Ronald F. Satta
Список книг автора Ronald F. SattaTrue and Reasonable
In the Bible, faith is contrasted with sight, not with reason. The apostle Paul consistently reasoned with his listeners, persuading them regarding the truth of his message, establishing a precedent for Christian apologetics (Acts 17:17, 18:4, and 18:19). He did so because the Christian faith is reasonable.
This defense begins with arguments in favor of theism: a finite universe, physical laws hospitable to life, and the origin and complexity of life. These factors suggest the existence of a brilliant and powerful creator who designed the universe, our world, and us.
But is it possible to know the designer? Yes. The next section deals with the authority of Scripture, and more exactly with why the Bible is superior to every other source, legitimizing its claim to divine origin. Several key prophetic passages are analyzed, including Isaiah 53 and Daniel 9. Since it is humanly impossible to accurately forecast the future with specificity, the fact that Scripture consistently does so indicates that it is a special composition whose message about the designer should be carefully considered.
From the authority of the Bible, the work turns to the person of Jesus Christ. He alone fulfills the prophecies of Isaiah, Daniel, and the other prophets. Moreover, the cohesive message of the apostles-the primary sources-following the crucifixion, even under considerable duress, further testifies to the reality of the bodily resurrection of Jesus. When these factors are combined, the Christian faith is endorsed by considerable philosophical, scientific, historical, and biblical evidence, making its truth claims quite probable, intellectually satisfying, and entirely reasonable.
The Sacred Text
The advances of geologic science, Darwinism, theological liberalism, and higher textual criticism converged in the nineteenth century to present an imposing challenge to biblical authority. The meteoric rise in secular knowledge exerted tremendous pressure on the Protestant theological elite of the time. Their ruminations, conversations, quarrels, and convictions offer penetrating insight into their world–into their perspective on Scripture and authority and how their outlook was challenged, defended, and sometimes changed across time. Moreover, the nineteenth-century imbroglios greatly illuminate a recent controversy over biblical authority. Some influential modern scholars of American religion contend that the doctrine of the inerrancy of the original autographs is a recently contrived theory, a theological aberration decidedly out of concert with mainline orthodoxy since the Reformation. They argue that pressure from biblical critics incited late nineteenth-century Princeton theologians to fabricate the notion as a way to quell criticism against Scripture. American fundamentalists, they insist, unwittingly adopted inerrancy as orthodoxy, being deceived by this innovation. This story has become standard scholarly currency in many quarters. However, The Sacred Text indicates that fundamentalists and conservative Protestants more generally are the standard-bearers of the ascendant theory of biblical authority commonly endorsed among many of the leading Protestant elite in nineteenth-century America.
A Survey of the Bible
Among books, the Bible is unique. Compiled over a time period spanning some 1600 years, it includes contributions from over forty different writers. Yet it has a unified message and a clear theme–redemption through sacrifice, and most especially redemption through the sacrifice of the Christ, the Messiah, the Promised One from God.
This coherence across time and space is the product of a single, unseen author–the Holy Spirit. Using the personality and style of each of the different sacred penmen, the Spirit so guided their work as to produce documents that expressed the divine mind precisely. Thus the Scripture, in the original autographs, was entirely without error in everything to which it spoke whether pertaining to matters of faith or fact–right down to the very words.
However, this amazing book–God's message to the human race–remains rather mysterious and even inaccessible to many Christians. I hope that these summaries will help interested students of the Bible acquire a clearer and more comprehensive understanding of the sixty-six canonical books of sacred Scripture, making their own Bible study more productive and meaningful.