Lecture

The Bible was written over a period of about 1,600 years by 40 different authors. This book on which the Christian faith rests tells one story that begins with creation and concludes on the threshold of eternity.

R. Douglas Geivett: Many people are interested in the question: Why believe the Bible is the Word of God? And there are a lot of interesting types of evidences that support the claim that the Bible does come from God. Of course the Bible’s not the only book that makes that claim. You have non-Christian sources of revelation that people argue for the Quran as the revelation of God, as far as the Muslim is concerned. And of course there are others who believe that God has revealed Himself in other ways without even relying on books through religious experience or what have you.

I think a fundamental question here is the question, why believe that God has produced a revelation of any kind at all? Do we have good reasons to expect God to try to make contact with human beings, to communicate something that they need to know? I believe there is evidence that God takes an interest in the human condition and therefore can be expected to make contact, to address these very questions that we all want answers to: Why am I here? What is my life for? What is the diagnosis of the human condition? There are real problems that we all agree are serious problems, but we can’t agree on the solutions. Does God have an interest in the matter? Does God have an opinion? Has He made His opinion known to us?

I think it’s reasonable to expect that God does know what bothers us and what’s wrong with the human situation. It is also reasonable to believe that He wants us to know what He thinks.

J. Kerby Anderson: One of the things that’s interesting about the Bible is that it claims to be the Word of God. Now that doesn’t prove that it’s the Word of God, that it already separates it out from other religious literature. You don’t find too many other religious works that claim to be the Word of God as the Bible does. So immediately its claim sets itself up. Now the next question you have to ask: Does it validate its claim? Well, you have lots of Old Testament prophecies, which you know were written down. We have copies of many of those prophecies written down then that were fulfilled in the New Testament. A lot of them were fulfilled in the life of Jesus Christ. Others were fulfilled in various nations. You have nothing like that again in religious literature. You have the prophecies about Jesus that were all literally fulfilled in Him. And you have other prophecies in other historical statements. Everywhere you go, whether you go to history or to prophecy, whether you look at the person of Jesus Christ, or you look at the statements about nations in the Old and New Testaments, it all matches up. And so, in a sense, it makes the claim that it’s the Word of God, and it validates the claim as we look at not only the Bible but at historical literature to see that we really do have God’s revelation in our hands.

J. P. Moreland: Many people today think that the Bible is very hard to understand or that it is basically a mythological book. But really neither of these things is true. If people will simply take the time to read the Bible, they will discover that while there are portions of it that require study and are a little difficult to understand, a lot of the Bible is accessible to someone who will pay attention to it and read it carefully.

J. Kerby Anderson: One of the things that is so striking about the Bible, which I think argues for the fact that it was inspired, that it was revelation is the fact that you have individuals writing over about a 1,500- to 2,000-year period from various cultures, various times in three different languages about a multitude of different topics, and the Bible is unified. The Bible has a unity that you find nowhere else.

J. P. Moreland: Furthermore, the Bible speaks to issues that are extremely relevant today. The Bible speaks to how to get along with people. It speaks to how to develop a family and a host of other subjects that people wonder about.

J. Kerby Anderson: Today if you were to get modern scholars to write on one topic, all in one language, all at one period of time, you would have more diversity than you would have unity. And hundreds and thousands of years, you have various individuals writing, and you have a unity from Genesis to Revelation. That argues, I believe, for the inspiration of revelation of Scripture.