Firm Foundation (part 1)

            Recently I was having a conversation with a couple of Jehovah’s witnesses. Though they and I obviously disagreed on many vital issues, we were agreeing with one another about the centrality and authority of God’s Word, which we both agreed was the Bible. They spoke of relatives who doubted them on this point, and how they did not understand how someone could doubt that God spoke through the Bible, and that the Bible was complete and sufficient. Having affirmed this, I began to show them from the scripture that many of their organizations teachings were false, and to demonstrate the true Jesus and the true gospel of the Bible. They disputed within the scripture for a while, but once the weight of the evidence became clear that the Bible taught something very different than what they believed, they blurted out, “but the Bible was written by Men! They could have gotten this stuff wrong!” Now, I am NOT saying that every Jehovah’s Witness would say this when pressed. That is not my point. My point is that, though they claimed, and probably believed, that they had scripture as their foundation of truth, when push came to shove, and the Bible contradicted their beliefs, these two individuals found fault not in their belief, but in the Bible. They had always USED the Bible to support their position, but clearly the Bible was NOT the foundation. It was not the REASON they believed what they did, since even when they found the Bible to disagree with them, they clung to the belief, not the scripture. They “knew” the belief they had was “correct” whether the Bible agreed with it or not! Obviously, that belief was founded on something else. Something else was the ultimate authority. Something else was the real source of spiritual truth. Until that moment, they did not even KNOW that the Bible was not their real foundation, and when I pointed this out, they were ashamed...but none the less they still would not believe what the Bible said was true.


            In my last post, I wrote about the inadequacies of spiritual experience as the foundation for truth. This is, of course, not to say that spiritual experience does not happen. Spiritual experiences are often very real and very powerful, and when it is truly from God, can be very affirming of Biblical truth. The question is, what happens when the experience and the Bible don’t match? Do you reinterpret the Bible in light of what you have experienced, or do you reinterpret what it was that you experienced in light of what is taught in the Bible? There are many foundations that people rely upon for religious truth. Tradition, religious authority figures, philosophy, nature. These things are not evil, and all have their place in the Christian life, but none of them is an adequate foundation on which we can know divine truth. Only the Bible provides a consistent and reliable source from which we can truly know who God is and what He desires. It is the sole foundation of Christian faith.


            Saying that, however, obviously requires me to answer a key question. If I don’t believe the Bible because of experience, or philosophy, or because a religious authority figure affirms its validity, or some other deeper foundation, how, then, DO I know that the Bible is true? If it is indeed the foundation of Christian truth, how do I know that? That is what I intend to explain over my next few posts.

Now, if I jumped immediately into listing evidences for the Bible’s accuracy, I would actually be defeating my real point. If one believes in the Bible simply because it can be supported by facts, reason, and experience (which it can), I would then be saying that those facts, those arguments of reason, and those experiences are the foundation on which the truth of the Bible rests. I would be claiming that the Bible is as true as anything else proven by those same tests, and thus the TEST (Evidence, reason, experience, etc) is the real foundation of truth. But if it is true what the Bible claims about itself in 2 Timothy 3:16, that scripture is actually “breathed from God”, then scripture is not subject to human tests of truth (unless we believe that God might be wrong!) but rather it IS the test of truth, which is Paul’s entire point when he writes this verse. The Bible does not just claim to be true, it also claims to be the test of truth, and it is so because of who it came from. Now, if I stopped here, my reasoning would be painfully circular (the Bible is true because the Bible says it is true). It is, however, important to START with this basic understanding. The Bible is true because it is the Word of God. Its source of truth is nothing less than the Author of Truth. It is not true BECAUSE archeology confirms it, Archeology confirms it BECAUSE it is true! It is not true BECAUSE it has changed so many lives, it has changed so many lives BECAUSE it is true. Charles Spurgeon put it well when he said, “Scripture is like a lion. Who ever heard of defending a lion? Just turn it loose; it will defend itself.” I could also borrow from the reasoning of C.S. Lewis here and say that I believe the Bible “as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” (Lewis was, of course, speaking of Christianity in general, but I believe his logic applies well to the truth of the Christian Scriptures specifically). The evidence of the Bible is plentiful, but it is important that we see the truth of the Bible as the reason for the evidence, never the other way around.

Of course, the idea that truth has been revealed by God in a form than can be understood and reliably passed down from one generation to the next and from one place to another (i.e. the written word) is not unique to the Christian Bible. There are other religious texts that make this kind of a claim. Even if we assume God has done this, why assume that the Bible is the right one? This is a very fair question, and one I will be coming back to throughout this series of posts to really drive home the uniqueness of the Bible in this regard. But It is also important to note that an examination of all major religious texts demonstrates that, if one does assume that God has revealed his will to man in this reasonable and tangible fashion, then it MUST be that the Bible is such a revelation. The Holy texts of the eastern religions, such as the Hindu Vedas or the Pali Cannon of Buddhism, don’t claim this kind of divine origin (nor could they in their pantheistic world view). The Pali Cannon, for example, is supposedly a collection of the teachings of Buddha and some of his more enlightened students, but it claims only to be the wisdom of a very enlightened man. Buddha would have adamantly denied that he received this information from a divine being. It was what he learned from his own spiritual journey. The same is true of the Taoist texts of China. These are “scriptures” in the vague sense of being revered writings of major religions, but they do not claim to be at all the same sort of revelation or communication of absolute truth from God that the Bible claims to be. Most ancient religious texts in the west may claim to be telling ABOUT gods revealing things, but they do not go so far as to claim to BE divine revelation. They claim to be writings of men who witnessed events of a spiritual nature and wrote about them. There are, however, a few other texts that DO claim to be revealed by God, and to be his very word. Interestingly, each of these (such as the Quran or The Book of Mormon) claims that the Bible is also Divine revelation. So even if you assumed that these other texts WERE “God Breathed” they would leave you having to deal with the Bible being such as well. People of such religions typically deal with this by claiming that the Bible WAS truly God’s word, but has since been corrupted, and that what truth does remain in it is misinterpreted by Christians anyway. These objections will be dealt with in later posts, but it is sufficient to say at this point that if there is any scripture at all, then the Bible is indeed scripture.

           So, having hopefully set the stage, let’s look at the assurance we can have that God has given us a firm foundation for truth in the enduring and inspired collection of written documents that we know of as “The Bible.” In my next post we will look at Scripture and the world of Archeology and Historical Studies as it relates to Biblical reliability.


- Luke