How do you know the Bible is true?
That's an excellent
question because so much is at stake in the Christian faith in terms of
the truthfulness of Scripture. The Bible is our primary source of
information about Jesus and about all of those things we embrace as
elements of our faith. Of course, if the Bible isn't true, then
professing Christians are in serious trouble. I believe the Bible is
true. I believe it is the Word of God. As Jesus himself declared of the
Scripture, "Your word is truth." But why am I persuaded that the Bible
is the truth?
We need to ask a broader question first. How do we
know that anything is true? We're asking a technical question in
epistemology. How do we test claims of truth? There is a certain kind of
truth that we test through observation, experimentation, eyewitness,
examination, and scientific evidence. As far as the history of Jesus is
concerned, as far as we know any history, we want to check the stories
of Scripture using those means by which historical evidence can be
tested—through archaeology, for example. There are certain elements of
the Scripture, such as historical claims, that are to be measured by the
common standards of historiography. I invite people to do that—to check
it out.
Second, we want to test the claims of truth through the
test of rationality. Is it logically consistent, or does it speak with a
"forked tongue"? We examine the content of Scripture to see if it is
coherent. That's another test of truth. One of the most astonishing
things, of course, is that the Bible has literally thousands of testable
historical prophecies, cases in which events were clearly foretold, and
both the foretelling and the fulfillment are a matter of historical
record. The very dimension of the sheer fulfillment of prophecy of the
Old Testament Scriptures should be enough to convince anyone that we are
dealing with a supernatural piece of literature.
Of course, some
theologians have said that with all of the evidence there is that
Scripture is true, we can truly embrace it only with the Holy Spirit
working in us to overcome our biases and prejudices against Scripture,
against God. In theology, this is called the internal testimony of the
Holy Spirit. I want to stress at this point that when the Holy Spirit
helps me to see the truth of Scripture and to embrace the truth of
Scripture, it's not because the Holy Spirit is giving me some special
insight that he doesn't give to somebody else or is giving me special
information that nobody else can have. All the Holy Spirit does is
change my heart, change my disposition toward the evidence that is
already there. I think that God himself has planted within the
Scriptures an internal consistency that bears witness that this is his
Word.