This is part 4 of the series blogging through the book Scripture and the Authority of God by N.T. Wright. You might want to start with part 1 and work your way through the series.
Exploring the authority of Scripture opens up lots of questions as one wrestles through how scripture can have “authority”, what that might mean, and how to put it into practice.
Some of these questions include:
- authority – what do we mean when we use the word authority?
- inspiration – was God involved in the writing process of the Scriptures, and if so how?
- inerrancy – to what extant is the text free from errors, contradictions, and inaccuracies? if the text is free from these problems, is that across all matters including historical, scientific, and spiritual or does this only apply to spiritual matters?
- canon – how do we know if we have the right books in the collection we call the Bible? how was the canon assembled? who has the “right” to discover and affirm which books are actually part of the canon?
- transmission – do we have the text that was originally written by the authors? what kind of errors are in the manuscripts we have and how do we handle them?
- interpretation – how do we approach interpreting the text so that we understand what it means and how we can apply it today? should we use a narrative approach, look for allegorical meanings, or treat the text literally? what is meant by literal? how do we bridge historical, cultural, and philosophical differences that exist between the writing of a book and today?
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