Authority of Scripture Archives

6 Ways Christian Students Can Prepare for College: #6 Stick Together Like a Band of Brothers (or Sisters)

April 24, 2023

Over the last few months I have been working through a 6-part series helping Christian students think through how to prepare for life at a big university. This topic is particularly relevant, I hope, given the number of high school seniors who are in the middle of deciding where they will go to college in the fall.

This little series is based on a recent lecture I gave to the Regents School in Austin, Texas, where I laid out 6 principles designed to help rising college students think more clearly about what’s ahead. It’s also based on my book, Surviving Religion 101. You can read the prior installments here, here, here, here, and here.

We now come to the final installment, and arguably the most important of the series: “Stick together like a band of brothers (or sisters).”

I can still remember the first time I saw the World War II film, Saving Private Ryan. The opening scene of the D-Day invasion was so profoundly gut-wrenching, I almost had to leave the theater. It’s the first time I think I ever really got a taste (just a taste, mind you) of the horrors of war.

I could barely watch as those brave US soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy, knowing it was almost certain they would die. And, at Omaha Beach, most of them did. The Nazis were dug into elevated positions, forcing the Americans to charge forward, unprotected on the open beach, into a barrage of bullets and explosions.

When faced with such incredible heroism, an obvious question comes up. What allowed these soldiers to be so brave? What could explain a person’s willingness to give their life so courageously? [Read more…]

6 Ways that Christian Students Can Prepare for College: #4 People Don’t Believe Things Simply Because of the Facts

April 4, 2023

I am in the middle of a 6-part series helping Christian students think through how to prepare for life at a big university. This topic is particularly relevant, I hope, given the number of high school seniors who are in the middle of deciding where they will go to college in the fall.

We now come to a fourth thing that rising Christian college students need to know: “People don’t believe things simply because of the facts.”

OK, let me lay out what are probably the toughest questions being pondered by Christian college students: If Christianity is true, then why don’t more people believe it? And why does it seem like the smartest people around are precisely the ones who don’t believe? If Christianity was really true, if Christianity really made the most sense of the world, then wouldn’t most people accept it?

These questions will be particularly acute when it comes to professors. There they are, trained in some of the finest research universities in the world. Brilliant. Smart. Filled with knowledge. And there is the Christian student. A nineteen-year-old with no advanced degrees, no letters after their name, no credentials.

What are the chances that Christian students are right and these professors—nearly all of them—are wrong? It might seem that the chances of that are pretty low.

Indeed, if this issue is left unaddressed it will begin to gnaw away at you, like a sliver in your mind, creating doubts about what you believe. So it’s important to have an answer. It’s critical to understand why the intellectual landscape is what it is. [Read more…]

Were Later Versions of Christianity Radically Different than Earlier Ones? Reflecting on Recent Scholarly Claims

March 30, 2023

I think it’s fair to say that the last decade has witnessed a bit of a resurgence of academic interest in early Christianity.

By “early Christianity,” I don’t mean the Christianity represented by the major figures in the fourth and fifth centuries when the church had risen to power—e.g., Athanasius, Constantine, Augustine. Rather, I am referring to the time period immediately after the apostles, mainly the second and third centuries, when Christianity was still in its infancy, struggling to find its way in a hostile Roman world.

Recent books covering this critical time period (and sometimes more periods) include Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity (2011), Larry Hurtado, Destroyer of the gods (2016), my own Christianity at the Crossroads (2017), Bart Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity (2018), and James Edwards, From Christ to Christianity (2021).

So, why all the interest? I think scholars are realizing afresh something that we have always known, namely that the validity of the later (and fuller) version of Christianity is dependent, at least somewhat, upon whether its core features can be traced back to the earlier stages of Christianity.

And if this cannot be done, if it can be shown that there is a radical gap between the two, then we might conclude that the Christianity that arose to dominance is not the “real” Christianity after all. Rather, it is just a man-made construction—born of politics or power or just random chance—that is out of sync with the earlier (and more authentic) version.

Then we might conclude that this earlier (more authentic) version of the faith has been suppressed and forgotten for all these generations. And then we might wish there were scholars brave enough to recover that lost version of the faith for us, restoring it to its proper place.

Well, if someone has such a wish, it can be realized in the latest volume, After Jesus Before Christianity: A Historical Exploration of the First Two Centuries of Jesus Movements (HarperOne, 2021). It is authored by Erin Vearncombe, Brandon Scott, and Hal Taussig—all writing on behalf of the Westar Institute (effectively the umbrella organization for the well-known Jesus Seminar).

A Bold Thesis

If the foreword by Sue Monk Kidd is any indication, the thesis of this volume certainly does not lack in boldness: [Read more…]

6 Ways that Christian Students Can Prepare for College: #2 You Won’t Have All the Answers

March 6, 2023

Last week I began a new 6-part series helping Christian students think through how to prepare for life at a big university. The series is based on a recent lecture I gave to the Regents School in Austin, Texas, where I laid out 6 principles designed to help rising college students think more clearly about what’s ahead. It’s also based on my book, Surviving Religion 101.

In the first installment my advice was simple: “Take this transition seriously.” Yes, students can be overly skeptical about their future college experience—what I call a “martyr complex”—where they begin to think everyone is out to get them. But the opposite is a danger too. Some students mistakenly shrug their shoulders as if this whole college thing is no big deal when it comes to their spiritual lives.

We now come to my second principle: “You Won’t Have All the Answers.”

As students jump into the intellectual fray at their university, it will quickly become clear that there are many questions they don’t know how to answer. Maybe it will be questions about God (if God is good, then why is there so much evil in the world?), or questions about the Bible (how can you believe in inspiration if there are contradictions in the Gospel accounts?), or even questions about science (hasn’t genetics proven that the human race did not originate with just two people?).

Whatever the question might be, it can be very uncomfortable not having an answer. The intellectual give-and-take of a big university environment can be intimidating. If you get caught on the losing end of an exchange with your professor or classmates (whatever that may mean) you might feel silly or embarrassed. It might make you withdraw from future conversations or even lead you to doubt what you believe.

But should a lack of answers lead to this sort of reaction? Not at all. [Read more…]

How a Pagan Philosopher Came to Believe the Scriptures are from God

January 24, 2023

It probably comes as no surprise that the most common question I receive from both Christians and non-Christians is “How do I know the Bible is the Word of God?” And the reason this question is at the top of the list is not hard to determine. The authority of the Bible is the foundation for everything that we believe as Christians. It is the source of our doctrine and our ethics. Thus, we need to be able to answer this question when asked.

Let me say from the outset that there is not just one answer to this question. I think there are many ways that Christians can come to know the Scriptures are from God. God can certainly use historical evidences to convince us of the truth of his Word (though it is important to understand the limitations of evidence). And God can use the testimony of the church to convince us of the truth of his Word (I cover the details of this in my book Canon Revisited).

But, it is noteworthy that throughout the history of the church many Christians have ascertained the divine origins of the Bible in yet another way: they read it. Rather than being persuaded through a deep dive into the historical evidences, many have come to believe the Bible is from God by observing its distinctive character and power.

Tatian is one such Christian. Tatian was a second-century pagan philosopher who was later converted and became a disciple of Justin Martyr. He also was the author of an apologetic work known as Oration to the Greeks (c.165). In this work, Tatian makes his case for the truth of Christianity. During one section, he lays out his personal conversion story and recounts how he carefully examined all the pagan religious writings and found them incoherent, problematic, and, sometimes, downright evil. But, then he happened to come across the Scriptures and began to read them: [Read more…]