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 Review #4846017 |
 |  | Can The Bible Be Trusted?  [E] A genuine consideration of the question.  |
| (3.5)| Hello Surgec68 . Thank you for entering this month's contest. Congratulations on being the runner up in this months contest.
As the official Judge of this contest, I have the following comments to offer for "Can The Bible Be Trusted?"  Did you answer the question?You focused on the bits you thought that you could defend and gave a reasonable defence of the New Testament based on how it came to be put together and recognised by the church as authoritative. Use of quotes, proof-texting or AI - could I hear your voice?You might have used AI in researching this but it felt human how it was put together and argued. How consistent was your argument?Your argument focused on the ways and criteria by which the canon of New Testament scripture was formed and agreed on by the early church. You suggested that this added a credibility to the claim the Bible was true and trustworthy. You avoided a discussion of Old Testament authority with a clear implication that would be a harder task to accomplish due to conflicts with modern science. Bible books were mainly written by apostles, were consistent with each other, were in widespread usage and bore the mark of the Holy Spirit. You alluded to apocryphal and pseudonymous scriptures and to a mindset which regarded the Bible as invented legends. But the bible was not given in a vacuum but rather in a geographically and culturally diverse context. It came to be affirmed in its current form via communal usage and recognition of its intrinsic worth and accuracy. The process itself jettisoned less authentic attempts to duplicate the literature and interpreted the events described in the New Testament as literal rather than legendary. In the end the Bible speaks to the whole of our lives and reveals God and our acceptance or rejection of it depends on whether we accept Him or not. My thoughts on the substance of what you saidI was intrigued by the way you presented the two ways we could read the emergence of consensus on the authority of scripture. On the one hand they might have been fabricated legends and on the other directly inspired by God's Holy Spirit and a witness to the incarnate God-Man with us who is Jesus Christ. There is no no-mans land between these two positions and the reader must choose between doubt and faith between recognising and accepting the God revealed in scripture or denying Him. I agree that reading the Bible is an encounter experience where we meet the One who inspired them and either move closer or further away. Approaching this argument from the perspective of the formation of the canon was an intriguing way to argue the position. It contrasts with the Muslim version of revelation that was dictation and in which there was a top-down purge of alternate texts by the Muslim caliphs. The Christian version of inspiration was tried and tested by an emerging spiritual community while the Muslim one was dictated and then imposed by established political authorities. The Christian model is the more credible because of the transparency of the audit trail and historical discussions that leads to the final text while the Muslim process is opaque and insists on being blindly accepted. I did not find your argument that convincing however because of the issues that your essay dodged. The implication of your implied choice to focus on the New Testament was that the Old testament was scientifically indefensible. So it seems that you did not address what you actually regard as the most serious challenge to scriptural authority. You did not use historical arguments that show that both the Old and New Testament texts were revealed in verifiable historical contexts, speaking of people who actually existed and are not therefore merely mythical but rather grounded and plausible. Similarly you did not address any of the major debates that exist about specific issues of biblical credibility, hermeneutics or historicity that rage in Western theological circles. In effect I felt you simply replaced the individual Muhammad's claim regarding the Quran, this is the word of God, with the communal churches claim that the New Testament is the word of God- accept it or reject it - there is no middle ground. But you did not give us arguments as to why it might be more reasonable or plausible to accept this rather than reject it. In the end faith is crucial. Christians and non-Christians both witnessed Christ's miracles. The first gave glory to God and the latter proclaimed them magic tricks inspired by the Devil to mislead Israel. The first declared Divine inspiration and the latter attributed it to evil. The choice between the two was real enough and Christians won that argument hands down. The evidence that the world has found the Christian argument more convincing than that of the Rabbis is a matter of comparing billions with millions. The question of inspiration is no longer the real choice most people face. Most non Christians have indeed decided to go off on completely different tangents rather than accept the parameters of this choice. Arguing faith to a Western scientific minded atheist, to a Hindu, to a Chinese ideologically minded Communist/Buddhist or Daoist or indeed to a Muslim requires a more comprehensive set of tools than the ones you used here. A Muslim will suggest the Bible has been corrupted and this is why it contradicts the Quran, though they cannot provide before or after examples of said corruption nor explain how the best bits of their own text appear borrowed from various preexistent Christian literature. A scientifically minded liberal Western atheist will ignore the discussion of inspiration and ask if the claims contained in scripture are scientifically credible or if they offend against a secular mutilation of morality phrased around a liberal notion of choice. Exposing the limits of the scientific method and the quagmire of materialistic reductionism, moral relativism and egoism at the heart of the so-called moral objections of atheists to the message of the Bible is the apologetic task there. A Hindu will drown you in endless examples of Hindu scriptures and just see the bible as one more text in an enormous library. They will talk in terms of metaphor rather than historical reality. Showing the historical credibility of scripture as opposed to myths about monkey gods building causeways to Sri-Lanka is the task there. A Chinese Communist might have more problems with passages like the one where Jesus forgives an adulterous woman about to be stoned as it questions the monopoly of state authorities on law and order matters. They will look at scripture in terms of how its ethics serve the Communist cause and will seek to draft it in distinctively Chinese ways. They will mainly miss or misunderstand the vertical/theological dimension of scripture living as they do under a empty sky. Their views will be colored by the experience and damage caused by the Taiping rebellion. The political task here is to show how the bible respects established authorities, values care for the poor - a prominent socialist theme and generally encourages people to work hard and pay their taxes. It is from that foundation that deeper issues can then be explored. A liberal Western theologian will slice and dice how the bible was formed, and will argue about what historical sources can be traced, will lose you in debates about authorship - timing and intent. They will talk about how the text should be redrafted through an anti-supernatural lens, will dispute the plain meaning of the text and accepted traditions of the early church proclaiming that they know better and see more clearly what was really going on. Indeed such people often think themselves smarter than the God who inspired the texts. They will justify whatever worldly agenda is popular today by utilizing trajectory hermeneutics that make the Bible a source of proof texts for that agenda. Exposing their pride, dishonesty with the texts and traditions and a problematic tendency to speculate is the task here. These are the main objectors to the Bible today but your essay did not address them. Mechanical issuesFocused on the substance here. Thanks again for entering. LightinMind
 My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .
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You responded to this review 12/05/2025 @ 1:56am EST