Dan Olinger

The Great Sin of the Evangelical Right

September 4, 2017 by Dan Olinger 15 Comments

A few posts back I mused about one of the church’s great purposes: to be a place where God’s people use their gifts to serve one another, to love their neighbors as themselves.

There’s an even greater purpose, to which that one contributes. The church is to be, as the theologians say, doxological; it is to bring glory to God, to incite praise.

How does it do this? Well, when the church gathers, we praise God in worship, and that’s certainly part of it. And as we use our gifts to nurture growth in others and help them become more like Christ, that’s part of it too. But there’s another way; it’s described in Ephesians 3.

The church is God’s creation, not ours. He is the one who envisioned and then brought into being an organization—an organism—that is not limited by bloodline or geographical boundary, like OT Israel. It consists of Jews and Gentiles (Eph 3.6), from all over the globe, who are brought together in unified worship of God.

And what is his purpose in doing that? Take a look at verse 10:

To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God.

That is, that the heavenly beings (“principalities and powers”) might look at what God has done in the church and recognize the rich wisdom of the God who did it.

What does it take to impress someone who goes to work in heaven every day?

And why would the unity of God’s diverse peoples be so impressive? Because Jews and Gentiles are supposed to be enemies, not friends. If natural enemies are gathered together, united in worship to God and in loving care for one another, there’s no earthly reason for it. Only God could do that.

And now to explain this post’s title.

Since the days of Jerry Falwell Sr.’s Moral Majority—and long before that—some Christians have listened to the siren song of political influence. They have chosen to position themselves publicly as the political enemies of the very people God has called them to reach, to draw into this inexplicably unified body. And for any number of reasons—fear of loss of earthly freedom or comforts, discomfort with or even disdain for people who are radically different from them, even perhaps the desire for power—they have devoted their energies to increasing the divide rather than tapping into the divine power that brings people together in one body, in Christ, despite those differences.

But those other people are so different! They’re so wrong about so many things!

Yes. Precisely. Only God could bring us together, by changing us—all of us—from the inside out. But he can and will do that. So why add to the momentum in the other direction? Why oppose his cause?

Why tweak the political opposition for the lapses in logic of their political positions, when the cause—the real cause, the eternal one—is so much greater and so much more worthy of your limited effort? Do you really think that if you zing that leftist, he’ll be inclined to come to you for guidance to the grace that is truly greater than all his sin? Or do you not care whether he does at all?

To whom have you shown such grace today? You know, the kind of grace God has shown you?

There is a woman in my church who recommitted herself to Christ late in life. She comes whenever she can, despite significant physical obstacles. She asks me questions if something I’ve taught hasn’t been clear. And when she gets home, she downloads the Sunday school and sermon notes from the church website and pores over them, line by line, with her Bible open on her lap, filling her mind and her heart with the promises and commands of God.

And she voted for Obama.

Twice.

And though I didn’t (even once!), I’m OK with that. Because she’s a reminder that the grace of God that has brought us together is greater than the forces that appear to be great enough to drive us apart—even to drive this great country to the brink of civil war.

May her tribe increase. May our churches be filled with people who disagree with me and you about really important things—politics, lifestyles, culture, food and drink, medical approaches, whatever—and who are drawn together as one body by the far more powerful grace of the God we are all determined to love more than anyone or anything else.

May people in our community who are angry, embittered, frustrated, frightened, hopeless see in our church clear evidence that there is a power that unites us that is infinitely greater than the nonsense around us—that our hope for today and tomorrow, as well as for eternity, is not in a president or a Congress or a Supreme Court, or even in violent confrontation in the streets, but in the one in whom we live and move and have our being—in the one whose will is done just as certainly on earth as it is in heaven.

When we mock political opponents, when we add to the national polarization, when we speak passionately about this world more than the next, we make the mighty grace of God look weak and even inconsequential. And then we wonder why our countrymen mock him.

God reigns. Why do so many of his people behave as though he doesn’t?

Photo by Matt McLean on Unsplash

Hard Evidence for a Supernatural Book, Part 8: On a Scientific Examination of the Data

August 31, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Part 1      Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7

Since we’ve raised the issue of Messianic prophecies, there are plenty of others worth adding to the pile:

That Messiah’s mother would be a virgin (Isa 7.14). (And yes, the Hebrew word there means virgin, as the choice of the Septuagint translators shows: they chose the Greek word parthenos, which unambiguously means virgin. The Septuagint translators were much more likely to know the nuances of a Hebrew word in their day than a modern scholar with naturalistic biases.) See Matt 1.22-23.
That he would be born in Bethlehem (Micah 5.2). You’ll recall that Herod’s advisors used this prophecy to tell the Babylonian magi (the “wise men”) where they could find the infant king (Matt 2.3-6).
That he would spend early years in Egypt (Hos 11.1). See Matt 2.15.
That one preparing his way would cry out in the wilderness (Isa 40.3). See Matt 3.3.
That he would bring light to Galilee (Isa 9.1-2). See Matt 4.12-16.
That he would heal people (Isa 53.4). See Matt 8.16-17.
That he would ride into Jerusalem on a donkey but also as a king (Zech 9.9). See Matt 21.1-5.
That he would be betrayed by a friend, one who ate bread with him (Ps 41.9). See Matt 26.20-25, 47-56.
That he would be sold for 30 pieces of silver (Zech 11.12-13). See Matt 27.9-10.
That he would be silent before his accusers (Isa 53.7-8). See Matt 27.12-14.
That he would be tortured (Isa 50.6). See Matt 26.67-68.
That he would be mockingly urged to let God deliver him (Ps 22.7-8). See Matt 27.39-40.
That he would be pierced (Zech 12.10). See Matt 27.35.
That his clothes would be disposed of by lot (Ps 22.18). See Matt 27.35.
That his death would be alongside both the wicked and the rich (Isa 53.9, 12). See Matt 27.38, 57-60.

Whew. That’s quite a list.

And did you notice a pattern?

All the confirmations I’ve listed are from Matthew.

Matthew is clearly writing his Gospel to demonstrate to his Jewish audience that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. One of the clearest ways he does that is by demonstrating that Jesus fulfilled the Messianic prophecies; he’s constantly saying, “All these things happened so that it might be fulfilled which was written by the prophet … .” A study of those passages would be worth your time; I haven’t included all of them in the list above.

I began this series by saying that I’ve found two objective evidences that the Bible is not an ordinary book. We’ve looked—briefly—at both its literary unity and its prophetic accuracy. After a lifetime of study, I find those evidences compelling.

Perhaps you don’t. Fair enough. But I hope you’ll be intellectually honest enough—and scientific enough—not to simply dismiss evidences that don’t support what you’d like to believe. A pile of hard data calls for serious investigation.

You wouldn’t want to be unscientific, would you?

Hard Evidence for a Supernatural Book, Part 7: Trifecta!

August 28, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Part 1     Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

So we’ve seen that Daniel’s specific prophecy of the rise and fall of Alexander the Great was at best very unlikely to have been written after Alexander’s death in 323 BC; and if Daniel describes Antiochus IV in chapter 11, then the skeptic’s position is even less likely. Daniel is accurately predicting future events, not faking it.

What say we go ahead and dispense with the skeptic’s position? How about if we demonstrate that it’s just impossible?

OK, at your insistence.

Daniel makes another prophecy. He speaks of a series of “weeks” yet to come (Daniel 9.25-27). After 7 weeks, followed by 62 weeks, Messiah shall “be cut off” (v 26). Now, that’s a surprising statement, because Messiah is pictured in much of the OT as a victorious king (1Sam 2.10; Ps 2.2; 20.6; Hab 3.13); the term is metaphorically applied more than once to strong kings (2Sam 22.51; Ps 132.17; Isa 45.1). What’s this about being “cut off”?

And when will it happen? At the end of 69 “weeks,” Daniel says. Most interpreters take the word week (which is just the Hebrew word seven) to refer to a period of 7 years (compare Gen 29.27). That would make 69 weeks a period of 483 years.

So Daniel says Messiah will be “cut off” 483 years after something. After what? After “the going forth of the commandment to restore and build Jerusalem” (Dan 9.25). When was that?

Well, there were actually several events that he might be referring to. We already know that Cyrus gave the Jews permission to return to Jerusalem in 538 BC. That proclamation included the commandment to “build the house of the Lord God of Israel … which is in Jerusalem” (Ezra 1.3). So that could be it, though it doesn’t include a command to build the city itself.

In 458 BC, Artaxerxes gave Ezra permission to take more Jews back to Jerusalem (Ezra 7.11-26) and to set up the priestly (Ezra 7.17) and judicial systems (Ezra 7.25-26). Artaxerxes also doesn’t mention building the city, but he does specify that Ezra can use treasury money for anything else that seemed good to him (Ezra 7.18), including but not limited to “whatever else is required for the house of your God” (Ezra 7.20).

In 445 BC the same Artaxerxes also gave Nehemiah permission to return to Jerusalem (Nehemiah 2.5-8). We know that Nehemiah used this trip to rebuild Jerusalem’s walls (Nehemiah 2.17).

So which one is it?

There are well-regarded scholars who argue for each of these. But I’d suggest that the middle one seems most likely. Nehemiah’s rebuilding of the walls in 445 seems to presume that there’s already something worth protecting inside. And Ezra’s large group of returnees (Ezra 2.64-65) surely would have built sufficient housing.

So what’s 483 years after 458 BC? Somewhere around AD 35.

I say “somewhere around” because getting more precise than this is little difficult, for at least three reasons. First, we use a solar year (365.25 days), and most of the ancient world used a lunar year (360 days) with various adjustments as needed for accuracy, so coordinating our calendar with the Babylonian and Hebrew calendars involves some work. Second, there’s some discussion among scholars over whether the verb “cut off” might refer to an event other than Messiah’s physical death. And finally, scholars disagree over the year of Jesus’ death; common assertions range from AD 30 to AD 36. So this is as close as we’re going to get with any degree of certainty at this point.

But seriously. Are we going to ignore the fact that Daniel predicted the date of Messiah’s death? What are the odds of that?

And what about the skeptic’s standard fallback? Prophecy is impossible, so the passage must have been written after the fact and passed off as an earlier document. Not even the skeptics attempt that one here, because it’s just impossible. The book of Daniel was certainly in the Hebrew Scriptures before the death of Christ; Jesus even refers to this very passage from Daniel (Dan 9.27; also Dan 11.31) in his Olivet Discourse (Matt 24.15) and refers to another passage (Dan 7.13) in his trial before Caiaphas (Mat 26.64).

So. A specific, numeric prophecy of a significant event, fulfilled.

Again, you can reject the Bible if you want to. You can consider it merely an ancient writing of an interesting but misguided people. But you cannot do so—legitimately—without dealing with the evidence.

Part 8

Hard Evidence for a Supernatural Book, Part 6: On a Roll

August 24, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Part 1      Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

The study of fulfilled biblical prophecies is a book in itself. We’ve looked at Jeremiah’s “70 years” prophecy of Judah’s exile in Babylon; in this post we’ll look at a prophecy that came during the Babylonian Captivity from a prophet living in Babylon.

Daniel went into exile in Babylon as a young man during the first deportation about 606 BC (Dan 1.1-6). According to the story (Dan 2), God sent Nebuchadnezzar a dream that he did not understand. The king, apparently suspecting his regular seers as frauds, demanded that they tell him both what he had dreamed and its meaning. When the seers protested, he ordered them all executed. Daniel then stepped up and offered to fulfill the king’s demand, and God gave him the answer “in a night vision” (Dan 2.19). (I note that in the Scripture, dreams occur while the recipient is sleeping, and visions occur while the recipient is awake. Daniel was apparently awake all night, awaiting the answer from God.)

Daniel reports to the king the next day with the substance of the dream and its meaning. Nebuchadnezzar had seen a large statue, with a head of gold, a chest of silver, hips and thighs of brass, and legs and feet of mixed iron and clay. Daniel reported that the image represented coming world powers: Babylon itself (the head), then Medo-Persia (the chest), then Greece (the hips), and finally Rome (the legs).

Now, Daniel does not name any of these kingdoms except for the first, but their reference is unmistakable, especially in light of later visions given to Daniel himself (Daniel 7-8), where Medo-Persia and Greece are named, and where the king of Greece is said to be “broken” and replaced by 4 kings (Dan 8.22)—an event that you can read about in your world history book in the section entitled “The Death of Alexander the Great.”

No one questions the accuracy of these predictions, because it would be foolish to. They are precisely accurate. So what’s a skeptic to do? Well, all he can do is assert that such a prediction is obviously impossible—so the author must have written after the events occurred and falsely claimed to be Daniel.

Well, that’s theoretically possible, of course. I could write a history of World War II and put Rasputin’s name on it. But I’d have a really hard time passing it off as some kind of miracle and getting it broadly accepted as legitimate. And therein lies the problem with this explanation.

The view requires that the account be written after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, and even 40 years or so later, when it became clear that the kingdom would be divided into 4 stable parts. And even that’s not good enough. Daniel appears to describe Antiochus IV (Dan 11), who didn’t begin to reign until 175 BC.

OK, so why couldn’t the book have been written after that?

That’s pretty simple—because Daniel is included in the Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew Scripture (Old Testament) into Greek, which was done in the 200s BC. (We have manuscripts of it from that century, and it is cited by other authors of that century.) How did pseudo-Daniel write about Antiochus, who didn’t start reigning until 175 BC? How did he write about the division of Alexander’s empire, which didn’t occur until perhaps 300 or 290 BC, and get all Jewry to accept his fraud as Scripture in time to get it into the Septuagint before 200 BC at the very latest? Jews are pretty skeptical about adding to their Scripture, if you haven’t noticed.

Now, I suppose there might be just a liiiiittle bit of wiggle room for the skeptic in those dates. But we haven’t finished with the data yet. Next time we’ll look at evidence that the skeptic’s explanation simply cannot stand.

Part 7 Part 8

Hard Evidence for a Supernatural Book, Part 5: Right Horse Every Time

August 21, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Part 1      Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

So one evidence that the Bible is an extraordinary book is its literary coherence absent a human editor. Back in Part 1 I said there were at least two verifiable evidences—what’s the second?

The Bible makes a lot of predictions. And not vague ones, like a Chinese fortune cookie (“You will meet someone today!”), or completely indecipherable ones, like Nostradamus (“A thing existing without any senses will cause its own end to happen through artifice”), but specific predictions that can be verified.

The predictive prophecies in the Bible fall into two groups: those that haven’t happened yet (we call those “end-time prophecies,” or “eschatology”), and those that have. Of the latter group there are a great many, but the two historical events most actively predicted are the Babylonian Captivity and the earthly life of Jesus. I’d like to look at several of these.

Jeremiah lived in Judah during the time that Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon was advancing against this southern kingdom. He prophesied that Babylon would win and counseled Judah to surrender. (You can imagine what kind of response that got from the king.) Very specifically, he said that Judah would go into captivity in Babylon for 70 years and then return (Jer 25.8-14). Eventually he bought property and saved the deed as evidence of his confidence that Judah would return to the land (Jer 32.6-15).

Seventy years of captivity in Babylon. How did he do?

Nebuchadnezzar’s first attack on Judah came in the third year of Jehoiakim (Dan 1.1), which would have been about 606 BC. He took a relatively few captives, including Daniel. He returned about 10 years later, in 597 BC, and took 10,000 captives, including the new king Jehoiachin (2K 24.8-17). A third wave, the Big One, came in 586, when the Temple was destroyed and the city left in ruins (2K 25.8-21).

Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon descended, in more ways than one, through his heirs until Nabonidus overthrew the dynasty in 556 BC. His son, Belshazzar, quickly became his co-regent in 553. As we all know, it was during a feast thrown by Belshazzar in Babylon that the kingdom was overthrown by the Persian Cyrus II (“the Great”) in 539 BC (Daniel 5).

Cyrus was enlightened, compared to his contemporary dictators. He figured that exiled peoples would probably be happier if they could go home, and about 538 BC he issued a proclamation allowing exactly that (Ezra 1.1-4). A number of Jewish exiles organized (Ezra 1.5-11) and returned to Jerusalem (Ezra 2) in 536 BC. They rebuilt the altar at the site of the former Temple and began sacrifices, which had ceased during the Captivity (Ezra 3). However, they quickly ran into opposition from the local Persian officials (Ezra 4), and construction stopped for about 16 years.

In 520 BC the prophets Haggai and Zechariah arrived (Ezra 5) and began exhorting the people to rededicate themselves to the construction work, which they quickly did (Haggai 1.12-15). Just 4 years later, in 516 BC, the Second Temple was dedicated (Ezra 6.13-18).

Now, that’s a lot of dates. What do they say about Jeremiah’s prophecy?

Right away we notice that Judah returned to the land in 536 BC, after Cyrus’s decree. And that’s 70 years after the first deportation. We also notice that the Second Temple was dedicated in 516 BC, 70 years after it was destroyed in 586.

Well, whaddaya know? Jeremiah was right. In fact, he was right twice, with just one prophecy. That’s really difficult to pull off, especially since Jeremiah was long dead by the time either of these resolutions occurred.

I suspect a skeptical reader might accuse me of cherry-picking—of finding any old numbers in the narrative that are 70 years apart and calling the prophecy validated. Slanted selection of evidence, that’s called in research.

Fair enough. The allegation should be examined for slanted selection.

So let me ask. How would you calculate the length of an exile? Wouldn’t you reckon from the first deportation to the first return? And in a case where the defining event of the exile was the destruction of the central monument to the nation’s unique religious belief, wouldn’t you count from the destruction to the reconstruction? How else would you count?

So there’s a clear, verifiable, objectively countable prediction, for which there is abundant historical confirmation of veracity.

You can reject the premise that the Bible is extraordinary, but you can’t legitimately do that without dealing with this evidence.

By the way, this isn’t the only such prediction, not by a mile. We’ll look at more in the next post.

Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Hard Evidence for a Supernatural Book, Part 4: Naked Emperors

August 17, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

I’ve argued (Part 3) that the Bible is a coherent work of literature. But that’s obviously not true if it contradicts itself. You can find all kinds of collections of supposed biblical contradictions; there’s one site that lists 101 of them, and the Skeptics Annotated Bible identifies 496.

I’ve studied this topic for many years, and the more of these charges I read, the less I think of them. In fact, the great majority—I’m talking 98 or 99%–are just silly. I don’t have the space to prove that here, but I’d like to engage in a little exercise that will get us started in that direction.

For many years, if you Googled^TM “contradictions in the Bible,” you’d get first a link to a list of 69 errors compiled by Jim Meritt. (The site owners have since taken it down, for reasons that will become obvious in a minute.) If you don’t know all the details of how something gets to be the first hit in Google, in brief it’s an indication that the internet community has decided, by linking to it, that it’s the most valuable resource available on the topic.

Since Meritt’s list was #1 for years, I went to the trouble of evaluating it in depth and compiled this summary. His work is now gone and replaced with this list of 332 alleged contradictions, largely harvested from the Skeptics Annotated Bible, but the principles we’ll note today still very much apply.

When skeptics allege a contradiction in the Bible, they’re pretty much always making at least one of eight very basic scholarly errors. Let me identify them and give an example of each.

1. Depending on an English Translation

No orthodox Christians teach that any translation of the Bible is inspired; inspiration, and thus inerrancy, apply only to the original writings. So when Luke says that the men with Paul heard the voice of Jesus from heaven (Acts 9.7), and Paul later tells the mob in Jerusalem that they didn’t (Acts 22.9), some English translations fail to make obvious a very clear distinction in the Greek—that the men heard the sound of the voice but could not understand the message. Now, a skeptic can be forgiven for being misled by a translation, but he should not get away with making scholarly judgments when he doesn’t even have the basic tools (knowledge of the biblical languages) to speak to the question.

2. Transcription Errors

The manuscripts from which modern Bibles are translated were copies made by hand from older copies. They contain copying errors; no one denies this, and there’s an entire discipline (textual criticism) that devotes itself to dealing with them. (And by the way, that’s not a problem for us—but that’s a subject for another post.) So when 1Kings 4.26 says that Solomon had 40,000 horse stalls, and 2Chr 9.25 says he had 4,000, that’s not an error in the original; it’s clearly a copying error.

3. Not Paying Attention

Any work of literature contains details, and readers are supposed to notice them. Gen 7.9 says that all the animals went into the ark in pairs. Back in Gen 7.2, we find that God told Noah to take 7 of each kind of clean animal—obviously, so he’d have extras for eating and sacrificing. Verse 9 doesn’t contradict that; there were 2 of all animals, and 7 of just the clean ones.

4. Not Paying Attention to Context

In 1Co 2.15, Paul says that the spiritual person judges all things; in context he’s talking about discerning what the Spirit teaches to those whom he indwells. In 1Co 4.5 he tells the Corinthians not to judge—that is, not to make decisions “before the time,” or without having complete information. The context of each statement makes it clear that they do not contradict.

5. Cultural Ignorance

The Bible is the literary product of another time and place. When we interpret it, we need to understand how the people of that time and place would have spoken or written. For example, Paul speaks of “The Twelve” apostles (1Co 15.5) after Judas’s suicide, when there would have been only 11. But it’s clear in the NT that the body of the apostles was routinely called “The Twelve”; and Peter’s statement in Acts 1.20-22 that the missing Judas must be replaced helps verify that.

6. Childish Literalism

Literature uses metaphor routinely. But skeptics often read such metaphors like Amelia Bedelia—perhaps because they think that’s how we read them. (It isn’t.) So God tells the serpent that he will eat dust (Gen 3.14), and the critic says that’s a scientific error. Um, no. When a drag racer looks in his rear-view mirror and shouts, “Eat my dust!” he’s not making nutritional recommendations.

7. Eyewitness Perspective

When two eyewitnesses report an event, they notice and thus report different things. (Investigators will tell you that if two suspects report exactly the same details about an accusation, they’ve probably concocted the story.) So when Matthew, Luke, and John report that the rooster crowed after Peter’s denial, and Mark reports that he crowed twice, that’s not a contradiction. In fact, since Mark is reporting Peter’s perspective, and Peter was the only disciple there, it’s likely that the other 3 are just summarizing what Peter had told them.

8. Roundness of Character

Good literature celebrates the fact that people are complicated. Is God a God of war (Ex 15.3) or a God of peace (Rom 15.33)? Well, it kinda depends on where you stand with him. That’s not a contradiction; it’s a round character, and we learned about those back in ninth-grade English, when somebody apparently wasn’t paying attention.

An objective analysis of these passages makes it clear that not only are they not contradictions, they’re not even reasonably problematic. And usually the people making the charges don’t know enough about the subject even to be addressing it.

That said, there are some difficult passages in the Bible; there are statements that we don’t have enough information to evaluate with certainty. What about those?

In the past, some of the thorniest questions—writing in the time of Moses, and the existence of the Hittites, for example—were answered as further information came to light from archaeology and other sources. Undoubtedly more questions will be answered as the Lord tarries.

But what if they aren’t?

Let me suggest that it’s not naïve or unscholarly to trust your friends. I trust my wife because I know her; we have a basis for trust. I trust God and his Word for the same reason. That’s not blind faith; it’s how healthy relationships work.

So for the things in God’s Word that we don’t understand, we wait, and we trust.

And for the things we do, we obey, and we worship.

Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Hard Evidence for a Supernatural Book, Part 3: Too Many Cooks

August 14, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Part 1 Part 2

And so we come to the evidence: objective evidence that the Bible is, um, unnatural, extraordinary, not like any other books. I’d suggest two lines of such evidence; we’ll look at the first one today, and a related topic later in the week. Next week, we’ll get to Door Number 2.

Door Number 1. Writing a book is hard. Just getting the facts right is hard enough (more about that next time); but doing it artfully, in a way that pleases the attentive reader, is really, really hard. Literary critics delight themselves in finding such artful devices in serious literature—for example, in noting how Willa Cather uses the imagery of wilting flowers to foreshadow the crumbling of the protagonist in the short story “Paul’s Case,” or how Dickens contrasts polar extremes in A Tale of Two Cities, or how an episode of Seinfeld weaves together a seemingly impossible number of storylines so they all come to resolution at the last moment: in one episode George, pretending to be a marine biologist to impress his girlfriend, pulls Kramer’s golf ball from the blowhole of a beached whale. (OK, that last one was ridiculous, and involves stretching the definition of literature almost to the breaking point. But give me some slack; I’m making a point here.)

The Bible does that: it tells a story—or rather, narrates and evaluates a history—in an artful way, bringing it to a resolution that leaves us amazed and deeply satisfied. (How is that evidence of the supernatural? If Dickens can do it, why do we have to bring God into the picture? Fair question. I’ll get to that in a minute.)

The Torah

The Bible consists of two parts: the Old and New Testaments. The Old Testament began its life as the Hebrew Scriptures. The Jews call it the “Tanakh,” which is not really a Hebrew word; it’s an acronym, like NASA or YOLO. The “T” stands for Torah, or “teaching,” which is the first 5 books of the OT. In the Torah we read about the origin of the earth, then that of the nation of Israel, then of the covenant that God made with Israel at Sinai, including its stipulations. There’s a lot of talk (especially in Leviticus) of the priesthood, its clothing, its sacrifices, its calendar. Details.

The priests had to do everything a certain way. The amount of detail is overwhelming. Each sacrifice had its own purpose, timing, and procedure. And to the reader’s surprise—it doesn’t work. Oh, God forgives the sins of the sacrificer, and of the nation, but the sacrifices don’t really work. Every morning there’s a sacrifice, and by mid-afternoon the priests have to do it again. The next morning, the cycle starts anew. Every year there’s a Passover, and the next year they have to do another one. The sacrifices don’t last, and that means they don’t really work.

We finish the Torah with a nagging sense of disappointment. We want a priest who can make a sacrifice that works—one sacrifice that gets the job done. We want a priest who knows how to priest.

The Prophets

The “N” in Tanakh stands for nebi’im, or “prophets.” In the prophets we meet men who bring messages from God. But frankly, they’re disappointing too. Many of the messages are obscure. Nathan the prophet tells David that God will build him a house through his son, whom he names as Solomon (2Sam 7). But then he says the son will reign forever. How’s that going to work? And some of the messages are downright bizarre—what’s with Ezekiel’s vision of the wheel in wheel in a wheel (Ezk 1)?

Why are the prophecies so—hard?! Why can’t a prophet tell us—better yet, show us—clearly what God is like, what he wants, how we can know him? We want a prophet who knows how to prophet.

The Writings

The “Kh” in Tanakh stands for khethubim, or “writings.” In the writings we meet the kings—their story in Chronicles, their writing in Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. We want them to succeed. Saul the Tall is (not surprisingly ????) a failure, and God himself selects David, a man after his own heart, and we think he’ll succeed. But he fails suddenly and spectacularly, and his family disintegrates. His son Solomon begins well; God gives him practically infinite wisdom. But by the end he’s worshiping idols. Solomon’s son splits the kingdom, and after that the kings in David’s line are successful only rarely and incompletely.

We finish the Writings, and the Tanakh, disappointed in the kings, wishing for a king who knows how to king. It’s all disappointing, all unfulfilled potential, all promise and no really satisfying fulfillment.

And then we turn the page.

The New Testament

We meet “Jesus Christ, the son of David, the Son of Abraham” (Mat 1.1)—perfect prophet, priest, king, who reveals God to us perfectly (Jn 1.1-18), who offers—himself!—as the perfect and final offering (Heb 10.1-13), who reigns now and forever in perfect righteousness and justice (Lk 1.33; Rev 11:15). The Gospels tell us what he said and did; Acts tells us about his successors; the epistles tell us what it all means; and Revelation tells us how it all ends.

A perfect story. Plot, character, storyline. Rising action, climax, denouement. Coherence, bookended by a perfect world destroyed (Gen 1-11) and a better world restored (Rev 21-22).

So how does that evidence a divine source? If Homer and Shakespeare and Dickens and Faulkner could do it, why couldn’t an ancient writer?

Here’s the thing. There was no “ancient writer.” There were about 40 of them, living across about 1500 years. (Yes, critical scholars would say more like 1000 years, but even if they’re right—and they’re not—the point still stands.) None of the writers ever met most of the other writers.

So how did they do it? How did they write a coherent, cohesive, artful narrative? It wasn’t some talented editor who came along at the end and pieced it all together from earlier sources; the OT was in place and ordered before any of the NT was written. The OT writers couldn’t possibly have known the end, and the NT writers couldn’t possibly have influenced or edited the OT writers.

Only an editor could do that. An editor who oversaw the entire process, beginning to end.

An Editor.

PS To be fair, if a book contradicts itself, it’s not really coherent. There are lots of accusations of contradiction in the Bible. In the next post, we’ll talk about that.

Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Hard Evidence for a Supernatural Book, Part 2: The Bible’s Claims for Itself

August 10, 2017 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

In my previous post, I noted that anyone who claims that the Bible is God’s Word should be expected to support that extraordinary claim with hard evidence—for the sake of his reputation, certainly, but more importantly for his own integrity; no one should order his life around a falsehood.

In this post I’d like to begin by defining exactly what the statement “The Bible is God’s Word” claims. No sense in proving something that nobody’s advocating. If we’re going to evaluate the claim, we need to know accurately and precisely what it is.

So does the Bible make any claims about its own nature? If so, what are those claims?

Most conservative Christians have come across the Big Two verses that speak to this question. The first of them is 2 Timothy 3.16, where Paul tells his disciple Timothy that “all scripture is given by inspiration of God” (KJV). The word inspiration translates the Greek word theopneustos, a compound word meaning “God-breathed.” So Paul says that God breathed, or uttered, the Scripture. I’m going to keep things pretty simple here, but if you’d like (a lot) more information on this concept, I’d recommend this article and this book.

The second Big Verse is actually 2 verses, 2 Peter 1.20-21, which I’ll quote here in full:

²⁰Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. ²¹For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.

Three claims to note here:

The human authors were not making this stuff up or just sharing their own opinions.
The human authors were under divine compulsion; the word moved here is the same Greek word used to describe Paul’s Roman ship being driven across the Mediterranean by a powerful storm (Acts 27.15, 17).
The divine compeller was specifically the Holy Spirit.

So the central claim is that God the Holy Spirit breathed out the words of Scripture by compelling the human authors in some way so that they wrote things that originated with Him, not them.

It’s no surprise, then, that Jesus remarks, almost off-handedly, that “the Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10.35).

But the Bible indicates a few further details about its claim. For example, in places the authors are themselves aware that what they’re writing is not coming from their own minds. Most obviously, the Old Testament prophets repeatedly—415 times in the King James Version—preface their words with “Thus saith the LORD.” And Paul says, “This we say unto you by the word of the Lord” (1Th 4.15), while John famously ends the book of Revelation by insisting that not a word of it be modified, on pain of damnation (Rev 22.18-19).

Further, the authors recognize other passages of Scripture as God’s Word. The New Testament authors repeatedly and consistently cite the Old Testament as authoritative (e.g. 1Tim 5.18); but more impressively, Peter refers to Paul’s writings as Scripture (2Pt 3.16), even after receiving a public dressing-down from him (Gal 2.11ff), and Paul quotes the Gospel of Luke as Scripture in parallel with the writings of Moses himself in the Torah (1Tim 5.18). This is all the more significant because the ink on the Gospel of Luke was barely dry when Paul wrote these words, and Luke had been a close traveling companion of Paul. Why is that significant? Well, Paul knew if Luke snored, or had bad breath, or had BO. You’re not likely to think of your close friends as Direct Messengers of the Almighty.

Now, none of this proves that the Bible is God’s Word. Anybody can take a piece of papyrus or parchment and write “Thus saith the Lord,” and that doesn’t make it so. In fact, if anyone we know today did that, we’d think he was ready for psychological intervention.

But these statements do help us define exactly what the claim is, and thus they prepare us to evaluate it. Is there verifiable evidence that the Bible is what it says it is—an extraordinary, supernatural book? If there is, we cannot reject the Bible’s claim without dealing with that evidence. And if there isn’t, we ought to return to sanity.

Next time, we’ll begin reviewing the evidence.

Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Hard Evidence for a Supernatural Book, Part 1: On Being Reasoned About a Crazy Claim

August 7, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

As a conservative Christian, I talk a lot about what the Bible says. Sometimes I even try to settle arguments with it (graciously, of course ????).

There’s a reason for that: conservatives believe that the Bible is the Word of God—that the words in the original languages of the Old and New Testaments are the very words that God spoke through the human authors, through a process called inspiration. In fact, the very first line of the doctrinal statement for the college where I teach is “I believe in the inspiration of the Bible, both the Old and the New Testaments.”

Now, that’s an extraordinary claim—to many minds, extraordinary to the point of ridiculousness, and thus ridicule. It’s perfectly reasonable for someone who hears that claim to respond, “So, you got any evidence for that?” I mean, really. There are Scriptures all over the place. Within the broader Christian tradition, there are the writings of Ellen G. White, and Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” and the Book of Mormon, and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. In the broader religious world, there’s the Qu’ran, the writings of Baha’u’llah, the Sutras, the Vedas, the writings of Haile Selassie, Dianetics, the writings of Swedenborg, and the Divine Principle. And we’re just getting started.

So why should we elevate one, the Bible, over all the others? For that matter, why should we elevate any of them? Can’t we just appreciate them for what they obviously are, the musings of various cultures, ancient and modern, that give us insights into their thinking and even life principles from which we can benefit? Do we have to get all exclusive and mythological and … freakish about it?

That’s not only a legitimate question; it’s one that we must ask. If you think you’re hearing the voice of God, and you aren’t, you’re deeply deluded, perhaps even to the point of psychopathy. And you might even be a danger to society.

But not only should we ask the question; we should demand an answer. It’s not enough to just shrug and say, “Well, that’s just what I’ve always believed.” What laziness. What irresponsibility. What nonsense.

So let’s get serious. Is there evidence—objective, observable, testable, verifiable evidence—that the Bible is extraordinary, and not like other books? And specifically, evidence that calls for alleging a supernatural origin? That’s a tough standard, but it’s a reasonable and even necessary one.

I’m not one to submit to an ancient writing unless there are compelling evidences that I’d be a fool not to. I’d like to spend a few posts sharing how my thinking along these lines has proceeded. My plan is to lay out the next few posts as follows:

What the Bible says about itself—not that that’s proof of anything, but we need to start by determining accurately what is actually being claimed.
Evidence #1 that that claim is worth considering seriously.
An excursus on a matter that evidence #1 raises.
Evidence #2. There’s a lot to discuss here, so this one may take 2 or even 3 posts.

Since my choice of life authority has depended on this issue, I’ve tried to think it through as objectively as possible. I’m going to try to communicate that objectivity as I share these thoughts with you.

I invite you to join me for the investigation. See you in the next post.

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Those Spiritual Gifts Tests? Maybe You Ought to Ignore Them.

August 2, 2017 by Dan Olinger 3 Comments

Since in my last post I raised the issue of spiritual gifts, I’d like to engage in a little iconoclasm here.

Much of what you read in those spiritual gifts books, and in those online tests, is completely made up. It’s folklore, not based in Scripture. Might be true, but might not.

There. I’ve said it.

Now the hard part: I need to back it up.

The Bible lists the spiritual gifts in 4 chapters: Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12 (with a discussion continuing into chapters 13 and 14), Ephesians 4, and 1 Peter 4. The 1 Corinthians chapter contains 3 lists, while each of the others contains just one. 4 chapters, 6 lists, 5 by Paul, 1 by Peter. Here’s a chart that lays them out for comparison.

Some things to notice:

Thing 1: No list is exhaustive; there are blank cells in each list.

So if we combine all the lists, is that list exhaustive? Or, to put it another way, does the Bible name all the spiritual gifts?

The correct answer is “We don’t know.” It’s important to know when you don’t know something. Here’s why.

The Bible clearly states that every believer has at least one spiritual gift (1Cor 12.7, 11). Those online spiritual gifts tests typically assume that you have one of the gifts listed in Scripture; but what if there are other gifts? And what if yours is one of those? You take the test, and, assuming it’s accurate (more on that in a minute), it shows that you have “none of the above.” What’s a believer, particularly a new one, going to conclude?

Must not be saved. Must have done it wrong. Must have not really meant it. Must have …

We can do great spiritual harm when we think the Bible says something that it doesn’t—and when we teach others our unstated assumptions (Jas 3.1).

So are there spiritual gifts that the Bible doesn’t mention?

I don’t know. And neither does anybody else. And we ought to quit acting as though we do.

And if you’ve taken one of those tests, and you’ve scored a Big Fat Zero, freak out thou not.

Thing 2: We don’t even know what some of the gifts are.

Several of the gifts we know a lot about: prophecy, pastor-teacher, speaking in tongues. Lots of biblical information.

Word of wisdom? Not so much. We know what wisdom is—there’s a whole genre on that—but what “word of wisdom” specifically refers to? Nope. It occurs in only 1 list, and it’s not defined there. No mention of it elsewhere in Scripture, no account of someone who had the gift, nothing. Same thing for word of knowledge. And discerning of spirits.

Have you ever noticed that more than half of the listed spiritual gifts—12 of 21, by my count—appear in only 1 list? And that the lists don’t define anything, they just, well, list? How much can we possibly know about those gifts, unless we meet someone in Scripture who is specifically said to have that gift?

So what is discernment of spirits? We don’t know.

Now how are you going to write a test for that? What questions are you going to ask?

Here’s what I think the test authors did. They made up a definition for the gift out of their own heads, and they wrote test questions to identify those traits.

Fair enough.

But let’s not pretend that’s what the Bible teaches.

Are the tests helpful? Well, they might be. For certain gifts. If you have them.

But I wouldn’t take them very seriously on matters where they don’t have any biblical backup.

Thing 3: If we don’t know what some of the gifts are, is it possible that we don’t need to know for sure what our gift is?

Nowhere in the Scripture are we told how to identify our gifts. For that matter, nowhere in the Scripture are we warned to distinguish between spiritual gifts and natural abilities. Even though The Folklore seems to think that’s very important, God doesn’t seem to care at all.

If my gift is discerning of spirits, and I don’t know what that phrase means, how will I know I have that gift?

I suspect that a lot of Christians take those gifts tests for the same reason some people read horoscopes.

Oh, I’m a Virgo? Cool! I understand myself so much better now!

Oh, my gift is mercy? So that’s why I cry so much!

Your spiritual gift is not about you. In fact, you’re the only person in the world that your gift is not for. It’s for everybody else.

Here’s my Official Biblical Spiritual Gifts Test:

What can you do?
Do it for Jesus.
For the glory of God’s name and the edification of his people.

There.

That won’t sell a lot of books or generate a lot of web traffic to my gifts test site, but it’ll make a huge difference for God’s people, if we’ll just do it.