One reason Stanley argues we need this change in perspective is that Scripture is too hard to defend:
“What your students have discovered, and if you read broadly you’ve discovered, it is next to impossible to defend the entire Bible. But if your Christianity hangs by the thread of proving that everything in the Bible is true, you may be able to hang onto it, but your kids and your grandkids and the next generation will not. Because this puts the Bible at the center of the debate. This puts the spotlight right on the Bible. Everything rises and falls on whether not part, but all the Bible is true. And that’s unfortunate, and as we’re going to discover today, it is absolutely unnecessary.”2
Among the things he specifically states are indefensible and not supported by evidence:
Israel’s Exodus from Egypt
The walls in Jericho fell down
The earth is 6,000 years old
The chronological information in 1, 2 Kings, 1, 2 Chronicles, and 1, 2, Samuel
The global flood in Noah’s day
Pretty much all those items were ENDORSED by Jesus Himself.
Easy to defend if you have the intellectual honesty and imagination to try to look at the context of human existance when the various parts of scripture were written. People who try to judge history through 2016 lenses are dishonest mental midgets.
Perhaps he should ride in the bible bus with J Vernon McGee.
” it is next to impossible to defend the entire Bible.”
Why? Does he have evidence that it isn’t true? Are those things to great for even God to do?
And we don’t know the age if the Earth. That’s just some person’s guess.
“The earth is 6,000 years old”
The date of the earth’s creation is not at all mentioned in the Bible.
Haven’t many respected Christian apologists already covered these issues and more?
Not everything in that list (and many other things people say are absolutely Biblical) is in scripture. There is plenty of room for rational dissent & debate on, say, age of the Earth. So yeah, if you’re going to come to indefensible conclusions about what Scripture says, then you’re going to have a hard time defending it.
Correct approach is to accept Scripture as true, and objective historical realities (known to us or not) are true, and have the humility to admit that we don’t understand some things.
Hooosez they’re not supported by evidence? They certainly are. For instance, the Walls of Jericho. They didn’t just FALL DOWN. Archaeologists discovered that the instant the walls were destroyed, their very foundations were heaved up out of the ground, as by an explosion UNDER them.
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All of the things he claims can’t be defended have been proven by hard physical facts.
His problem seems to be simply that he is a child of darkness, and has turned the Holy Spirit away.
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