1. What is Scripture’s major theme and purpose?
2. How would you defend the authority of Scripture?
3. Where do you stand on the inerrancy of Scripture? Why?
4. What were the standards followed to develop the canon of Scripture?
5. Explain and defend your view of the Trinity.
6. How do you understand the ministry of the Holy Spirit and His gifts in the church today?
7. What are the conditions of salvation? (believe? repent? confess? surrender? subsequent obedience?)
8. Assurance of salvation: Can I lose my salvation if I continue to sin?
   How can someone know with confidence that he or she is a Christian?
9. What is your understanding of church government? (a) Can women be elders in your church? Why or why not? (b) Does the pastor have a greater authority than other leadership positions? (c) What are the functions and qualifications for your leaders?
10. Support the ministry priorities of your church from Scripture.
11. Under what conditions would you discipline someone from your church? How?
12. Which is more important: numerical growth in your church or the spiritual growth of the people you already have coming? If your church grows, how will you insure the spiritual growth of your people? In other words, how do you understand the process of sanctification?
13. Eschatology: What is your basic understanding of end times and how central will issues
    related to end times be to your ministry?
14. Explain and defend the concept of believer’s baptism.
15. What is your theology of stewardship? tithing?
16. What will you require of those wishing to be married under your ministry? Live-ins, divorced.
17. What is Biblically acceptable worship? What is the Biblical basis for contemporary music in worship?
18. What is your position on social issues: abortion, homosexuality, cloning, surrogacy, genetic engineering, war, nuclear weapons, death penalty, feminism, masturbation, use of alcohol, dancing, Halloween, Christmas decor, religious symbols & art, etc.
19. If a person from any of the following groups were to challenge you to show them at least three major differences between what you believe and what they believe, what major differences would you delineate? Mainline Christian denominations, Catholicism, Liberal Christianity, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Science, Scientology, New Age Movement, Occultism, Free Masonry, Eastern Mystics, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam
20. Define and defend the concept of “justification by faith.”
21. How do you determine God’s vision for your church? How will you know it is from God?
22. What is the role and importance of prayer in the planting of a church and seeing lives
    changed?
23. To whom are you accountable? Who has authority over you?
24. Describe the role of God’s sovereignty and human free will in the process of salvation.

The central theme of the Bible is God’s work at creating for himself a unified family of people who worship and love him. He does this despite the repeated efforts of people to run away. In theological terms, the story of the Bible is Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Re-Creation.

Therefore, the purpose of the Bible is for God to reveal to people his plan for loving them and to teach them how to love him back.

Specifically:

• The Old Testament describes how God created people, how they rejected him and became enslaved to sin. It also tells how God started fresh by focusing on the creation of just one holy family—Abraham and his descendants—through whom he would reach out to all people.
• It describes the many ways they proved unfaithful and the many ways God remained faithful to them.
• It also records the many prophecies of a coming King who would rescue the people from their own unfaithfulness and pave the way for everyone to have a relationship to God.
• The New Testament shows how Jesus was the fulfillment of those prophecies and how by his death on the cross he purchased people back (redeemed them) from their slavery to sin and made the new relationship with God a possibility.
• It teaches that all who believe in Jesus are adopted into this new family.
• Finally, it teaches what life in the new family of God is supposed to look like, what God is doing to re-create the hearts of those in his family, and what God plans to do in the future to re-create the world into what it was supposed to be from the beginning.

One of the most foundationally important issues when it comes to any religious or theological belief system is the understanding of where the authority for one’s belief originates. Catholics look to the traditions and history of the church, but Protestants (and more specifically, Evangelicals) recognize the Bible as the sole authority for matters of faith. Here are a few key reasons I personally believe in the complete authority of Scripture over every other human or institution.

Textual Accuracy

The textual accuracy of the Bible is unmatched by any document in human history. The NT far outstrips all other documents in antiquity both for the abundance of ancient manuscripts and the relatively small number of discrepancies between them. In fact, the earliest known New Testament manuscript comes from the Gospel of John and it dates from within 50 years of its authorship.

Comparatively, the earliest manuscript of Josephus (an ancient Jewish/Roman historian) dates from roughly 1000 years after its origin, and the earliest known copy of Homer’s Odyssey dates from nearly 900 years after its origin.

The story of the OT is nowhere near that of the NT, but its textual history is still far beyond that of any other ancient document. We have many fewer manuscripts of the OT, but they not only outnumber all other ancient documents, they also agree with each other with more than 90% accuracy.

On top of it all, when the whole Bible is considered a few things are true:

• When spelling changes and other minor errors are factored out, the discrepancies among biblical manuscripts amount to less than 5% of the total.
• Among the significant discrepancies, none of them impact any important theological truth.

Historical Accuracy

The Bible is unique among ancient spiritual documents in that it records a great deal of verifiable history. Names of people groups, geographical information, natural phenomena, events with dates, and even stories of events concerning the surrounding nations. Many of these claims are recorded with such accuracy that they can be cross referenced with the historical records of other civilizations to produce accurate dates within months or even days.

What is most remarkable is that in nearly every case where the Bible has made a claim that can be verified through modern methods of archaeology, those claims have been confirmed. In fact, there have been a number of instances where the Bible has made a claim that anthropologists and archaeologists have doubted only to discover through additional research that the Biblical record was in fact right on target. There still is one or two issues outstanding where the best archaeology seems to disagree with the best biblical scholarship, but a clear determination can’t yet be made.

Intrabiblical claims (NT about the OT including Jesus’ testimony)

Many ancient documents make claims about themselves, but what sets the Bible apart is the fact that it was compiled by many authors who make claims regarding the authority of the other authors.

• David, in Psalm 119 especially, highlights the authority of the “Law” or the first five books of the Old Testament. Moses authored those.
• The Prophets of the Old Testament spoke of the power of God at work in the life and writings of David.
• The later prophets confirmed the word of the earlier prophets.
• Jesus confirmed the authority of the entire Old Testament by claiming that it would last until heaven and earth passed away and also that it all pointed to his own ministry.
• The early apostles confirmed the earlier writings about Jesus by quoting from them.
• The apostle Paul spoke about the authority of “all Scripture.”
• The apostle Peter spoke about the authority of the ancient prophecies in the same breath as talking about the authority of Paul’s writings.

While the Qu’ran might declare itself to be the only authoritative Scripture, it is still the word of Mohammed about his own writings. The Bible is the word of one author about the authority of the others.

Spiritual History

No book throughout human history has proven to be as spiritually effective as the Bible has. Wherever the Bible has been translated into the common language of the people it has left a trail of dramatically transformed lives. It has been the number one best seller of all time not because of a slick marketing campaign or because of the American penchant for creating and buying new editions each month but because of its relevance across all barriers of language, culture, and time.

The Bible has nearly universal appeal and has proven to be the spiritual book par excellence of all time.

Personal Experience

None of these claims would have personal appeal to me unless they were backed up by the simple truth of the Bible making a difference in my own life—and that, it has done.

From the practical advice on how to live and the spiritual claims of how to be right with God to the intellectual stimulation of the historical records, the Bible is without a doubt, the best book I have ever read, and it continues to be so in my life. It is the first book I recommend to anyone who is interested in spiritual things, and I am convinced that it will make a difference in the life of anyone who reads it with an open heart and a little bit of guidance from someone who is familiar with its contents.

Conclusions

• The text of the Bible has been accurately transmitted from antiquity to today.
• The historically verifiable content of the Bible has been consistently confirmed by scientific inquiry.
• The spiritual content of the Bible has changed the lives of people in every culture where it has been read.
• The practical advice of the Bible has also been successful regardless of culture.
• The Bible itself claims it is the authoritative word of the God who Created all things.

Because of these things, I have given the Bible the place of ultimate authority in my life and will continue to propose that others do the same.

The question of Biblical “inerrancy” has been raised a number of times particularly in the past 50 years or so. Before answering this question, I think it’s important to simply highlight what the real issue is.

The Foundation of our Faith

The Bible forms the foundation of the Christian faith, and in fact, in one way or another it forms the foundation for the Jewish faith as well as various Christian sects, so the question of the authority of the Bible is one of the most fundamental questions we can answer. It is essential that we establish whether the Bible is an authoritative document or merely a helpful document or something less.

Real authority requires complete reliability

Another reason this question is so important is that in order for the Bible to be considered authoritative in a person’s life it must be a reliable document. If a friend isn’t trustworthy in what he or she tells you, it’s unlikely you will be willing to take advice from that person.

There are many people who might want to believe that the Bible can have spiritual authority in our lives even if it isn’t completely reliable. I can’t accept that kind of reasoning. If the Bible is unreliable in even the smallest part, then for me, it would bring into question other parts. Ultimately, it would boil down to me making a judgment call on each issue to determine if that particular claim were reliable or not. In other words, the authority would not be the Bible. I, as the final evaluator of the claims, would retain the authority for myself, and the Bible could be at best a motivational document but nothing more.

The question we must answer:

Therefore, since the Bible must be completely reliable in order to have any real authority, the question we must answer for ourselves boils down to this, “How accurate (reliable) is the Bible?”

The possible answers can be summarized in these statements:

• The Bible is completely free of any errors of any kind.
• The Bible as it was originally written was completely free of any errors of any kind.
• The Bible as it was originally written was completely free of any factual errors concerning the intended claims of the authors.
• The Bible as correctly interpreted is free of any errors.
• The Bible, correctly interpreted, is authoritative though not entirely without fault.

These are important distinctions because these statements make all the difference in understanding both what the Bible means to say and what it means for my life today. For example, apparent conflicts between the Bible and science only exist if you adopt the first two statements.

However, if you adopt the final statement, there really is no reason to trust the Bible very much because it depends on the work of the interpreter and also on the presupposition that it could be wrong in some areas.

In brief, the first option is naive and ignores the fact that minor spelling and grammatical errors exist in nearly every copy and/or translation of the Bible.

The final option is of no help because if humans have authority of interpretation and determining what is “right” and what is “wrong” in the Bible, then it loses nearly all of its authority over us.

Which option is mine? Which option is that upheld by our church?

From my personal Doctrinal Statement:

I believe that God, through the Holy Spirit, divinely inspired human agents to record special revelation in the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments. This inspiration is such that the written words of Scripture are fully the words of God and fully the words of the human who penned them. Thus, they reflect the personalities and proclivities of the individual authors but are the completely inerrant communication of God to people. That is, the Scriptures as the authors originally intended them are entirely free from error in all matters to which they pertain. They are the final authority of faith and life (Ro 3:2, 16:25ff.; 2Ti 3:16f.; 2Pe 1:20f.).

From my church’s Doctrinal Statement:

The Bible is the Word of God, fully inspired and without error in the original manuscripts, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and it has supreme authority in all matters of faith and conduct. (Romans 15:4, 2 Timothy 3:16-17, 2 Peter 1:19-21).