Trent Horn - Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties

Hard Sayings

A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties

T RENT H ORN

Hard Sayings

A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties

2016 Trent Horn

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For Matthew

Introduction

If you could only give one book about Christianity to a non-Christian friend, what would it be? Maybe it would be a classic defense of the faith like C.S. Lewiss Mere Christianity ? Or maybe it would be a gripping biography of a saint? Or maybe it would be the one book most Christians want with them if they were to be stranded on a desert islandthe Bible.

But be careful. Although Christians think the Bible can help your faith, atheists say intensive Bible reading is a good way to destroy your faith. Famous magician and outspoken atheist Penn Jillette says, [Ive] read the Bible cover to cover... if you read the Bible or the Koran or the Torah cover to cover I believe you will emerge from that as an atheist.

David Silverman, the president of American Atheists, said in the New York Times , I gave a Bible to my daughter. Thats how you make atheists.

What is it about the Bible that catapults some people into atheism?

Jillette says, [I]ts all tribal; when you see a God that is jealous and insecure... it was clearly written hundreds of years after the supposed fact and full of contradictions. Carrier adds, [T]his same cruel God orders people to be stoned to death for picking up sticks on Saturday, and commands that those who follow other religions be genocidally slaughtered. Richard Dawkins, the author of the New York Times bestseller The God Delusion, summed up many atheists attitudes toward the Bible and its depiction of God:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

A jealous and cruel God. Endorsements of genocide and slavery. Irresolvable contradictions. When Christians are presented with these objections to the Bible many of them dont know what to say. Theyve been sabotaged by Sunday school lessons and homilies that ignore what Pope Benedict XVI calls the dark passages of Scripture. The goal of this book is to shine the light on these passages and equip Christians to defend the inspiration and inerrancy of Gods sacred word.

W HY T HIS B OOK?

One reason I wrote this book is that there are no works that comprehensively explained the Bibles tough passages from a Catholic perspective. There were some books that helped defend Scripture against general attacks on its reliability (Fr. William Mosts Free from All Error is one example), but there were none that systematically addressed the Bibles most infamous tough passages.

When I would be asked in public forums to recommend books on Bible difficulties I usually referred the audience to books by Protestant authors, like Gleason Archers New Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties or Norman Geisler and Thomas Howes Big Book of Bible Difficulties . These books have helpful answers, but sprinkled throughout their pages are statements that conflict with the Catholic Faith.

One example would be these authors claim that the best way to resolve the difficulty in Jesus command to eat his flesh and drink his blood (John 6:53) is to say that the passage is symbolic and not literal. Indeed, to his followers this command represented the original hard saying of Jesus. Or as Johns Gospel says, Many of his disciples, when they heard it, said, This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?... After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him (John 6:60, 66).

But as a Catholic it would be 1) heretical for me to denounce the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and 2) an unsound approach to Scripture, since I believe that the literal view best explains this passage. Therefore, I felt it was necessary to write a book about perplexing Bible passages that would not lead Catholics into theological error. I felt called to explain the Bibles hard sayings so that todays disciples dont draw back and stop following Christ or believing in his sacred word.

That being said, I hope non-Catholics will examine my approach, compare it to the approach taken by authors like Archer or Geisler, and see if it is a more feasible way of defending the inspiration and inerrancy of Sacred Scripture.

T HE D ARK P ASSAGES OF S CRIPTURE

Pope Benedict XVIs apostolic exhortation Verbum Domini refers to dark passages of Scripture, or as Benedict says, passages in the Bible which, due to the violence and immorality they occasionally contain, prove obscure and difficult. In short, they are the apparently erroneous passages that make us question whether the Bible is the word of God.

Part I of this book addresses external difficulties, the dark passages that appear to contradict scientific or historical facts known apart from the Bible (for example, Genesis and evolution, or the historicity of the Gospels). Part II addresses internal difficulties, those passages that appear to contradict other parts of the Bible (passages that disagree on details of the same event or that describe God in very different ways). Finally, Part III addresses the passages Benedict refers to, the ones that contain moral difficulties that seem to endorse evils like chattel slavery or the slaughter of innocent women and children.

Keep in mind that answering every objection a critic could raise against the Bible would require a book much longer than the Bible itself. Fortunately, most of the objections critics make fall under a few common patterns, and so only a small percentage of the Bible is cited in their arguments. By reviewing these patterns and commonly cited verses you can learn to defend Scripture without having to examine each of the Bibles approximately 35,000 individual verses.

It is my hope you will see that objections to the Bible can be answered. In fact, Bible scholars have done that for centuries. Therefore, believers should not be afraid to share the good news about the love of God that is recorded in his inspired and inerrant word.

Reading the Bible (or the Koran) Will Make You an Atheist, Penn Jillette, interview by Paul Hoffman, June 8, 2010, bigthink.com/videos/reading-the-bible-or-the-koran-or-the-torah-will-make-you-an-atheist.

Laurie Goodstein, Basic Religion Test Stumps Many Americans, New York Times, September 28, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/us/28religion.html?_r=0.

Richard Carrier, From Taoist to Infidel, The Secular Web , 2001, infidels.org/library/modern/testimonials/carrier.html.

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2008), 51.

Verbum Domini , 42.

Norman Geisler and Thomas Howe, When Critics Ask: A Popular Handbook on Bible Difficulties (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1992), 35051.

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