Speaker
Dr Peter Williams
“The toughest questions.”
“Responding to attacks on Scripture.”
“God commanded genocide?”
“The Bible is sexist?”
“The stories changed over time?”
“How can such an old book be God’s word today?”
Attacks on God’s word have a long history: “Did God say?” (Genesis 3:1). They remain a favourite way to intimidate Christians today and question God’s character. Some of the toughest questions arise from the moral teaching of Scripture and its historical claims. This year’s conference will equip you to respond to such attacks and provide reasons why you can trust what God has written, rightly understanding what the Scriptures claim to be.
Session 1: “It’s not fair.”
The first session will deal with the common objection that the Old Testament shows God promoting lots of violence including genocide and generally that he’s a mean character. We will also respond to the objection that the Bible is full of things we find unfair such as slavery and sexism.
Session 2: “It’s not true.”
People today think that there’s no evidence for Scripture being historically true. In this session we will show that in fact some of the biblical accounts have been amazingly confirmed by archaeology and that people’s doubts today about the historical credibility of Scripture are not because they lack evidence.
Session 3: “It’s not God’s word.”
In the final session we explore how Christians understand the Scriptures to be fully God’s word. Though our doctrine of the Scriptures has many different aspects, these cannot be separated from the Scriptures’ central claims about the person of Jesus, which have many lines of supporting evidence.
Peter J. Williams, did his MA, MPhil and PhD at Cambridge University on ancient languages to do with the Bible. He was a Senior Lecturer in New Testament in Aberdeen and is now Principal of Tyndale House in Cambridge, a world-leading research centre on the Bible with the UK’s best library of the Bible. He is also on the translation committee of the English Standard Version of the Bible and Chair of the International Greek New Testament Project. He’s been married to Kathryn for 20 years and they have a daughter and a son.
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