Questions and answers about faith, from one Christian's perspective
The title of this post is a bit odd for a blog about Christianity. After all, I believe Jesus exists (present tense) so the question is a bit like “have you stopped beating your wife?”.
Well, it wasn’t the original title, but I let myself wander a bit with this post, as you’ll see at the end.
Regarding the historicity of the Bible, there’s a spectrum of thought. On one end, we find Continue reading “Did Jesus exist?”
The Old Testament contains many passages that are difficult to believe. There are of course problems with scientific, geographical, or historical details, the most famous of these being the six-day creation. These issues do not present severe difficulty except to the fundamentalist who insists on taking every word literally. Allegorical interpretations of the Genesis story have been part of mainstream Christian thought since long before the scientific age.
The more serious concerns with the Old Testament come from passages where either the “moral of the story” itself, or the life lesson that a believer could be expected to draw from a passage, or the depiction of the character of God, strikes us as terribly wrong. For example, in Numbers 5:11-29, we read that Continue reading “Did God order the Israelites to commit genocide?”
I find that one’s answer to this important question predicts a lot of how the rest of one’s thinking takes shape.
One group says yes, the Bible is inerrant, right down to the last detail, including the literal six-day creation. This position is usually maintained either through exaggerated claims about archaeology and prophecy, or on the fear that compromise on that point leads down a slippery slope.
A second approach is to say Continue reading “Is the Bible completely without error?”