What are the beliefs held by Campus Crusade about the Bible?

First, let’s define what I mean by “the Bible”.

Let’s look at what Campus Crusade for Christ’s statement of faith says on the issue:

The sole basis of our beliefs is the Bible, God’s infallible written Word, the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments. We believe that it was uniquely, verbally and fully inspired by the Holy Spirit and that it was written without error (inerrant) in the original manuscripts. It is the supreme and final authority in all matters on which it speaks.

Cru believes, along with the Protestant branch of the Christian faith, that the Bible consists of 66 books consisting of the 39 books of the Hebrew Bible (commonly known as the Old Testament) and the 27 books of the New Testament. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox canons include several books that we, in accordance with the Jewish belief and tradition, would not. These books (Esdras, Tobit, Judith, Maccabees, Odes, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach & Baruch) are regarded by many as being profitable to read but are not considered “Scripture” in that they are not believed to have any authority on belief or doctrine. These rejections are most often based on ancient Jewish rejections of them as authoritative.

How much do we trust it?

There’s an ongoing debate within the Church about how far we take the words of the Bible to be true. This is where the words infallible, fully inspired, and inerrant come into play as well as the entire last sentence of the quote from the Statement. We will get into this more in a later post, but here’s the quick run-through.

What does the Bible seem to say about itself?

Psalm 12:6 The words of the Lord are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times.

Proverbs 30:5 Every word of God proves true; He is a shield to those who take refuge in Him.

One of the books that we read a lot when going through our training (initial and ongoing) with Campus Crusade is Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology, a 57-chapter 1291-page tome that covers a huge swath of Christian theology at an admirable depth. In one of the seven chapters on the Bible he defines what we mean by “inerrant”:

The inerrancy of Scripture means that Scripture in the original manuscripts does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact.

Grudem elaborates that the doctrine of infallibility allows for and assumes the following:

1. The Bible uses everyday language and ordinary speech.
   For example, when it talks about the sun “rising” it is speaking in the normal (non-scientific) sense. When it says that Jesus fed 4,000 there may have been 3,956 or 4,103 people, we recognize this to be the case just like when we talk about the 4,000-person snowball fight in Dupont during “snowmageddon”.
2. The Bible uses loose or free quotations as was acceptable in its contemporary literary tradition.
   The definition of “quotation” as word-by-word is a fairly modern and thoroughly Western phenomenon. Ancient Greek and Hebrew had no quotation marks and like many places in the world even today quotes of what someone said need only to accurately convey the content of their remarks. “He said he’ll be home shortly” is consistent with a the subject saying, “I’ll leave for dinner in two minutes.”
3. The Bible uses irregular and uncommon grammar in certain instances.
   The use of plural verbs for singular actors, alternate spellings, feminine adjectives for masculine objects are not unusual in the Bible (especially Revelation). It should not surprise us that these passages could still be truthful, just as someone who speaks with a “backwoods” dialect could still be the most trustworthy person in the world.

“Verbally and fully inspired…”

This simply means that we believe that the whole of the Bible was authored by God, by the power of the Holy Spirit working through human agents who imparted some piece of their own written inflection and perspective without tainting the accounts by error or sin.

Resources

At the end of each post I will attempt to add a list of resources to read or check out if you want to understand more about what I’ve said.

• Campus Crusade’s Statement of Faith
• Systematic Theology
  • Amazon
  • Half.com
  • Wesley Seminary Library
  • Library of Congress
• John Piper (“Ask Pastor John” Podcast) – Is the Bible Without Error?
  • Other “Ask Pastor John” episodes about the Bible
• Wikipedia Articles
  • The Biblical Canon
  • Books of the Bible
    • Tobit
    • Judith
    • Esdras
    • 1, 2, 3, 4 Maccabees
    • Odes
    • Baruch
  • Biblical Inspiration
  • Systematic Theologies

This past Wednesday DC Cru held one of our “large group” events and discussed the authority and reliability of the Bible. As a part of it we opened the door to have people ask questions about it, but we were not able to address them in a complete manner, nor were we able to answer all of them. I want to write a series of emails to accompany Wednesday’s discussions, I’ll post them on the DC Cru Blog as well as the Facebook group and fan page.

Before I attempt to address the questions, I want to finish “collecting” the questions that are really being posed.

Here is the list that I’m planning on working from, please comment at the end of the post and add any that you are wondering about.

• What are the different Christian views on the nature of the Bible? What does inerrancy and infallibility mean? Is the Bible only reliable when it talks about spiritual matters or is it also correct when it addresses history & science?
• How was the Bible written? What interaction did God and the human authors have that produced these texts?
• How did we get the Canon? What determined which books made the list and which did not? What happened to the books that were not determined to be part of the Canon?
• How have we gotten the Bible that we read today? What has been the process of translation over the centuries? How do we know that our translations are really what the original authors wrote?
• What are the main themes of the Bible? What is the main point?
• What is in the Bible? How should I read it? Where should I start? What background information should I keep in mind as I read?
• What about the really crazy stuff and the stuff that doesn’t seem to match up with Jesus? Genocide? Man-eating and man-puking fish?
• What about when [INSERT NAME HERE] did that thing that seems to be totally evil? How can the Bible possibly say that that was a good thing?

Does that seem like I covered the range of questions? What else do you want to ask? Are there subpoints of that list that you’d like to add? On Monday I’ll start to post some responses to these questions.

I just posted this over at my own blog, and I figure I should share it here.

I think most Christians who are aware of who Christopher Hitchens is assumes that he doesn’t really understand the message of the Christian faith, that he really just needs to understand what it’s really all about and then he’d surely come along. And then you read about his conversation with a Unitarian minister:

Maryiln Sewell: The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make and [sic] distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?

Christopher Hitchens: I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.

What do you do with that? This is where Christians – ministers, missionaries and all who take Christ’s command to tell the whole earth seriously – can get burned out. We can get convinced that “if only they really knew” then people would certainly decide to follow Christ. But, that’s not reality, and that’s not what Jesus or the rest of the New Testament tells us. After Jesus says his famous quote about it being easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than for the rich to be saved…

When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished, saying, “Who then can be saved?” But Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” Matthew 19:25-26

The rest of the New Testament goes on in a similar manner. Paul says to the Corinthians:

…my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. 1 Corinthians 2:4-5

A chapter earlier he had said:

For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

… the  Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. 1 Corinthians 1:17-18, 22-25

The Gospel is almost too easy to accept, and it also seems like foolishness to those who understand it. In the Hitchens conversation both parties are rejecting the Gospel, but I would venture to say that Hitchens is far more honest in his rejection than the Unitarian minister. He recognizes it for what it is and declares it “foolishness” while the minister plays semantic and word games and twists the scriptures to mean whatever she wants.

This should be a reminder that someone’s receptivity to the Gospel is not based on the witness or the presentation given. Someone’s response to the Gospel is a result of their own wrestling with God (the Holy Spirit), we should be clear about our message, but it’s the Gospel and the Holy Spirit that do all the convincing and all the convicting and all the converting – not us.

I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. Romans 1:16

[Thanks to Melinda at the Stand to Reason blog for the quote.]

Recently I woke up in the middle of the night with one word on my mind. Intimacy.

As I sleeplessly thought on intimacy and the implications therein the big surprise was that I was completely unsure how to define it or even really think about it. Naturally our minds move into thinking about the combination of physical intimacy and emotional intimacy. My basic conclusion was that intimacy is sharing your secrets. Your special inside secrets that you only give out to people when you trust them. If someone is starved for intimacy they will give these out to everyone they meet, trying to gain connection. If they are afraid of intimacy or don’t know what to do with it they never let anyone know, they keep everything on the surface. The middle ground would be a person who evaluates wisely and will share those deep things with people they trust and are hoping for deep continued connection.

It is important to remember that all three of these people need intimacy…everyone needs close deep connections so they do not feel isolated and alone.

Last night Jake talked at the DC Cru large group meeting about thinking through ways to live missionally – how to live so that everyone around you sees and hears about Christ in a way that they all have opportunities to respond to the Gospel.

When he wasn’t being awkward and the beginning and end he had talked about a missiologist that we listen to a lot. I wanted to share some audio tracks of this guy, Michael Frost, that have influenced how I see and live my life every day. He’s an expert particularly on developing a missional framework in a postmodern culture. (Sounds like something that would help out a lot here in DC, huh?)

The links are all to the website Odeo, which hosts a number of podcasts and other audio downloads. Each link has a link to listen to it online as well as a link directly to the mp3.

• Michael Frost :: 1 of 7 (mp3)
• Michael Frost :: 2 of 7 (mp3)
• Michael Frost :: 3 of 7 (mp3)
• Michael Frost :: 4 of 7 (mp3)
• Michael Frost :: 5 of 7 (mp3)
• Michael Frost :: 6 of 7 (mp3)
• Michael Frost :: 7 of 7 (mp3)

A few weeks ago Jake forwarded Carrie and I an article from Dallas Willard called “Live Life to the Full.” Willard teaches philosophy at the University of Southern California.

I mostly just wanted to share a quote from it, but it would be worth the 10 minutes to read the whole article. Anyhow, this is the quote that stood out:

Grace is not opposed to effort. It is opposed to earning. Effort is action. Earning is attitude.

He goes on to talk about ways that we can come closer to Christ through work, but how we still gain that closeness only out of our heart of receiving it as a gift.

Check out the article here.

Original Image | by gfes-dmin | CC 2.0 AT

Thanks largely to some thoughts from Tim Keller, some friends and I have been thinking a ton this year about how a large part of grasping the good news of Jesus is being able to distinguish it from the not-so-good-news of Religiosity — that being “You-Better-Get-Your-Act-Together-So-God-And-The-Rest-Of-Us-Can-Tolerate-You.”

Like most of what Matt Chandler says, this clip is good practice in telling the two apart. And it’s about sex and grace, two key areas in which so many well-meaning spiritual leaders have failed a lot of us.

We have a creative God who is first revealed as Creator. Genesis 1:1-3, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…it was formless and void…the Spirit was hovering over the surface of the dark waters…THEN GOD SPOKE “Let there be light” and there was light. God is an artist and even in His art we see His character and His eventual plan. He takes that which is formless and void, wild and waste, and makes it good by bringing light.

There is no coincidence that John’s gospel starts out talking about the Word being God, and creating all things, and giving life which is the light of men shining in darkness and the darkness not overcoming it. So why talk about this? Because it was a set up; from the very beginning God is trying to show us He is creative and His intentions toward us is to bring light and life, to make things new.

Paul continues this language in 1 Thessalonians 5. This is where we get that Jesus will come like a thief in the night, Paul’s next few phrases, “brethren, you are not in darkness and the day will not overtake you like a thief; for you are all sons of light and sons of day.” The thief of the night is the sun.

We must now ask ourselves, “What does this have to do with me?”

Both Jesus and later Paul more than invite us, but declare we are, a part of this process of light entering darkness. Jesus said it, “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden…” Matthew 5:14 it continues to explain the pervasive nature of light, not that we might be but that we are, it is a declaration! 1 Thessalonians 5 explains again we “are all sons of light and sons of day.”

We are not given the out we so often claim. The way most people talk about their mission or lives as following Christ is that they will be light, eventually. Or we may be light. Or that we are sometimes light. These are not only untrue, but denying that which we are, our very identity and place in the family of God.

My hope in this is not to criticize or heap condemnation if you don’t feel like light or if you feel like a dimly lit wick. Jesus both declares us as light and we are assured in Isaiah 42:3 “A bruised reed He will not break And a dimly burning wick He will not extinguish; He will faithfully bring forth justice.” As this continues on declaring God as creator of all things and His intentions for Israel, and carries over to us as the Church in verse 6-7, “And I will appoint You as a covenant to the people, As a light to the nations, To open blind eyes, To bring out prisoners from the dungeon And those who dwell in darkness from the prison.”

The Lord calls us a city on a hill, a lamp burning, a light to the nations. So I guess my observation and my prayer is pretty simply in the end, God said let their be light, then…

Let us be light.

Today, we have spent a lot of time on campus and in this room talking about happiness, what it is, and how we get it. Nearly every person I know desires happiness and spends the majority of his or her time pursuing happiness. To Benjamin Franklin, happiness was simple; beer was proof to him that God loved him and wanted him to be happy. In the Declaration of Independence, our founding fathers declared, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” I want to tell you about my life long pursuit of happiness and to tell you how God has been a part of that pursuit. As I have been preparing to tell my story, I realized that many of us hold different views on what happiness is. When I speak of happiness, I will be speaking as the renowned author Albert Camus when he said, “What is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads? I am going to be telling my story in terms of one of my favorite parables in the Bible, the parable of the Prodigal son. The parable is in Luke 15 starting in verse 11 and I am going to start my story off by reading the parable…
My story starts with the older brother. When I think of my childhood, and who I was, I think of my fourth grade year. It was the first year we received letter grades. I got straight A’s, one of two students in my class. My teacher oversaw the student store and I was elected by my peers to be the President of the Student store. I represented my school in the Student Olympics and my Heritage Project was highly awarded district wide. I also had my hands in various other pursuits. All in all, during fourth grade, I received a lot of special treatment for my achievement. It got to the point that in college a friend, who was in my fourth grade class, confided in me that she actually hated me for years because I won everything in fourth grade and she never had the chance to. When I was young, I saw church and God as another place to earn approval. I went to church every Sunday, and youth group every week, but I was so wrapped up in doing extra things that nothing made it much past the skin. My life, from birth till high school graduation was characterized by this trend, success and special treatment. This pattern bent my conception of love and I began to equate approval and special privileges with love.
When I was younger, I had this idea that I could earn love and approval and even that I needed to earn love and approval. What I discovered over time is that I wasn’t making myself happy; I was feeding crumbs to the cookie monster. The more crumbs I fed the cookie monster, the more he desired the whole cookie and the more unsatisfied he became with the crumbs he was getting. What I was learning was that success doesn’t really buy love, it buys momentary approval. I, like the older brother, was close to the father, I was doing the right thing, but like the older brother, I was doing it for the wrong reasons. The older brother does not obey his father because he loves his father; he obeys his father because his father is a source of wealth, a source of approval. As a child I did the right thing for approval and love, when I got older, I did the right thing to manipulate people and get what I wanted from them. I wanted my own way just as much as a rebellious younger brother, I just looked obedient getting what I wanted. There was a hunger inside of me for the love that each of us needs and I was cheapening the legitimacy of that need by feeding it approval. Like the older brother, the love, the goodness was available to me, but I wanted it on my terms. So, I forced myself to earn it, I tore myself apart to earn it. All the while, all I accomplished was increasing my need for love, while decreasing the quantity and quality of the substitute.
So, off I went to college. At college, I was away from my parents, the people I spent the vast majority of my life trying to please. I still tried to put myself in the good graces of those around me by doing the right thing; I still got good grades, I was still captain of the water polo team, and I still got what I wanted. The major difference was that I was without moral direction. At home I had adhered to my parent’s rules not because I agreed with them or thought them good, but because I was in my parent’s good graces when I obeyed. Suddenly doors were open to me that I had never even considered before. I wanted a new way to happiness so I opened every door available to me, I chased every pleasure I could find. I went from the good boy to the life of the party. At school of partiers, my friends and I could walk into any party and take it over, that was just how we rolled.
As the college years rolled by, I still liked to think of myself in terms of the older brother. I still liked to see myself succeed, I still liked to be lauded and approved of. The problem was that as my life spiraled out of control, an enormous gulf was left between who I actually was and who I always thought I was, the person I wanted to be. For a while, I tried hard to do better but the spiral continued, so I started to party to escape. The week became four days I survived to get to the freedom I found on the weekend. Booze, pot, and girls became my method of dealing with problems. My junior year, I was president of the water polo club. One weekend we weren’t allowed by the university to travel to our tournament because I had filed the necessary forms too late. I took the whole thing really hard. On Saturday, there was a football game and I had already sold my ticket. I ended up watching the game alone on my couch. As I watched the game, I drank a fifth of Captain Morgan’s Tattoo rum. After the game, I went over to the neighbors to continue drinking and get blazed. Then, I met up with my friends and my girl at the time and went party hopping. I hardly remember the first party. At the second party, I completely blew off all my rage and anger by screaming at my girl for losing the fleece which I had left at the last party. I don’t remember any of it. That month, October 2006, I hit rock bottom. I was so lost, so torn up in side, so directionless, so numb inside I was living the Goo Goo Dolls lyric, “When everything feels like the movies, you have to bleed to know you’re alive.” I needed so badly to know that I was alive, I needed so badly to know that I could still feel anything, that I took a knife and after holding the blade over a flame until it glowed red, I held it to my arm until it didn’t hurt anymore. Then, I did it again. The result is the cross shaped scar on my right forearm.
This was my pigsty moment, this was my time to realize that the direction of my life was killing me and rather quickly. I had seen the world, no pleasurable pursuit had been held back from me, I had tried anything and everything I had wanted to and in the end I found myself in a pigsty. I, however, like the younger son, had known something better. For all of my masquerading and hard work at church, I had learned a thing or two about Jesus, I knew that He loved me and I knew that He had died for my sins but I couldn’t connect those things to myself. I knew that God was the only chance I had, so I sought Him the only way I knew how, I worked at it. The inevitable end of an older bother mentality is the understanding that I am not worthy of love, but maybe, just maybe, I can earn it. So, I read my bible, I went to church, I tried to get to campus ministry meetings. I also cut down on the drinking, the drugs, and the sex. I was doing great things for myself if my life was measured on a balance, good on one side and bad on the other. The younger brother takes this approach as well, he returns to the father and asks for a job, an attempt to earn his way back in to the father’s good graces. I see now that the difference between the older brother and the younger is that when they are freely offered everything by the father, the younger son humbles himself and accepts, the older brother wants all that the father offers but he still wants it on his terms.
So I tried to be religious, but it only worked to a point. I stabilized the crazy mountains and valleys my life had been to rolling hills. The crazy was still in me though, and occasionally it would get out leading to some of the worst nights of my life. I couldn’t understand, I was trying hard to do the right stuff but I was still screwing up real bad, like sleeping with my roommate and long time friend, Andy’s, ex-girlfriend, who he still had feelings for bad. Pursing God wasn’t working for me, at least not this way. I could feel Him tugging at my insides, calling my name, “Ben, Ben, Come home.” It had been so long since I had been home, I barely remember what it looked like let alone how to get there. For the first time in my life, I needed help, I was in the pigsty but I was unable to pull myself out. The pleasure of the younger brother had failed me and the ability within to be righteous like the older brother had failed me again. I did the only thing left I knew to do; I called Tom, a campus minister, who reached out to me. I don’t call people I don’t know to talk unless it’s for my job, I just don’t. As I got to know Tom and started getting involved in the ministry he worked for, I began to see a different face of Christianity. I began to see a different God than the one I thought I knew.
When I was living as the older brother, his voice told me that I was living a good life, that I was deserving of love, I was deserving of salvation. The truth is that both brothers are alienated from the father; both are treating their father poorly so that they can control their own destiny. In the same way, I was sinning against God when I acted like the older brother and the younger brother because I was placing myself and my desires at the center of my life.
When I was defined by the older brother persona, I thought of God in terms of what He could do because that was how I thought of myself. In this view, Jesus was a role model, He was somebody who did it better than me. What I came to realize is that God does not love, He is love. In other words, love is not something that exists outside of God which He possesses, love exists only because it is a part of God and it can be only defined in terms of God. As I approached God from the younger brother’s mentality, I began to see Jesus as my Savior who died so that I might return home, in light of this I saw God as the foundation for life, the one thing I could build my life around and find true and complete happiness. I am not here today telling my story because of something that I have done, something I achieved. I am here because God loved me while I was still a sinner and He wanted me to be happy. So, He pursued me to the point of death so that I may share in His life, His joy, and His love.