Faith. Rebuilt
I’ve been a Christian believer for more than 60 years, and through the first 40-50 years, the Old Testament really bothered me. I didn’t know how to understand it. I couldn’t really believe the stories of Adam & Eve and Noah’s Ark were literally factual. I was troubled by a loving God apparently ordering cruel […]
A review of “The Exodus” by Richard Elliott Friedman and “Exodus for Normal People” by Peter Enns. Two books shine light on the truth (and legends) of the exodus of Moses and the Israelites from Egypt. Well worth reading.
A review of “Has Archaeology Buried the Bible?” by William Dever, and an assessment of how this informs a christian understanding of the Old Testament.
A conversation about how it feels to question the Old Testament while continuing to believe in Jesus.
Most christians have been taught to reverence the Bible. This has been especially true of Protestant christianity. The Reformation was built on the doctrine of sola scriptura (by scripture alone). And when conservative christianity felt threatened by evolution, liberal theology and modernist thinking in the 19th century, it developed a statement of “the fundamentals”, one […]
You can find a lot of different views on the internet about the accuracy of Old Testament history and how archaeology does, or doesn’t, support the Old Testament accounts. Minimalist historians, and internet sceptics, will tell you it’s almost all invented myth, while maximalist historians and christian apologists will tell you that archaeology supports the […]
Believing the Bible is what it appears to be rather than what we may want it to be solves a lot of problems.
Disarming Scripture by Derek Flood The Old Testament world was a violent place. For a christian, the most troubling violence is surely that said to be commanded by God, whether it be Abraham being commanded to sacrifice his son and heir Isaac, Joshua commanded to exterminate Canaanites who are unfortunate enough to be living in […]
The exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and their travel to the Promised Land is one of the key events in Jewish religious history, and, therefore, in christian belief as well. But did it actually happen? Did something like 2 million people cross the Red Sea and through the Sinai, aided and guided by miraculous […]
I don’t know about you, but when I read the Old Testament accounts of Joshua and the Israelites invading Canaan, I don’t have any picture of the geography or where the cities were located. The matter is complicated by the fact that many people feel a lot is at stake. Believers generally want to find […]