Is the Bible just 2,000 year-old letters? Should Christians stop using the Bible to avoid becoming irrelevant?Audio

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Don't use iTunes? Subscribe here.TranscriptHello and welcome to Unapologetic, a podcast about how we can defend and not apologize for our Christian convictions. Today's topic: the Bible. How should Christians think about the Bible? Is it just a collection of 2,000 year old letters, as some would say? Or is it authoritative for everyone? Is it authoritative only for the Christian? Is it authoritative for the non-Christian? What if someone doesn't recognize the authority of the Bible? Is what the bible said just true back then and not true today? Well these are the questions that we're going to analyze today on Unapologetic. (0:35) Recently, Rob Bell was asked when the church would get on board with affirming homosexuality. Here's what he said: "I think culture is already there and the church will continue to be even more irrelevant when it quotes letters from 2,000 years ago as their best defense when you have in front of you flesh and blood people, who are your brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, and coworkers and neighbors, and they love each other and just want to go through life with someone."Well, that's very persuasive, and in fact, many people that are a part of the Reformation project, which is a group of homosexuals who claim to be Christians, who are lobbying and appealing to Christians at large to accept homosexuality and same-sex marriage. What they've said is that it's generally not the logical argument or the scriptural argument that convinces someone to be on their side. It is an emotional appeal; they know someone, a family member, a coworker, a good friend, that's generally how someone is convinced to come to the viewpoint that homosexuality is ok or even good. (1:45) So Rob Bell's definitely onto something there in how he speaks with his rhetoric. However, what about his view that the bible is just a collection of 2,000 year old letters? Well this view has some grave implications. First, it implies that culture decides and determines what is right and what is wrong. So if the majority of people are on the same page, well then whatever they agree on is moral and whatever they disagree on is immoral. Such a view is extremely dangerous though.Consider Martin Luther King. At a time when the majority said blacks were not valuable, Martin Luther King went against that and said, 'No, whites, blacks, everyone has the same innate worth and dignity, and everyone's worthy of respect in that regard.' Well, he went against the cultural view of the day. That would make him immoral. And what about societies where everyone's on board with persecuting a certain group of people? That would make that persecution correct.If we flip the Martin Luther King analogy around, it would make mistreating black people correct at such a time when the majority agreed on it, but that view is preposterously horrible! So I hope you see that this 'majority makes morality' view is a very bad view. (3:07) The second problem is that it puts us in a very precarious place with what Scripture actually is, because Scripture makes the following claim: in 2 Timothy 3:16, it says that,"All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequately equipped for every good work."That's either true or false. Either scripture is literally God-breathed or it's not. But what we determine about that claim will have far reaching implications. (3:45) So, later on we're going to talk about how this group…