The Bible is Bad

Oh, man. This isn’t gonna’ be pretty.

And it will make a lot of people mad.

Watch (or read below) our Truth in Two and find out why.

Dr. Mark Eckel is Executive Director of the Center for Biblical Integration at Liberty University. Support MarkEckel.com (here). Find the MarkEckel.com YouTube Channel (here). Mark is President of The Comenius Institute (website) and interprets culture from a Christian vantage point (1 minute video).

Pictures: Josh Collingwood, Snappy Goat

FULL TEXT

“The Bible is a homophobic, racist, misogynist, violent document that suppresses minorities.” Statements such as this from adversaries of Christianity. Attacks against the Bible sometimes begin with such generalities. When public university students confronted me with assumed grievances against Scripture, I would respond with three questions. One, have you read the Bible within the context of the time it was written? Two, can you give me examples from your study of the Bible that would give evidence of what you claim? And three, by what standard do you evaluate ethics from the Bible or anything else? My questions were always greeted with silence; students had not thought to honestly assess the Bible.

So, is the Bible an anti-sex, anti-gender, anti-race, anti-love, anti-minority document? Nothing could be farther from the truth. Genesis 12 says that God’s intention is to bless all the peoples of the earth through Israel. Deuteronomy 10 declares that God loves the orphan, widow, or displaced stranger and expects His people to do the same. God is “no respecter of persons,” says Paul in Romans 2. God shows no partiality between people or people groups. So where do human problems come from?

What folks who attack the Bible do not want to acknowledge, is that all the problems in the world begin with us, not God. Seeds of hate and violence come from the human heart. And when anyone wants to declare something as ‘bad,’ my response is always the same, “By what standard are you declaring a standard? Where do you think standards come from?” The very Book that people want to attack is The Book that has given the world the concepts of freedom, individuality, rights, and protection from the powerful. Yes, the Bible outlines boundaries and limitations for human living. But the Bible also gives the very basis for equality between people. For the Comenius Institute, this is Dr. Mark Eckel, Executive Director of the Center for Biblical Integration at Liberty University, personally seeking truth wherever it’s found.