With so many contradictory renditions of the biblical text, the public has lost confidence that we can actually know what the Bible says. It is an easy step from this skepticism to an indifference about what the Bible says.
The reason you don't like the Bible, you old sinner, is because it knows all about you.
The task of all Christian scholarship—not just biblical studies—is to study reality as a manifestation of God’s glory, to speak and write about it with accuracy, and to savor the beauty of God in it, and to make it serve the good of man. It is an abdication of scholarship when Christians do academic work with little reference to God. If all the universe and everything in it exist by the design of an infinite, personal God, to make his manifold glory known and loved, then to treat any subject without reference to God’s glory is not scholarship but insurrection.
Why is it that Christian activists are regularly pilloried for basing social standards on biblical texts while liberals are actually praised for mixing religion and politics?
From arts, to literature, to science, to the founding of Christian institutions, all of that has its roots in a biblical worldview, but when you fail to recognize that it's the systemic reality of the greatest civilization in the history of humanity, you can become apathetic about what you actually now have. We have something that generations of people did not have.
The Biblical vision is not so much concerned with life after death but about life after life after death.
The concept of downsizing so that others might upgrade is biblical, beautiful. . . and nearly unheard of. We either close the gap or don't take the words of the Bible literally.
Faithfully disciplining (training, educating, correcting) your child in a manner that pleases the Lord is an expression of biblical love. It also is a step of obedience for you as a parent and provides godly direction for your child.
A case can certainly be made that Christians bear a major responsibility for our ecological crisis. But the fault is not their biblical but their unbiblical view of nature. Christians have long failed to understand what the Bible really teaches concerning nature and our responsibility for it. For this there is no excuse. Repentance must be our first response. Our second response must then be to right the wrongs of our faulty understanding and act accordingly. We are all responsible to know what can be known of God's will for nature, and we are then responsible to act on that knowledge.
If one takes a public stand against, say, most any sin you can think of, one is considered "courageous" and a "defender of the faith. " Folks will quickly applaud you and tell you how much they admire you for "taking a stand" on biblical truth. Except if you quote Matt. 5:44 and invite people to apply it in any sort of meaningful, literal way. The moment one begins to talk about loving your enemies they all of a sudden become "liberals," "extremists," or are accused of completely taking an otherwise straight forward passage "out of context.
To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries
The church must seek to be biblical rather than relevant. We are not going to leave a mark upon our culture because we have studied its ways and adapted ourselves to it. We are relevant when we reject the world outright and are its polar opposite! This present darkness provides a great opportunity for the church to be the salt of the earth, but if we mix with the very impurities we are supposed to expose. . . we are as useless as our culture already believes us to be.
It has been said that in order to pursue the history of Biblical interpretation, you must include the whole philosophy of the West, which informs it at every stage.
I think a lot of people, even Christians, are willing to be satisfied with gaining lots and lots of biblical knowledge - and many people go to Bible studies and don't realize it isn't enough to know what's right, it's applying the information and the knowledge that you have.
It came to me more as a whisper of suggestion than the fundamental adage that it is - if this is not biblical, I shall always believe it should be - that all of us need someone who loves us enough to forgive us despite the history.
The problem is, even when we preach the Gospel correctly, then we go to this thing on how to invite men and it's not biblical or historical. We get them to jump through some evangelical hoops and say, "yes" to the appropriate questions and we pope-ishly announce them to be saved.
We, including many Christians, read the Bible through "eyes" conditioned by, and even accommodated to, modern Western culture plus the influences of messages and ideas from other cultures that are alien to the worldview of the biblical writers. Therefore, in order fully to understand the Bible and allow the Bible to absorb the world (rather than the world - culture - absorb the Bible) we must practice an "archaeology" of the biblical writers' implicit, assumed view of reality.
What we are left with then is the present, the only time where miracles happen. We place the past and the future as well into the hands of God. The biblical statement that “time shall be no more” means that we will one day live fully in the present, without obsessing about past or future.
The measure of biblical truth that we have grasped is not determined by the size of our heads, but the breadth of our hearts.
There are more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible than in any profane history.