The authority of the Bible is based on the fact that it is the written Word of God.—R.C. Sproul
NOTICE: The following
article is written by the author itself and not by me, I am not trying to
violate their copyright. I will give some information on them.
PAGE TITLE: http://www.ligonier.org/
ARTICLE
TITLE:
How do we know if the Bible is true?
DATE: May 9, 2016
AUTHOR: R.C Sproul
AUTHOR
INFORMATION: Robert Charles Sproul (born February 13,
1939) is an American Calvinist theologian, author, and pastor. He is the
founder and chairman of Ligonier Ministries (named after the Ligonier
Valley just outside of Pittsburgh, where the ministry started as a study center
for college and seminary students) and can be heard daily on the Renewing
Your Mind radio broadcast in the United States and internationally.
"Renewing Your Mind with Dr. R.C. Sproul" is also broadcast on Sirius
and XM satellite radio. In late July 2012, a new Christian internet radio
station called RefNet (Reformation Network) was also
announced by Ligonier Ministries in an effort to reach "as many people as
possible" where Internet access is available.
Ligonier Ministries hosts several theological
conferences each year, including the main conference held each year in Orlando,
FL, at which Sproul is one of the primary speakers.
Sproul was a passenger on the Amtrak train
that derailed in the 1993 Big Bayou Canot train wreck and often gives firsthand
accounts of the story.
That’s
an excellent question because so much is at stake in the Christian faith in
terms of the truthfulness of Scripture. The Bible is our primary source of
information about Jesus and about all of those things we embrace as elements of
our faith. Of course, if the Bible isn’t true, then professing Christians are
in serious trouble. I believe the Bible is true. I believe it is the Word of
God. As Jesus Himself declared of the Scripture, “Your word is truth.” But why am I
persuaded that the Bible is the truth?
We
need to ask a broader question first. How do we know that anything is true?
We’re asking a technical question in epistemology. How do we test claims of
truth? There is a certain kind of truth that we test through observation,
experimentation, eyewitness, examination, and scientific evidence. As far as
the history of Jesus is concerned, as far as we know any history, we want to
check the stories of Scripture using those means by which historical evidence
can be tested—through archaeology, for example. There are certain elements of
the Scripture, such as historical claims, that are to be measured by the common
standards of historiography. I invite people to do that—to check it out.
Second,
we want to test the claims of truth through the test of rationality. Is it
logically consistent, or does it speak with a “forked tongue”? We examine the
content of Scripture to see if it is coherent. That’s another test of truth.
One of the most astonishing things, of course, is that the Bible has literally
thousands of testable historical prophecies, cases in which events were clearly
foretold, and both the foretelling and the fulfillment are a matter of
historical record. The very dimension of the sheer fulfillment of prophecy of
the Old Testament Scriptures should be enough to convince anyone that we are
dealing with a supernatural piece of literature.
Of
course, some theologians have said that with all of the evidence there is that
Scripture is true, we can truly embrace it only with the Holy Spirit working in
us to overcome our biases and prejudices against Scripture, against God. In
theology, this is called the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit. I want to
stress at this point that when the Holy Spirit helps me to see the truth of
Scripture and to embrace the truth of Scripture, it’s not because the Holy
Spirit is giving me some special insight that he doesn’t give to somebody else
or is giving me special information that nobody else can have. All the Holy
Spirit does is change my heart, change my disposition toward the evidence that
is already there. I think that God Himself has planted within the Scriptures an
internal consistency that bears witness that this is His Word.
No comments:
Post a Comment