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Helpful answers to difficult questions

You need to know that having questions and doubts doesn’t make you a bad person or a bad Christian, and God is certainly not disappointed with you, according to Jonathan Morrow in his book Questioning the Bible: 11 Major Challenges to the Bible’s Authority. But you also don’t want to let those doubts just sit there, because when doubts go unaddressed they inevitably steal the vitality of our faith.

The book addresses a number of important questions, including:

  • What can we really know about Jesus?
  • How do we know what the earliest Christians believed?
  • Has the Biblical text been corrupted over the centuries?
  • Is the Bible unscientific?
  • Is the Bible sexist, racist, homophobic and genocidal?

In my opinion, most of the questions are answered quite well, in a persuasive and even-handed manner. On the other hand, I think that the author’s arguments on slavery are weak, his first point being that “Christianity did not invent slavery”. In fact, the Bible is from end-to-end an anti-slavery manifesto, with the Old Testament describing the escape from slavery in Egypt and the New Testament describing the escape from slavery to sin.

Similarly the author’s argument that the Old Testament slaughter of Canaanites was about idolatry rather than ethnic cleansing does not, in my view, properly address the question. A Christian understanding of the Old Testament requires that it be interpreted in the light of the New Testament, and Jesus’s commands to love our enemies, to do good to those who persecute us, and not to resist an evil person but to turn the other cheek. A proper interpretation of Old Testament passages apparently condoning violence needs to involve a discussion of Jesus’s position on violence.

Notwithstanding these issues, most Christians will find in this book some very helpful answers to some difficult questions.