Whether the Bible Is an Authority?
David Eller opines: “To non-Christians (including Atheists), the Bible is not authority at all, just as to Christians the Qu’ran or the Hindu Vedas are no authority. Nonbelievers don’t care what somebody else’s text says. … I don’t care what the Bible says — it is not my authority — and so its claims are not worthy of my serious consideration, any more than any other texts or myths in the world.” (Natural Atheism, 39) Can I reason likewise about our author’s own book? Why should I accept anything he writes? Isn’t it a “text” in the world? What is not a “text”? Ah, Eller will say, but his book contains arguments. He is not asking me to believe on authority. The Bible, on the contrary, contains only unsupported claims about the articles of faith. OK, let’s start with the basics: did Jesus exist, and did He say and do the things recorded in the Bible? That’s a legitimate historical question. Eller cannot escape it: the answer is either yes or no, and it depends on a sober analysis of the Bible in its aspect as an historical document. If the answer is yes, then we might proceed from that, for example, to the question of Jesus’s self-understanding and to the C.S. Lewis’s trilemma. The Bible can ultimately be dismissed by an unbeliever in terms of its necessity or sufficiency or both for the distinctively Christian set of faith and morals. But it has to be dealt with. It’s a fact, a stubborn presence, and it won’t go away by being called “biased testimony.” (38) To make that happen Eller would have to claim that every important event mentioned in the Bible beyond, perhaps, early Genesis is fake or suspect or embellished by deceivers or deceived beyond recognition. And not even the most fanatical atheist would dare do that.