LETTER TO THE EDITOR
The integrity and veracity of the Bible
Friday, February 11, 2005
Dear Sir,
I am a pastor of a church in the Washington, DC area. My family and I come to Grand Cayman several times a year and we read with great interest the local papers.
I was quite interested to see an article under your Theological Commentary Section on Feb 4, 2005 entitled “Should the Bible be taken literally?” by Fr. Sean Major-Campbell. I was hopeful that Fr.
Major-Campbell would strongly advocate the position of biblical inerrancy and divine inspiration. But in reading the article, I was sadly disappointed.
In his article, Fr. Major-Campbell stuck together a rambling litany of liberal thinking regarding the integrity and veracity of the Bible. In the end however, his rambling point was simply that we should not take the Bible literally.
To hear this coming from a clergyman doesn’t shock me anymore
-- it simply saddens me. I came to faith in Jesus Christ as a senior in college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1971.
I was a drug addict, an alcoholic and a profane womanizer. I was led to Christ in 1971 by a street preacher who had the courage to present the claims of Christ to me in the context of the Bible being God’s true and accurate revelation to all mankind.
And when I believed in Jesus in the straightforward way that the Bible described my entire life was transformed. I became a completely “new person in Christ” (2 Cor 5:17).
Since that time, I have been to seminary, taught in seminary, and served as a pastor for the last 25 years at McLean Bible Church in the Washington DC suburbs. I also did my doctoral work at Johns Hopkins University in Near Eastern Biblical Studies, where I was exposed to all the liberal theology that Fr. Major-Campbell spewed out in his commentary.
I would like to remind the readers of the claim of the Bible for itself—that it is the inspired (lit in Greek “God-breathed”) revelation of the living God to mankind. Numerous archaeological studies over the past 100 years have confirmed the historical reliability of the bible, in contrast to Fr. Major-Campbell’s insinuations to the contrary.
Furthermore, the Dead Sea Scrolls (which I have the privilege to actually see and study personally) clearly prove that the transmission of the Bible was not a haphazard and sloppy process as Fr. Major-Campbell implies. Rather, we now know that it was a precise and scientific art that resulted in the accurate and dependable transmission of the Biblical manuscripts from their originals.
Yes, it is true -- as Fr. Major-Campbell says -- that people have twisted and
misinterpreted the Bible over the centuries in order to try and justify all sorts of ungodly behaviour. But this has nothing to do with the question at hand.
Just because people abuse antibiotics, does that mean those antibiotics are ineffective?
Of course not! Just because people have distorted the Bible, does that mean that the Bible is therefore not God’s Word? Of course not!
Let Fr. Major-Campbell keep his “cut-and-paste” Bible if he wants.
Jesus told us in Matt 7 at the end of the Sermon on the Mount that people who build their lives on the Bible are like people who build their house on a rock - a rock so solid that it will survive even hurricane Ivans.
So I urge the readers to rely on the Lord Jesus’ view of the Bible instead of Fr. Major-Campbell’s. And when all the smoke clears in eternity, we’ll all be very glad that we did.
Lon Solomon, Senior Pastor
McLean Bible Church, McLean, VA. USA
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