Dad,

I think that this is what you are worried about, but fear not, I am not interested in any of those questions. All of the questions on that page can be answered with another question, like “What?” Or “Who cares?” Or “Are you serious?”

Harry Emerson Fosdick was a preacher at the height of the modernist – fundamentalist debate early in the twentieth century, and he defined the understanding of the Bible in relation to our current situation as an understanding that will

“liberate our minds from handicaps and summon our souls the more clearly to the spiritual adventures for which the Scriptures stand! Being a ‘Bible Christian’ in this sense is a great matter. Too often it is made a small matter. To be a Bible Christian must we think, as some seem to suppose, that a fish swallowed a man, or that sun and moon stood still at Joshua’s command, or that God sent the she-bears to eat up children who were rude to a prophet, or that saints long dead arose and appeared in Jerusalem when our Lord was crucified? Is that what it means to be a Bible Christian?

“Rather, to be a Bible Christian is a more significant affair than such a bald literalism suggests. To believe in ‘the God and Father of the Lord Jesus,’ creator, character, comforter, consummator, -that is to be a Bible Christian. To know moral need which our wit and will could not meet, and inward salvation from it through the power of the Spirit, and to live now in undying gratitude that overflows in service, -that is to be a Bible Christian. To have found in Christ, revealer of God and ideal of man, one who calls out our admiration, captivates our love, centralizes our ambition, and crowns our hope, -that is to be a Bible Christian.”

-quoted from “Stealing Jesus” by Bruce Bawer.

Fosdick doesn’t argue that the events in the Bible are fact or not, whether they can be backed up with historical evidence or even whether or not any of it actually happened, he simply says that the Bible is more significant than the question of literalism. To argue the points that are at the heart of the questions on the biblebelievers.com site is to trivialize the true meaning, the true power, of the text.

And that is something to worry about.

Bryan