A common feature of the debate surrounding apologetic methodology involves speculation as to the ground of our Christian belief.
We might summarize the question before us this way: Do we believe in Jesus because we believe the Bible, or do we believe the Bible because we believe in Jesus?
Ultimately I’m going to take issue with the way the question is phrased, but since this is how it is usually cast, I’ll take some time to work through those questions, first.
The Problem and the TensionThose interested in this debate usually take a hard position on either side.
If you believe our faith is grounded in God’s Word, you’re likely a presuppositionalist. This view is most often associated with what’s known as “revelational epistemology,” which maintains that the only way anyone knows anything is by revelation from God.
If you believe of our faith is grounded in Jesus himself, you’re likely an evidentialist or classicalist. This position would only require agreement with the consensus of New Testament scholarship that the gospels are reliable primary source documents about the life of Jesus of Nazareth—a belief in supernatural inspiration is not required but is rather something like a side effect of becoming a follower of Christ.
The following quote by Dr. William Lane Craig nicely summarizes this view:
Even taken as ordinary, fallible human records, the New Testament documents have been shown to be reliable with respect to these facts. Too many Christians naively think that unless you presuppose biblical inspiration and inerrancy, the historicity of the life of Jesus goes down the drain. This attitude, far from showing confidence in the Bible, actually betrays a profound lack of confidence in its historical credibility. Without the theological assumptions of inspiration and inerrancy to hold it up, the Bible is implicitly taken to be untrustworthy on this view.
But once one becomes a Christian, then one submits to the teaching of the Lord Jesus. When we see how Jesus regarded the Old Testament, we perceive that he taught it to be the inspired and wholly reliable Word of God. So as his disciples, we should, too. We believe in the Bible because we believe in him.
What’s interesting is that folks on both sides of the debate would surely want to affirm aspects of the other’s view. Certainly we all want to say that we learn things about God through special revelation—and, at the time same time, we all want to say that the gospels are historically reliable documents that teach about the life of Jesus.
So what’s the real issue, then?
As someone with friends on both sides of the issue (I personally find myself somewhat in the middle), it seems to me it rests on the important distinction between logical and chronological priority.
How Do We Come to Know Things?While a broader discussion about epistemology might be helpful here, that’s a bit beyond the scope of this piece.
For our purposes, let’s discuss logical priority vs chronological priority.
The latter is rather easy to grasp. For event x to be chronologically prior to event y, event x must simply take place before event y in time.
Logical priority constitutes x being a sufficient condition for y to take place. Fellow blogger J.W. Wartick has a concise, helpful explanation:
Logical priority, broadly defined, is the way things are ontologically ordered. That is, to say that for two factors, x and y, x is logically prior to y if and only if x takes precedence over y. An example could be to use miracles and God (note this is just for the sake of example, I realize that some would argue miracles can exist without God, but I’m simply using it as an illustration). The existence of God is logically prior to miracles in the sense that if God does not exist, then miracles do not. In this case, God would be x, while miracles would be y. In order for y to be the case, x must also be the case, thus making
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