Many Christians think that the imprecatory psalms provide models for how to curse one’s enemies. The hermeneutical assumption seems to be that the imprecatory psalmist’s declarations of hatred for his enemies and his desire that they be destroyed are sanctified and wholly correct statements and wishes. However, ask a person who takes that view when […]
biblical inspiration
Why belief in divine inspiration commits the reader to wrestling with Scripture
We begin with a tweet from Brian Zahnd: “Biblical inerrancy” is an empty signifier. Why? Because an inerrant text still has to be interpreted. Then you run into the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism (to borrow a phrase from Christian Smith). Plenty of people agree on inerrancy and disagree on everything else!” Next, we have a […]
Are Angels and Demons Part of an Obsolete Biblical Worldview?
In his book The Biblical Cosmos (which I just reviewed here), Robin Parry points out that the Bible is written against the backdrop of an ancient cosmology which we no longer accept in the modern world. For example, biblical writers assume a flat earth and a three-storied universe with heaven located physically above the earth. They assume […]
Inerrancy: Still Hazy After All These Years
I grew up in a Pentecostal fundagelical church where we prided ourselves on taking Scripture seriously. That meant, among other things, a commitment to literal interpretation. From a literal six days of creation to a literal thousand year millennium, we took Scripture in what we believed to be the natural sense. And that meant reading […]
Does the religious status of New Testament documents undermine their historical veracity?
In his classic 1943 book The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?, F.F. Bruce makes the following observation: “Somehow or other, there are people who regard a ‘sacred book’ as ipso facto under suspicion, and demand much more corroborative evidence for such a work than they would for an ordinary secular or pagan writing.” This […]
The Bible Tells Me So: A Review
Peter Enns. The Bible Tells Me So… Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It. HarperOne: 2014. Like many Christians raised in the church, I grew up singing “The B-I-B-L-E Song” in Sunday school: The B-I-B-L-E Yes that’s the book for me, I stand alone on the Word of God, The B-I-B-L-E. Back […]
Happy trails to you
“Tomorrow I fly to Notre Dame for something called the “Logos Workshop”, an interdisciplinary meeting of biblical scholars, philosophers, and theologians, to debate papers on the topic of hermeneutics and biblical inspiration from such luminaries as Kevin Vanhoozer and Eleonore Stump, with other luminaries like as Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff milling about in the crowd. Yes […]
