Category: Bible

Believing the Bible: the Old Testament – 1

This is the eleventh in a series of posts on Understanding the Bible in the 21st century. So far, the matters we have been discussing seem, to me at least, to be fairly clear and straightforward. They have been based on clear statements in the Bible (or lack of them) and the clear views of […]

Believing the Bible: the New Testament

This is the tenth in a series of posts on Understanding the Bible in the 21st century. We have seen that the Bible claims to be an authoritative scripture which reveals God. We have also seen that it doesn’t seem to claim to be inerrant or the very words of God himself. So what can […]

Is the Bible inerrant – and does it matter?

This is the ninth in a series of posts on Understanding the Bible in the 21st century. Christians generally believe the Bible, and believe in the Bible, but what should we believe about the Bible? Probably the strongest claim christians make about the Bible is that it is inerrant – it contains no errors. There […]

Word of God?

This is the eighth in a series of posts on Understanding the Bible in the 21st century. We have looked at what Jesus, the Bible and the Bible authors say about the Bible and how they used their scriptures. Now it is time to see what we can conclude about the Bible, and whether some […]

Interpreting the Bible: the story so far

I have looked at six topics so far in this series on Understanding the Bible in the 21st century. Before I move on to draw some conclusions, I want to sum up what I have learnt so far.

A tale of two covenants

This is the sixth in a series of posts on Understanding the Bible in the 21st century. The Bible is divided into two ‘Testaments’. It is obvious that the Old Testament tells about Hebrew history and religion before Jesus, while the New Testament tells about the coming of Jesus and what happened next. But is […]

The Bible as story

This is the fifth post in a series on Interpreting the Bible in the 21st century. People say and write a lot about the Bible. But here is something interesting: the way we write about the Bible is very different from the way the Bible itself is written. Most of the books, newspaper articles and […]

How Jesus and the apostles interpreted the Old Testament

This is the fourth in a series of posts on Understanding the Bible in the 21st century. We have seen that the Bible doesn’t claim as much for itself as some christians do. Now I test these conclusions by examining how Jesus and his apostles treated their Bible – our Old Testament.

What does the Bible say about itself?

This is the third in a series of posts on Understanding the Bible in the 21st century. It is important we begin not with what people say about the Bible, but what it says about itself.

Interpreting the Bible

I have argued (Everyone disbelieves some parts of the Bible) that, while most christians say we follow the Bible as our standard of what to believe and do, in fact all of us make exceptions for certain parts. So how do we decide how to interpret the tricky parts of the Bible?