Are there Good Grounds for Believing the Bible?

So Dr. Kruger, you're out to Applebee's, prior to quarantine, right?

And you are not engaging in social distancing and you're sitting at the table and you're having a really good conversation with a friend and eventually you get onto the topic of religion.

And someone says, well, I understand that you believe the Bible, but I don't think there is any good reason to believe that the

Bible is true. I mean, how do you even know? Who wrote those books? Where'd they come from? How do you know that the

Bible is the word of God? Now, notice what I just asked, Dr. Kruger. I just asked a bunch of questions in there, very sloppily.

And I did it on purpose because that's how it's usually presented in a popular, you know, normal conversation.

No one goes out like a premise one, premise 2 .1. How would you address that question that I just asked while sitting at the dinner table or at an

Applebee's or something like that? Yeah, well, I mean, at the core of it is it's an epistemological question.

It's the how you know question. I mean, you did throw out numerous questions there, but the essence of it was, well, how do you know you have the right books?

You know, you Christians say you do, but we all know that you just kind of stumble in the dark here is the implied answer.

And so, you know, hidden behind the question is a challenge. Do you Christians have adequate grounds for how you know that it's this book and not that book?

I mean, what are those grounds? And the non -Christian will say, well, see, I don't see any grounds. I think you guys just say it's these books and you don't really know for sure.

And it's that kind of epistemological question that I think is exactly why I wrote Canon Revisited and some other things

I've written too, which is dealing with the question of how you know. Now, notice how you don't answer that question. You can't answer that question just by saying, well, you know, the

Canon was formed and finalized in the fourth century and the Council of this, that, and the other, and everyone's like, well, okay, but you still haven't answered my question, right?

Which is why reception history, as interesting as it is in terms of canonical studies, is not gonna answer that question, which is always what's frustrated me about most canonical studies.

So what I've argued in my book and sitting in your hypothetical scenario in Applebee's, this would be hard to fully unpack, but I would say, well, actually,

I think God has given us good grounds for knowing what books are from him. And I think he's given us three different angles to look at.

One is the self -authenticating qualities of the books themselves. And we'd have to unpack what that means. Secondly, the fact we have good grounds historically for thinking they come from the apostles.

And those are people who have the ability to speak for Christ as his mouthpiece and worth listening to.

And then thirdly, we have the uniform testimony of the church. Over the centuries, it would suggest that they responded to these books and recognize

Christ's voice in them. Now, at that point, you're not gonna say, yeah, I'm not buying it. Well, okay, then you got to peel back the layers.

Well, what would you buy? What are you looking for here? What is it that you think is gonna be persuasive to you? And then now you're into the worldview discussion.

Okay. And I like how you're asking these questions and you're getting into the, well, what would you say is something that would be acceptable to you?

Notice that this kind of language, we're often criticized from our classical brothers. Like, well, presuppositionalists don't engage in those kinds of in -depth discussions, but it's all about worldviews in the broad sense.

But right there, the way you've just addressed that specific issue, you're willing to engage in the conversation with the other person and get into some of the details.

There's nothing wrong with asking. This is where, of course, I'm always confused by the characters of presuppositionalists not engaging in the conversation.

I'm like, well, no, it's the presuppositionalists that are actually asking the questions that unpack the non -Christian's worldview most aptly.

Because usually presuppositionalists are looking to do a reductio ad absurdum on the non -Christian worldview. So we're trying to learn more about their worldview.

We wanna know more about what makes a text so we can show its inconsistencies. And think about Keller's book,

Reason for God, which was so popular a number of years ago and still pretty popular. Most people don't know that he was just using presuppositional methodology in that book, talking about worldviews and so forth.

He doesn't use all the terminology that presuppositionalists sometimes use, which is to his credit. People didn't really pick up on it, but if they find that persuasive, that's presuppositionalism, but yet it still is very engaging.