A few years ago, I was killing time at Barnes and Nobel here in Temecula, and saw this book in the bestselling section: “Misquoting Jesus: The Story of Who Changed the Bible and Why” by Bart Ehrman, professor of Religious Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. I thought, “really, a best seller.” I sat down with it and read the first few chapters. Ehrman eloquently and persuasively explains that early manuscripts of the New Testament is riddled with holes and cannot be trusted because it contains, not one or two, but between 200,000 and 400,000 inconsistencies and errors. The former evangelical, who graduated from Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College, now calls himself “a happy agnostic.” As I turned the pages, my faith in everything I knew about the Bible was slowly crumbling. I knew about a few textual variants: John 8 and the ending to Mark came quickly to mind, but this claim of 400,000! I didn’t even think there were that many words in the whole N.T. (there aren’t by the way).
I don’t know that I ever really recovered my complete faith in Biblical inerrancy until the other day. I stumbled across an interesting quote in a book I was reading “The Case for the Real Jesus” by Lee Stroble. The quote was from Daniel Wallace, a professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary,and a highly respected Biblical Scholar. The topic was why do so many believers have their faith shaken every time some new attack on the Bible comes along. Pick any one of this recent bestsellers: The Da Vinci Code, Holy Blood Holy Grail, Misquoting Jesus, The Jesus Tomb, etc. Dr. Wallace had just finished defending these claims (I won’t tell you how, you’ll just have to read the book).
Dr. Wallace then says the quote that caught my attention. “I have been saying for some time that I don’t think the Evangelical church has fifty years of life left to it until it repents.”
This isn’t some wacko agnostic religious professor at NYU or some state school in California. This is a leading evangelical scholar. He has given his life to the evangelical church. And now, he is giving it a somber death sentence.
I’m guessing your question is the same as mine “Repent, for what?” Says Dr. Wallace, “We need to quit marginalizing scripture. We can’t treat the Bible with kid glove. We really need to wrestle with the issues, because our faith depends on it. And second, we need to quit turning Jesus into our buddy. He is the sovereign Lord of the universe, and we need to understand that and respond accordingly.”
He’s right, and we all know it. There are so many uninformed Christians out there who couldn’t really defend their faith from hard questions, me being one of them! Part of it may be fear. We think the Gospel cannot stand up to modern critique, that the Bible, out-dated as it is, is simply no match when pitted against big modern words like carbon 14 and evolution. We fear that everything we base our life on crumbles away when placed under closer examination. So instead of investigating these claims ourselves, we turn away and run from the challenge. I guess it’s just easier to have blind faith.
So what am I to do? What are we, as a Church (with a big C or small c) to do? Now I know we can’t all go back to school and become New Testament scholar, but I suppose it starts with digging into the word. Getting familiar with word, and hiding it in your heart (Psalm 119:11)
I mean, if we really believe the Bible is wholly inspired by God, and is what we base our life on, shouldn’t we (I) be more interested in knowing it inside and out.Some might say that this approach is a little to “religious.” Is it? All I know is I love the Church. I truly love the people. And I would hate to have to explain to my grandkids the reason why the Church has lost all relevancy to our world:Laziness. Thoughts??