Dr. Michael S. Heiser: Can We Actually TRUST The Bible?

All scripture is inspired. It’s from God. It ultimately originates with God.

And I’m going to present a providential model of inspiration to you.

But not every portion of scripture utters a truth proposition. In other words, a point that the writer and God wants you to believe and not deny.

The superscriptions on the cross in the four Gospels — none of them are identical. Okay?

Now let me put on my antagonistic professor hat for a moment.

“Well, you’d think if the Spirit of God was producing this stuff that He could have gotten at least this right.”

Just before I jump into our subject here, it’s really important to be oriented to the text of scripture.

Part of my own heritage was that I grew up as a believer. I became a Christian when I was a teenager.

Some of you have probably heard parts of my testimony in different interviews and whatnot.

I knew nothing when I first really understood the Gospel. I was sort of brought under the wing of this particular church in my hometown, and they took scripture seriously.

I was talking to your pastor just before this morning. This is the third Calvary Chapel church I’ve been in. I’ve talked to maybe half a dozen Calvary Chapel pastors, and I always ask them, “Why do Calvary Chapel churches grow?”

And it was sort of a trivia question at the beginning, but it’s more intentional now.

The answer is always, “Well, we actually go through scripture verse by verse.”

And I used to think that was a gimmick answer because I grew up with that.

I thought, “Well, what else happens in church?”

And I’ve come to realize now — I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming toward the conclusion — that that isn’t what happens in most churches, even most evangelical churches. So it’s actually a meaningful answer.

I don’t want to dismiss my own background.

In some ways, I’m living off the capital of the original investment that was put in me by the pastors of the church I went to and grew up in.

But what often happens is you get trained not to pay attention so much to the text as you are trained to think about the text through the filter that you either are given or that you kind of pick up along the way.

And that was me.

I loved the Bible. I loved anything old and strange.

I’m very open about being one-dimensional. I was a geek.

I remember the day — this will tell you how dumb I was — I was close to graduation from high school and didn’t know what to do.

I remember the day I discovered that people paid my pastor. Like, he got paid to teach the Bible.

I didn’t know that.

You ask, “Well, how did you think he bought groceries?”

I never thought about it.

It was like, “Wow. You mean people actually pay?”

Well, not very much, but it’s like, “You’ve got to be kidding. I could actually do this and get paid for it?”

So I figured this is what I want to do.

I want to be a professor or something like that.

Again, I was the geek. I figured I’m going to have to go get a PhD and all this kind of stuff. So I knew that.

But you go through the training that I had gone through, and there I am as a doctoral student at Wisconsin.

Again, if you’ve read Unseen Realm or Supernatural, you know what’s coming.

Someone just sort of yanks your chain and says, “You need to look at the text over here.”

And you do.

And it’s like, “How in the world did I not see that before?”

So I’ve had my theology messed with quite a bit.

Providentially, I always had the sense that you’re going to run into people who hate scripture.

Even if they don’t hate scripture, they don’t like what you do with scripture.

They don’t like the fact that you actually believe it.

So they’re going to try to undermine your faith.

In my own decision-making going through graduate school, I intentionally wanted each place I went to to be harder academically and more antagonistic because my attitude was, “Give me your best shot.”

I just felt like when the dust settles, the Bible’s still going to be here because people have been shooting at this thing for a long time.

So it’s like, “Okay. It’s still here. Give me your best shot and we’ll see how that works out.”

Fortunately, providentially, I sort of had that either hardwired into me or built into me.

So when I went to Wisconsin — the Berkeley of the Midwest, as it were — and a believing friend showed me this issue, I understood completely what it’s like to get your cage rattled theologically.

But at the end of the day, it’s your Bible.

Train yourself to pay attention to the text.

That’s really what you should care about.

You shouldn’t care about denominational stuff.

You shouldn’t care about other filters you pick up along the way.

And they can be good filters. They can be really helpful.

I’ve been in a variety of denominational contexts, and I could honestly say all of them were helpful at some point.

But they are not substitutions for the text.

They just aren’t.

And if you’re not being taught to trace what is said through the text, then you’re being undertaught.

Perhaps not mistaught — maybe a little mistaught — but you’re not being shown the best thing.

As I’ve been speaking a lot over the last few years, meeting a lot of people, getting a lot of interaction online, this question comes up all the time.

So in your schedule, this topic is listed as something like “Why We Need a Better View of Inspiration.”

We’re going to talk about the “why” first.

Then I’m going to try to walk you through what I sincerely believe is a better way of looking at inspiration that will address all the problems I’m going to show you this morning.

And it’s just a little smidgen of them.

I have intentionally picked things in this talk that undergrad students — and in some cases even seminary students — will run into in the course of their education.

I used to do this to people in class.

I would tell them, “Look, I would rather have me be the one who rattles your cage because I’m your friend. I’m not here to destroy you.”

“I could destroy you in five minutes. I’m not here to do that.”

“I’m here because I want to have a controlled environment where I can show you the kind of things that your friends in high school who went off to university — this is what they’re getting.”

“This is what they’re being told, and this is how it’s being explained to them, and it’s undermining their confidence in scripture.”

I know that because I went through all that.

I did all that.

So what I want to talk to you about today is something important.

It’s not just pie-in-the-sky theory.

It is current.

You will find this if you spend five minutes on Google looking.

Especially if you go to an organized religion class or Bible class taught by someone who either rejects any sense of inspiration or defines inspiration in such a way that it strips God out of the process.

The Bible becomes something less than supernatural.

So what we’re going to talk about today is important.

There’s a creeping suspicion even among many Christians.

The first time I gave this set of talks, a pastor in Washington asked me to do it because he said:

“In my congregation, there are a lot of people, especially younger people, who just have this sense that the Bible isn’t completely trustworthy because of something they ran into on YouTube, Facebook, social media, a class, whatever.”

So he asked, “Can you talk about that?”

That’s the orientation here.

Here’s what I don’t mean and what I’m not talking about, because frankly this is the easy stuff.

Creation versus evolution.

Jesus mythicism — the idea that Jesus was not a historical person, just a myth.

Claims of other religions.

Militant atheism.

This is the obvious stuff.

This is the stuff already on the radar for someone who takes scripture seriously.

This isn’t going to cause internal turmoil with someone grounded in the faith.

The Jesus mythicist stuff might, because it sort of has this veneer of biblical scholarship.

At least in some cases.

There’s one scholar unfortunately who writes for a popular audience, so it gets out there on social media and sounds bigger than it really is.

But we’re not talking about that stuff.

What I want to talk about is trustworthiness.

Is the Bible reliable and authoritative?

Is it reliable and authoritative for faith and practice?

Those terms come out of 2 Timothy 3:16.

Another way of saying it: are its truth propositions true?

Is what it asks you to believe believable?

In other words, is it coherent?

Is it true?

Now, what kinds of things are you really focusing on then?

Well, there’s stuff that if you actually read the text of scripture closely, you’re going to run into.

You encounter things when you read, and that’s going to affect how this question surfaces in your mind.

“What does that mean?”

“How can this be the case?”

“How do I think about this thing I’ve encountered either in a sermon or in my own reading?”

How we’ve been taught about what the Bible is and how we got the Bible directly affects how we process things we run into.

And this is the problem we have.

As I’ll talk about in the next session, the way we have been taught traditionally about inspiration actually creates problems for the stuff we find in the Bible.

That sounds kind of goofy, I understand that.

But when I show you examples, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

There are things you actually find in the text that do not conform to the way you were traditionally taught about inspiration.

And the moment you realize that, it creates internal conflict.

These are the kinds of things that people who want to undermine confidence in scripture will target.

They’re not obvious.

If they’re not obvious and then someone shows them to you in a university class, it creates the impression:

“Oh, my pastor was hiding that from me.”

“He skipped that.”

“There’s something my parents and pastor didn’t tell me.”

“Why didn’t they want me to know that?”

“Why didn’t they want me to think about that?”

All I have to do as a professor is say exactly that in an audience full of undergrads, and I’ve got half of you already.

Because I’m instilling the hermeneutic of suspicion within you.

It’s not hard to do.

Happens a lot.

I’m going to go through some examples of why this is the case.

Why the way we’ve traditionally been taught about scripture doesn’t work in some places.

And if you see that it doesn’t work, then it creates this “Well, what is the Bible then? How did we get it then?”

Simple.

I’m going to start with two obvious illustrations and then go into less obvious ones.

Ezekiel 1.

You’ve probably read this at least four or five times. I was going to say fifty times.

Yeah, everybody reads the prophets, I know.

Ezekiel 1:1–3:

“In the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month…”

Blah blah blah.

Okay, it’s Ezekiel getting into the material that’s going to be his life and message to the captives in Babylon.

Does anything look odd to you?

Just take a moment and read through the rest of that.

Is there something odd about the wording?

I’ll give you a few more seconds.

Let me go to the next slide.

Is there anything odd about the highlighted portions now?

The colored portions?

What’s the problem?

There’s a switch between first person and third person.

See, we’re taught, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God.”

The word “inspiration” there is theopneustos — God-breathed.

Most evangelicals will not say that means God dictated the words.

The dictation view is kind of passé.

But instead, you’ll read in evangelical theologies lots of things that don’t really mean a whole lot.

For instance — and I don’t want to pick on Erickson because he’s a good guy, a wonderful theologian — but if you read his theology textbooks, he wants to get away from dictation.

Instead of God literally whispering words into ears, he says things like:

“The Holy Spirit impressed upon the writers so strongly what He wanted them to write that all the words are the result of that impression.”

But what does that mean?

What does “intensity of Holy Spirit impression” mean if it doesn’t mean dictation?

And if it does mean dictation — or something close to it — then is the Holy Spirit schizophrenic?

Can’t He make up His mind whether it’s first person or third person?

Is Ezekiel writing Ezekiel?

That sounds like Ezekiel because he’s there among the captives.

He tells you that plenty of other times in the book.

But why is he talking about himself in the third person?

Is he a narcissist?

Is he confused?

Why is he doing this?

The obvious answer is: there was an editor.

And now we’re all transfixed with horror because now we don’t just have biblical writers — we have people editing the stuff biblical writers produced.

So now we have “non-Holy-Spirit” portions of the Bible. Thank you very much.

We’ll put that bullet in the chamber to use on someone at some point.

But when you’re actually arrested by the text, when you actually look at it, it creates questions.

And I’ve got news for you:

If you’re reading your Bible and you don’t have questions, I don’t know what you’re reading.

You’re not reading very closely.

Questions are good.

It’s just your Bible.

There’s no need to put it down and back away slowly.

But again, the way we’re traditionally taught about how we got it makes this uncomfortable.

We’ll come back to that.

Here’s another obvious one: the superscriptions on the cross.

Four Gospels.

None of them are identical.

Now let me put on my antagonistic professor hat for a moment:

“Well, you’d think if the Spirit of God was producing this stuff that He could have gotten at least this right.”

I mean, it’s pretty important. It’s the superscription on the cross.

So either the biblical writers couldn’t get it right, or the Spirit of God couldn’t get it right.

Which is it?

See, I’ve put you in a dilemma because you have to pick one of two things.

And no matter what you pick, it undermines your confidence in whether the biblical text is trustworthy.

The real question is:

Why is it different?

Am I forced to pick between the two alternatives my professor just gave me?

That’s the old either-or fallacy.

And academics are really good at that.

“Either you accept the way I think about it or the way your pastor thought about it.”

Did your pastor ever tell you that?

If he did, did he answer the question as to why they’re all different?

Again, this is a game that is played every day in classrooms, on the internet, on social media.

It never ends.

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Michael Heiser Corrects The Record On “Original Sin”

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