| Solid Ground (Preface&Chapter1) |
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| Written by John Feakes | |
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Page 1 of 4 Solid Ground100 Reasons to Trust New Testament HistoryBy John FeakesPrefaceThe reader may find himself puzzled as to why, in a book intended to demonstrate the historical reliability of the New Testament, I’ve chosen to donate such a large amount of space to addressing the question of God’s existence. A moment of reflection reveals the answer. If we assume at the onset that God does not exist, or that He has never performed miracles, then the New Testament must be viewed as necessarily unreliable. After all, the New Testament is replete with references to God and His actions in history, most notably, the decisive revealing of Himself in the person of Jesus Christ – the central figure of the New Testament. Virtually all branches of the historical sciences demand a sort of methodological atheism from their investigators. The unspoken but very powerful rule here is that God may not be considered at all as having intruded into the affairs of human history. This thought has super-saturated the western world since the days of Darwin. Without a doubt, the single most powerful and common argument against the reliability of the New Testament record is its constant references to miracles of God. The rule that we’ve all been pressured into following, to one extent or other, is that God may not be considered as having acted in human history. This is the way science works, we are told. We are constantly reminded that the truth is to be found through the scientific method alone. And yet consider that this “rule”- that conclusions are to be reached through the scientific method without permitting God into the equation - was itself not a conclusion reached by scientific investigation, but is simply a philosophical preference!Clearly, a proper evaluation of the New Testament’s historical credentials will involve more than a “scientific” examination of the archaeological record, or other corroborative historic sources. To evaluate the New Testament properly we’ll need to first take at least two steps back, and consider carefully what assumptions may reasonably be made before we proceed to examine the specific historic evidences. Chapter one was created for this purpose. |
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| Last Updated on Saturday, 07 November 2009 00:52 |