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One of the great rediscoveries of the Reformation — especially of Martin Luther — was that the word of God comes to us in the form of a book, the Bible. Luther grasped this powerful fact: God preserves the experience of salvation and holiness from generation to generation by means of a book of revelation, not a bishop in Rome. The life-giving and life-threatening risk of the Reformation was the rejection of the pope and councils as the infallible, final authority of the church. Luther’s adversary, Sylvester Prierias, wrote, “He who does not accept the doctrine of the Church of Rome and pontiff of Rome as an infallible rule of faith, from which the Holy Scriptures, too, draw their strength and authority, is a heretic”...

I was asked, “If there is a way to correctly interpret Scripture, then why do so many ‘learned’ people come away with different interpretations?” Variations of this question come up from time to time: If a god had really inspired the Bible, wouldn’t he have written it clearly enough for everyone to understand? Don’t disagreements on the meaning of the text disprove its divine origins? People can make the Bible say whatever they want it to say; doesn’t that prove there’s no one correct interpretation? If God intended to communicate a particular meaning through the biblical authors, and if God inspired their writing, why do people interpret the Bible differently? The fault lies not with God or with the text but with us. Here are three reasons why this happens....

“Remember, a Jedi can feel the Force flowing through him.” Obi-Wan’s admonition to Luke Skywalker sums up what some skeptics probably think about Christianity. If it were real, they would be able to “feel it” in some tangible way, and perhaps also be able to manipulate its power. A skeptic I spoke with recently framed it this way: “I don’t ‘feel’ God in my heart the way most theists claim to, I don’t see any external justification for his existence, and I simply see no good reason to believe. So why is it my fault that I don’t believe? God supposedly created me just the way I am, after all. So, I’m not ‘rejecting God’ since he never made himself known to me in any real way. So why is non-belief a crime at all? What is the effect of non-belief that is so horrible?”...