CONFIDENT:
Why We Can Trust the Bible
By Daniel Strange and Mike Ovey
Christian Focus. 151 pages. £7.99
ISBN 978 1 78191 554 7
The Scriptures, the Word of God, come under attack in every age. The question of whether we can still be confident in their reliability is therefore a perennial one which needs to be regularly addressed in the face of challenges old and new.
The principal and academic vice principal of Oak Hill Theological College, North London, step up to the mark with this slim paperback, to build the Christian’s confidence in the Bible and to provide ammunition against a fast changing world which sneers at fools like us who continue to believe in the ancient book. We need to be able to answer the questions and assumptions people have in our digital and ‘touchy-feely’ age, not those they had 30 or 40 years ago.
Following Jesus
The thrust rightly insists that if a Christian is someone who follows Jesus Christ then they must follow Jesus in his view of the Bible as the Word of God and mean by that what Jesus meant by it. Though this is a well-worn way of proceeding, Strange and Ovey bring a real freshness to the argument, both starting much further back than previous generations needed to and taking on many of the vital challenges thrown at Scripture from a postmodern, deconstruc-tionist, mindset.
Things the book looks at include how many ordinary secular people have their minds made up for them by the media, the reasonableness of revelation, the vital blessings the Bible has brought to Western civilisation, the question of authority and how we should both interpret and respond to the Bible in our lives. The authors do a great job in bringing intelligent Christians up to speed so that they can confidently ‘stand on every promise of your Word.’
