status and place in society. So the second or third son got nothing, or very little. Yet all through the Bible, when God chooses someone to work through, he chooses the younger sibling. He chooses Abel over Cain. He chooses Isaac over Ishmael. He chooses Jacob over Esau. He chooses David over all eleven of his older brothers. Time after time he chooses not the oldest, not the one the world expects and rewards. Never the one from Jerusalem, as it were, but always the one from Nazareth. Another ancient cultural tradition revealed in Genesis is that in those societies, women who had lots of children were extolled as heroic. If you had many children, that meant economic success, it meant military success, and of course it meant the odds of carrying on the family name were secure. So women who could not have children were shamed and stigmatized. Yet throughout the Bible, when God shows us how he works through a woman, he chooses the ones who cannot have children, and opens their wombs. These are despised women, but God chooses them over ones who are loved and blessed in the eyes of the world. He chooses Sarah, Abraham’s wife; Rebecca, Isaac’s wife; Samuel’s mother, Hannah; and John’s mother, Elizabeth. God always works through the men or the boys nobody wanted, through the women or girls nobody wanted.

Concerning the boast of Voltaire on the extinction of Christianity and the Bible in 100 years, Geisler and Nix point out that "only fifty years after his death the Geneva Bible Society used his press and house to produce stacks of Bibles." 32/ 123,124 WHAT AN IRONY OF HISTORY!

Potiphar, the commander of Pharaoh's guard, saw that Yahweh favored his slave Joseph—and right away I'm skeptical. Potiphar was an Egyptian and Egypt had its own ancient religion, featuring incredible gods and a fantastic afterlife. You think Potiphar or any sober Egyptian gave a rat's ass about some crap Hebrew god called Yahweh? Who killed you for squirting a little semen on the ground? And offered a piss-poor afterlife where you "gathered with your people" in some dark, subterranean shithole called Sheol?

Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have got hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination. So an authoritative Bible is not the enemy of a personal relationship with God. It is the precondition for it.

Intro What the problem is; our contemporary cultural context: Here’s what we face. Early points What the Bible says; the original readers’ cultural context: Here’s what we must do. Middle points What prevents us; current listeners’ inward heart context: Why we can’t do it. Late points How Jesus fulfills the biblical theme and solves the heart issue: How Jesus did it. Application How through faith in Jesus you should live now.

Think of the implication of the very term “regressive.” To reject the Bible as regressive is to assume that you have now arrived at the ultimate historic moment, from which all that is regressive and progressive can be discerned. That belief is surely as narrow and exclusive as the views in the Bible you regard as offensive.

Our faith doesn’t magically make our assumptions about Jesus and the Bible true. Faith can’t turn a falsehood into truth. Rightly understood, it’s not a blind belief in the unbelievable; it’s a rational belief based on a preponderance of evidence.

I'd never given much thought to the biblical standpoint on homosexuality, because I was seemingly a born skeptic, and I could sense the evil prejudices of mortal men within the biblical text. I was frightened of God, and for good reason. If I had only picked up the New Testament in my younger days, my life would have been different. The God of the Old Testament was filled with vengeance and rage towards the beings that he created, giving them free will, and then punishing mankind for daring to use it. Much as it was in the Bible, the dawning of the knowledge of manhood for me began in the garden...

Taking all in all, God is, as he candidly informs us in his autobiographical chronicle — the Bible — extremely whimsical and revengeful; actually an ideal model of a despot.

The vision of the Center for Progressive Christianity is to encourage churches to focus their attention on those for whom organized religion has proven to be “ineffectual, irrelevant, or repressive.” They define progressive Christians as individuals who: (ProgressiveChristianity.org, “The 8 Points.” Accessed June 24, 2012) Believe that following the path and teachings of Jesus can lead to an awareness and experience of the Sacred and the Oneness and Unity of all life; Affirm that the teachings of Jesus provide but one of many ways to experience the Sacredness and Oneness of life, and that we can draw from diverse sources of wisdom in our spiritual journey; Seek community that is inclusive of ALL people, including but not limited to: a. Conventional Christians and questioning skeptics, b. Believers and agnostics, c. Women and men, d. Those of all sexual orientations and gender identities, e. Those of all classes and abilities; Know that the way we behave towards one another is the fullest expression of what we believe; Find grace in the search for understanding and believe there is more value in questioning than in absolutes; Strive for peace and justice among all people; Strive to protect and restore the integrity of our earth; and Commit to a path of life-long learning, compassion, and selfless love. To these guidelines, Borg adds two more key aspects of Progressive Christianity: Focus on this life more than on the next life; Accept a non-literal reading of the Bible.

The difficulty comes in the few places in the Bible where the genre is not easily identifiable, and we aren’t completely sure how the author expects it to be read. Genesis 1 is a passage whose interpretation is up for debate among Christians, even those with a “high” view of inspired Scripture.17 I personally take the view that Genesis 1 and 2 relate to each other the way Judges 4 and 5 and Exodus 14 and 15 do. In each couplet one chapter describes a historical event and the other is a song or poem about the theological meaning of the event.

the wages of sin is death;

It starts out in the usual way, with the children of Israel doing evil in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord doing what he always does in such cases: he sells them.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:

Psalms 143:1. Hear my prayer, O LORD, give ear to my supplications: in thy faithfulness answer me, and in thy righteousness. It is a theory held by some persons of skeptical minds that the only benefit of prayer is the good it does to us. That was not David’s theory. Here, three times, he begs to be heard, and to be answered. Oh! do they think us such idiots that we would go on speaking in a keyhole with nobody to hear us? Do they think us brought so low — so destitute of wit — that we think it worth our while to speak out what is in our heart if God does not hear and does not answer? I reckon prayer to be the most idiotic of all occupations unless there be really a God to hear, and a God to answer. And the benefit of prayer is not in itself so much as in the full confidence that it is a real thing, and

Most historians, even many religious leaders, have discounted the story of Exodus as a myth, a moral lesson rather than a historical reality. As support for this stance, skeptical archaeologists point to the lack of Egyptian sources in documenting any series of plagues or a mass exodus of slaves, especially within the time frame indicated in the Bible.

When I say “Christianese,” I am referring to informal, homogenous, and often vacant lingo intended to sound theologically profound. “God just laid it on my heart.” “Our pastor really brings the Word.” “The Bible helps us ‘do life’ together”—that kind of thing. Christianese simplifies the complex, complicates the simple, leans heavily into bumper-stickerisms, and often has the effect of making the speaker sound like they learned English from church marquees. In Christianese, you don’t merely read the Bible, you “spend time in the Word.” You aren’t disconnecting from God, you are “backsliding.” You aren’t sharing time and food with friends, you are “fellowshipping.” Your donation isn’t a gift or tithe, it is a “love offering.” You don’t have a devotional, you have “quiet time.

We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant them to be the restoration of the natural order. The Bible tells us that God did not originally make the world to have disease, hunger, and death in it. Jesus has come to redeem where it is wrong and heal the world where it is broken. His miracles are not just proofs that he has power but also wonderful foretastes of what he is going to do with that power. Jesus’s miracles are not just a challenge to our minds, but a promise to our hearts, that the world we all want is coming.

It is also wrong to think that Bible exposition can’t have a very strong focus on human need. Nearly all Bible texts do address such existential issues directly or indirectly. However, if we start with our questions and only then look to the Bible for answers, we assume that we are asking all the right questions—that we properly understand our need. However, we need not only the Bible’s prescription to our problems but also its diagnosis of them. We may even have maladies we are completely unaware of. If we don’t begin with the Bible, we will almost certainly come to superficial conclusions, having stacked the deck in favor of our own biases and assumptions.

A great many skeptics are unfortunately put to waste, in that they vainly focus their energy on ridiculing a certain tiny denomination of Biblical fundamentalism, a denomination seated just one chair away from unbelief. They, the skeptics, cannot believe because they are the most literal of fundamentalists: of those who must interpret Scripture as simply an obsolete, absolutely dead compilation of intellectual incompetence. Nevertheless, by all means, because, after all, that is supposed to happen - Scripture states of itself that all thought and interpretation is folly without the Holy Spirit - however the ironic thing is the case in which one believes that the Bible is, in its true essence, completely outdated. And like flashes in a pan, he hints at his naivety, that he knows little about the world around him, little about those who live in it. Either that, or he knows little about what Scripture really says in relation to the world around him, little about what it really says in relation to those who live in it. It is as though he is the one dead to the world and it to him. He has not the Spirit to give life to his own spirit; he can only possibly understand Scripture as long-deceased rather than the modern world's very living narrative.

Now, what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? You won’t! You’ll have a Stepford God!

My friend and Old Testament professor Tremper Longman once told me that reading the Bible is somewhat like watching the movie The Sixth Sense. That movie has a startling ending that forces you to go back and reinterpret everything you saw before. The second time through, you can’t not think of the ending as you watch the beginning and middle of the movie. The ending sheds unignorable light on everything that went before.

As we show in Astro-Theology and Sidereal Mythology and The Trees of Life, the Bible reveals its secrets to those skeptical and persistent enough to follow the twists and turns of its convoluted text. Every chapter and verse makes perfect sense to the man armed with symbolic literacy and the occult keys of decipherment. Academics concede that the Bible’s text is full of

If you don’t trust the Bible enough to let it challenge and correct your thinking, how could you ever have a personal relationship with God?

Every Christian needs to understand the message of the Bible well enough to explain and apply it to other Christians and to his neighbors in informal and personal settings (level 1). But there are many ways to do the ministry of the Word at level 2 that take more preparation and presentation skills yet do not consist of delivering sermons (level 3). Level 2 today may include writing, blogging, teaching classes and small groups, mentoring, moderating open discussion forums on issues of faith, and so on.

Andy Stanley argues that biblical expository preaching worked in a time when our society agreed on the importance and truth of the Scripture. That does not work now, he believes. Instead of starting with the Bible and ending with practical application—as in the traditional sermon—we should start with a current human need or contemporary question and then bring in the Bible for a response and solution.

Classical rhetoric allowed the speaker inventio—the choice of a topic and the division of the topic into constituent parts, along with elaborate arguments and devices to support the speaker’s thesis. For Paul, however, there is always one topic: Jesus. Wherever we go in the Bible, Jesus is the main subject. And even the breakdown of our topic is not completely left up to us—we are to lay out the topics and points about Jesus that the biblical text itself gives us. We must “confine ourselves” to Jesus. Yet I can speak from forty years of experience as a preacher to tell you that the story of this one individual never needs to become repetitious—it contains the whole history of the universe and of humankind alike and is the only resolution of the plotlines of every one of our lives.

In Paul’s judgment, it was not appropriate to offer a careful Bible exposition to an audience who not only disbelieved in the Bible but also was profoundly ignorant of even its most basic assumptions. Evangelistic occasions are, then, one place where more topical Christian messages may be appropriate.

Therefore, one of the natural dynamics in preaching is that you will tend to preach to the people you listen to most during the week. Why? The people you are most engaged with fill your mind with their questions, which become added to your own grid as you read the Bible, and you will learn to notice biblical truth that speaks to them. Thus your sermons will tend to aim at the people whom you already have most on your heart. Over time they will be the people who are most interested in and satisfied by your preaching. They will come and bring others like themselves. Because they are coming, you will meet more of them, speak more to them, and thus (semiconsciously) tailor your sermons more to them. The

Christian men and women aren’t preaching per se; they prepare and present lessons and talks; they lead discussions in which they are presenting the Word of Christ.4 Even though Peter is not only talking to public speakers he warns those who present the Word to others in any form to take their task seriously. He adds that when Christians teach the Bible their speech should be “as . . . the very words of God” (1 Peter 4:11).

Every Christian needs to understand the message of the Bible well enough to explain and apply it to other Christians and to his neighbors in informal and personal settings (level 1). But there are many ways to do the ministry of the Word at level 2 that take more preparation and presentation skills yet do not consist of delivering sermons (level 3). Level 2 today may include writing, blogging, teaching classes and small groups, mentoring, moderating open discussion forums on issues of faith, and so on. This book aims to be a resource for all those who communicate their Christian faith in any way, particularly at levels 2 and 3.

The Bible does not say that God speaks and then proceeds to act, that he names and then proceeds to shape—but that God’s speaking and acting are the same thing. His word is his action, his divine power.

Modern people, for example, may come to the Bible looking for answers to the question “How do I build up my self-esteem and feel better about myself?” Yet in the biblical passages on sin and repentance, they will discover that the more basic human problem is too high a view of ourselves.