Our All Fellows Seminar serves as the final seminar for all cohorts (taking the place of any seminars previously scheduled from December 2nd through the 10th) This is an opportunity for all of our fellows to come together to celebrate our work this fall.
It’s a basic axiom of Christianity that we wouldn’t have knowledge of God’s plan for salvation without the Bible. The Apostle Paul said that “all Scripture is God-breathed” (2 Tim. 3:16). But Peter acknowledged that humans collaborated in the writing of the Bible (2 Peter 1:21). The tools of modern scholarship have opened windows onto the human element of the Bible’s composition and, as with all things human, there is a lot of evidence of screwiness. Manuscripts got lost or corrupted. The Bible is rife with contradictions of fact. From a modern scientific and historical outlook, the Bible seems supremely unreliable. How could such a mess of a book be the Word of God?
In this talk, Prof. Ryan McDermott (Pitt, English) examines what Christians claim and don’t claim about the Bible’s reliability as history. He will compare different Christian understandings of how humans collaborated with God to compose the Bible and will draw on recent research in anthropology, oral history, literary studies, and classical history writing to contrast the Bible’s claims to truth with modern standards of history and science. Prof. McDermott argues that in the 21st century, we often need a conversion of mind in order to be able to trust the Bible.