Healthy plants have deep roots and strong pillars have solid foundations. If we are to be Christians who are deeply rooted in Christ and built on the solid Rock, then we need more than mere sound bites. One means that the Lord has used throughout church history to strengthen His people’s faith and witness is reading good books. This book review series is identifying books that can serve as shovels that help you dig deeper in your Christian life.
Book: Surviving Religion 101 – Letters to a Christian Student on Keeping the Faith in College - Michael J. Kruger
Charles Hodge – “The best evidence of the Bible’s being the word of God is to be found between its covers. It proves itself.”
As we engage in conversations on a variety of topics – salvation, morality, church, abortion and so on – our views ought to be drawn directly from the Bible. Thus, whether we are correct depends on whether the Bible is correct. So, everything always boils down to the same question: Can the Bible really be trusted?
The next few letters will address this foundational issue. Normally these discussions begin by dumping a pile of data on us. While there is an essential place for historical evidences (as we’ll see in later letters), they don’t always have the intended effect. It can overwhelm us making us wonder if we have to be intellectual heavyweights to really know if the Bible is God’s Word. Is the average Christian in the dark about the truth of God’s Word until she masters all the historical data? In Chapter 10 of Surviving Religion 101, Michael Kruger helps us see that God has provided another, more accessible way for the truth of His word to be known.
1) God Has Spoken Somewhere
For an atheist or materialist, the idea of God revealing Himself in a book might seem like a crazy idea. But once again we need to understand the role that our worldview plays in this. In the Christian worldview, it makes a lot of sense why God would reveal Himself in a book and this has everything to do with the distinctness of the Christian God.
Despite the claim that all gods are the same, the God of Christianity is notably different. One way to get at this is to say that He is a personal absolute. By absolute we mean He is the transcendent, all-powerful Creator and Sustainer of all things, who is self-existent and self-sufficient. But He is also personal, meaning He is a living Being who relates to His creation. He loves, He saves, He judges, He shows compassion, He blesses, He curses – all of which is revealed in His personal, covenantal name LORD that He disclosed to Moses at the burning bush (Ex. 3:14-15; 33:19; 34:6-7).
Out of all the world religions, only God as He is perceived by Judaism, Christianity and Islam could reasonably be considered a personal absolute. But even here the Christian God is utterly distinct as He is Triune. God the Father has eternally delighted in His only begotten Son through the Spirit (John 3:35; 17:24). This means it is of the true God’s nature to be relational. Further, the Triune God is the eternally speaking God. The Father has always had His eternal Word radiating forth from Him (John 1:1-2; Heb 1:3).
Our view of God matters because from a Christian worldview we have very good reason to think that God would speak to His people. For this relational Triune God to make creatures as relational beings in His image and then not speak to them would be most surprising!
2) The Pen Is Mightier
So, if God were to speak, how would He do it? Again, the answer depends on a person’s worldview. In the West, we have a profoundly individualistic worldview and so we expect God to speak to each person privately. But the God of Christianity typically operates corporately (Rom 3:2). From a Christian worldview, we would expect God to deliver His Word in a way that was publicly accessible to all His people – including His future people. And we can be thankful for this, because “God told us” is more reliable than a private revelation of “God told me.”
There is one medium of revelation that allows for both public accessibility and long-term preservation: the written word. This means that it makes perfect sense – given what we know about the Triune God – to think that He would not only speak but that He would preserve His words in a public, permanent manner. In other words, we have good reason to expect that God would have left us written records.
3) Hearing God’s Voice
When it comes to identifying the writings of a human author, you take what you know about him – his style, tendencies, personal characteristics – and look for those qualities in the text. This is the same mechanism by which we can know a book is authored by the divine Author. God’s qualities should be evident in God’s book.
There are three divine qualities that we can highlight – beauty, power and unity. God’s word is beautiful, meaning it reflects the excellencies of God Himself (Ps 19:7). It is also powerful, harnessing divine power to do things in the life of the believer, such as bring wisdom, joy, hope and peace (Heb. 4:12). Above all this, the word is unified with itself, telling the same story of redemption from start to finish (Tit. 1:2).
In regard to unity, people often overlook what a remarkable book the Bible is. It was written by more than forty different authors, over more than a thousand years, in various geographical locations, within vastly diverse cultural contexts, and in different languages. Yet, the authors not only agree on a wide variety of complex doctrinal issues – salvation, eternal life, the nature of God, the person of Christ, and so forth – but join together to tell the same overarching story of redemption in Jesus Christ from cover to cover. Are we to believe that these authors just randomly came together to weave a single, harmonious tapestry? No, this is the sort of quality we would expect from a book that had a divine author.
Here’s the point: we come to trust the Bible because we recognize a divine voice in it – the voice of our God. To use the biblical illustration – the sheep recognize the voice of their shepherd and follow Him (Jn. 10:27). It is worth noting that most Christians, even the highly intellectual Christians, have come to believe that the Bible is the word of God, not by analyzing piles of historical evidence, but simply by reading the Bible and recognizing that God is speaking there!
4) Isn’t this Too Subjective?
Now, the skeptic will argue that all this seems very subjective: “Of course, you Christians claim to find divine qualities in the Bible. But when I read the Bible, I don’t see beauty or harmony. If these qualities are really there, then why doesn’t everyone see them?”
But this objection misses the point. The Christian claim is that these are spiritual qualities that require the help of the Holy Spirit to recognize. Only the Shepherd’s sheep recognize His voice. Due to the effects of sin, the non-Christian is not able to see and understand spiritual realities (1 Cor. 2:14). To change the illustration, non-Christians are those who are spiritually tone-deaf. They listen to the Bible, and it sounds off-key to them. They assume the problem is with the Bible, when in reality the problem is with their hearing (Mk. 4:9). They need their ears fixed (by the Spirit) so they can hear the music as it should be heard.
This means coming to believe that the Bible is the word of God is a supernatural affair. The divine qualities are objectively present in scripture, but we need the help of the Holy Spirit to see them properly. Left to ourselves, we are like a blind man denying the existence of the dazzling sun.
5) But What If I’m Wrong?
What if we think we recognize God’s voice and are mistaken? First, we can look at the long history of God’s people and ask which books they have recognized as bearing the voice of their Lord. If we think we recognize God’s voice in certain books, and it turns out we are the only ones in the history of the church who have done so, then that might (rightly) make us doubt our own spiritual hearing. But thankfully, there is a deep, wide, and long unanimity among God’s people over the books of the Bible. In the first century, when the earliest Christian writers (like the apostle Paul) cited books as Scripture, they always cited books that are included in our current Old Testament. The church quickly coalesced around the same twenty-seven books that we have now – so there has been a unity that has lasted nearly two thousand years.
Of course, we must take into account the opinion of the most important person, Jesus Christ. Even non-Christians should give His opinion its due weight given His incredible moral teaching, and unprecedented impact on the history of the world. Jesus quoted extensively from the Old Testament and regarded these books as divinely given by God (Mt. 5:18; Jn. 10:35). Moreover, He viewed His words as equally authoritative as Scripture, laying the foundation for the New Testament (Lk. 24:44; Jn. 5:39).
Second, we can explore the historical credentials asking if there is evidence for their reliability. A book isn’t inspired simply because it is historically reliable; but we would expect an inspired book to be historically reliable, because God is the God of truth. We will explore this more in future letters, but for now, we can acknowledge that under the most severe criticism, the Bible has stood the test of time.
Conclusion: There is nothing more foundational and central to your health as a Christian than maintaining a deep and abiding trust in the truth of God’s Word. While you don’t have an answer to every question or the time to sift all the historical evidence, yet by the Spirit’s grace you can firmly believe with Jesus that the Bible is the voice of the Heavenly Father (Mt 4:4; 5:18).
Surviving Religion 101 – Letters to a Christian Student on Keeping the Faith in College by Michael J. Kruger. Published by Crossway, Wheaton, Illinois, 2021. Softcover, 262 pages.