Word of God and Circular Reasoning

Tom made some great comments and asked some good questions. I’ll answer them as I get time, over the next few days.

You wrote: "We know that the Bible is the Word of God primarily because it says it is and assumes that it is.” I find this reasoning unsatisfying. It is, I believe, what is known as "circular reasoning," like someone telling you he is a policeman and that you have to believe it because he is a policeman. Later on you might find out that he lied, or was confused and only thought he was a policeman. So why would I believe that the Bible is the word of God primarily because it says so?


Tom,

First let me say that I appreciate your tone and your curiosity. You are asking good questions in a good way. I appreciate that.

Circularity
The first answer is that all arguments are, when you get down to the nitty-gritty, circular. They all eventually get to the point of asking, who says? Or by what standard? The problem, then, isn’t that the argument is circular, which I’m happy to admit it is, but who or what is the authority for the facts or presuppositions of the argument? In many cases we are happy to admit the authority of the speaker or source as a valid authority (experts, authors, athletes, etc.). In this case we are saying that the one who defines everything is our authority. God tells us what everything is. The sky is blue, for example, because he says it is. 2+2=4 because that is the way God defined that particular math problem. We are so used to the way life is that we forget that it is this way for purposeful reasons, and those reasons abide in the mind of God.

So, the first answer to your question is we believe the Bible to be God’s word because God says it is and he is a suitable authority to make circular statements about himself. How could he do anything else? There can be no higher authority to appeal to.

If a fellow claiming to be a policeman comes up to you and tells you to get out of the car, you can only tell if he isn’t a policeman by appealing to something above him. Policeman must wear badges, for example. A higher court decreed it. Does he have a badge on? Then according to that higher decree there is a good chance that he is indeed a cop. But let’s say that you found out later that he wasn’t a policeman after all. How would you determine this unless you appealed to some higher power or authority? In the case of God and his word, there is no higher authority to appeal to. So you have to take his tests and apply them to people who claim to speak on his behalf. Which leads to the second point.

The Tests of a Prophet
Second, the Koran claims to be the word of God. The Book of Mormon claims to be the word of God. We could go on for a long time listing books that claim to be sacred scripture. All of these books and texts assume or teach that the Old Testament is accurate as far as it goes. For example, the Koran agrees with the Old Testament as far as Ishmael. The Book of Mormon declares itself to be another testament, claiming to be in complete agreement with what is already found in the Old and New Testaments.

So, we are to run the tests given in the Bible to see if their prophets are true prophets and their texts truly the Word of God. Do they seek to have us follow gods other than the God of the Bible? Even if you go way back to the beginning you can see that the god of the Koran is not the same God as the God of the first 17 chapters of the Bible. The first verse of the Bible, for example says that God created everything. God made the world in such a way that we understand that created object reflects the character and nature of the one who created. Thus whatever God creates will reflect who he is to anyone looking at the created object. This means that we can look around us, at any level, and make observations about the person of the being that created what we find. What we see is great diversity and great similarity at the same time. We see complexity and simplicity. We see singularity and plurality. Then, when we look from the creation to the Bible we find that same God revealed on those pages. We find a single God with plurality personality—a Trinity. That is the kind of God we find in the Bible. But is it the same God we find in the Koran? No. The God of Islam is a monadic, singular God. Mohamed was not a very good Bible scholar. He got the one god part of Judaism right, but not the triune God of the Bible as a whole. This is because the man who claimed to speak for God in the 7th century did not know the true God and consequently was not sent by him. (Mormonism fails this test as well btw.)

What do we find when we examine Mormonism? The second test is that the things the prophet says will happen do. If you examine the claims of Joseph Smith you will find that he gave all sorts of prophetic decrees and exhortations that had foretelling aspects to them. Some of them appeared to come true, but many many did not. If you’d like to see more on this you can visit a web site like this: http://www.utlm.org/. The Bible says that if God is speaking through a man, what he says will happen does. In the Bible we see this kind of prophecy happening over and over again with no flaws or misses. Thus we know that the Bible is true and Mormonism is a false religion. (Islam fails this test too.)

What about the third test? What the newer prophet says must fit with previous scripture. This means that if somehow the prophet either didn’t make any predictive announcements or if they somehow came true and if the god seemed to be the same God of the Bible, you would need to watch for a little longer to see if what they were saying lined up with what we already had. If you hold either Mormonism or Islam up to the Bible, they fail this test as well. Islam is a religion of vengeance and warfare. Mormonism is a polytheistic religion in which the God of the Bible is not the highest God in the universe, simply one of many.

Lest the reader think I am picking on these two other “religions” let me say that we can do this with any religious group in the world. Is what they are representing to us as God’s word, actually God’s word? Does it agree with what we see around us? Does what they teach about God and the world fit with how life actually is and what we understand about God in his word? Does it try to lead us away from the God revealed in the bible? Does it tell us of a god that doesn’t do what he says he will do? Does it tell us of a God who changes his mind and character to suit the “prophet”? Does the god represented look amazingly like the man who claims to represent him?

You might say that Jesus looked a lot like God, to which I would say yes, but that is because he was God. Abraham didn’t look anything like the God he represented. Neither did Moses or any other prophet in the Bible. They were all very human and very sinful human beings. The claim in the Bible, however about Jesus, is that he was God incarnate. And this is key to the difference between Christianity and the other religions. They claim that Jesus was a prophet, but the Bible claims that he was God.

My point here is that when you subject the prophecies of the other religions through the basic tests of prophecy, you find that only Christianity passes them all.

Redemptive History
There is a third proof that the Bible is the word of God. This is tied to the major theme of the book—redemptive history. The bible is a book about God and his dealings with man. But the primary relationship between God and man involves redemption. Man sinned and is in rebellion against God. The story of the Bible is primarily about how God is working in history to save his people from their sins and to restore them to the covenantal relationship they were originally created to share with him. The key question to ask here is, Is it true? Does the explanation of God fit with what we see around us? Yes it does. The God taught about in the Bible is the only way we can accurately explain everything we see around us.

Second, does what the text say will happen happen in actual history? Yes. Everything the prophets said would happen happened. Not only did it happen exactly like how it was described, but it also happened when they said it would happen.

Third, what does the Bible point to? It points to and culminates in Jesus of Nazareth. It not only culminates in Jesus the man, but it is fulfilled in his death for humanity on a cross. But even more spectacularly, the promise is that he would rise from the dead. If he did not rise, none of anything else in the Bible is true and the whole thing should be chucked into a deep hole somewhere. But it did happen. Jesus did rise from the dead. The Bible says that Jesus was justified as the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead (Rom. 1:3). And when Jesus was vindicated, the Bible was also validated as being the Word of God.

I hope this helps.