Scripture Alone...but why?

Tomorrow at church (9:30am) Josh Taylor will be speaking about the Bible, its centrality in our lives and in the Reformation. He has been doing some thinking about it all and I post some of his thoughts about what appears to be a vicious circle in our thinking about the bible:

"One difficulty people have with Christian is that they say you can’t use the Bible as evidence to support the assertion that the Bible is the word of God. “How do we know the Bible is the Word of God? Because the Bible tells us so!”. It seems like a cyclical argument that doesn’t make sense.

The problem comes when we try to find another authority above God, who gets to judge whether the Bible really is God’s Word or not. If God has written it, what higher authority can there be than himself to verify that it comes from him? No-one else gets to put their seal of approval on it. Either God tells us that it really is from him, or we go and worship whatever authority has the final say, because they must be the true god. The buck has to stop somewhere.

That leaves the window open for deceitful people to make their own claims to have the authority of God. So how do we decide if the Bible’s claim to truth is the right one?

We start by not forcing the fact on people. You don’t have to believe that the Bible is the Word of God before you read it. In fact, quite the opposite – it’s as you read it that you become convinced that it is from God.

It’s like this: God says that Jesus is Lord. Where does He say that? In the Bible. If you read the Bible and become convinced that Jesus is Lord, then you’re at the same time affirming that God really did write the Bible.

It’s like 1 Thess 2:13:
‘And we also thank God continually because, when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as it actually is, the word of God, which is at work in you who believe’.

Once you get into the text, you soon see there are a lot of good reasons to believe the Bible’s claims. Historically, the New Testament has been verified by Christian and secular scholars alike. That means it’s not a fairy-tale, but real people recording real events. If that is true, then the things Jesus did, like rising from the dead, gives us unprecedented reason to believe his claims to be from God.

As we hear those facts, and become convinced that Jesus is Lord – then at the same time we are affirmed that those words are actually from God, spoken through men.
Rather than standing outside the Bible, trying to reason why it could or couldn’t possibly be God’s Word – simply read it, and the response you have to its content will decide whether you think it’s from God or not.

There is a lot more evidence for the Bible’s claim to be from God, this just gives us a framework for thinking about it.

What do you think about this approach? Please feel free to comment, there is no doubt further conversation that could be had on this topic."