Latest D. A. Carson Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I suspect that relatively few people will sit down and read 1250 pages [ of The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures.] all the way through from cover to cover. There may be some, but not everybody. But there are many, many, many different Christian, theological, pastoral, specialisms that are covered by one section or another of the book and this will become, therefore, a resource volume for many people.

  D. A. Carson

  Christian, Book, People

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• What the Bible says is what God has disclosed and we want to approach this sacred text with cognitive reverence.

  D. A. Carson

  Want, Sacred, Reverence

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• You get into theological education and you're busy marking papers and getting into administration in raising funds and doing all the things that are part of life, but here we were talking about important theological, historical, gospel related, biblically centered things hour after hour after hour.

  D. A. Carson

  Talking, Historical, After Hours

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• It's not a matter of us standing outside it and ticking off the boxes: yes, the Bible is faithful here; yes, it's telling the truth there, and so on, but rather granted that it's God-given. It's the frame of reference that shows us how to live in, tells us how to think about everything.

  D. A. Carson

  Thinking, Faithful, Matter

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• God has disclosed of himself in human words with such magnificent self accommodation to our limitations. Precisely so that we may be his holy people and reverence everything that he says, cherish it, value it, and thus live it out.

  D. A. Carson

  Self, People, May

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• We treat the Bible, not as if it's a magic book that has to be handled like a piece of abracadabra, make sure it's dusted, never put it on the floor, and things like that.

  D. A. Carson

  Book, Magic, Pieces

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• Some people say What's the use of the term if it has to be so fully documented and constrained and footnoted and all the rest. My response to that is: there is no theological word that does not have to be similarly footnoted and constrained: justification, spirit, sanctification etc. Any term can be distorted or domesticated or fly off the handle because of another alien philosophical structure that's imposed on the text and so on. Inerrancy is no different from what we find in every other theologically loaded word.

  D. A. Carson

  Philosophical, People, Doe

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• At the end of the day, in brief summary: inerrancy is interested in the truthfulness of Scripture and it is a powerful way forcing people to think about that reliability that is God-given.

  D. A. Carson

  Powerful, Thinking, People

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• For example, the Bible does say this is a proposition, "There is no God." But of course the context of Psalm 14:1 enriches it a bit: "the fool has said in his heart, there is no God." So there are contextual constraints and when you finish putting in all the contextual constraints and sophisticated discussions of what inerrancy is and isn't.

  D. A. Carson

  Heart, Example, Doe

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• Not all Scripture is propositional, some of it is asking questions, some of it's rhetorical, but where Scripture is stating something, asserting something, making a truth claim, uttering a proposition that is claiming to be true, it is the truth.

  D. A. Carson

  Asking Questions, Scripture, Claims

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• So there are all kinds of things that grammarian purists would argue are awkward forms of speech and sometimes they are intentional for rhetorical effect and sometimes it's the way people chose to write at the time. Inerrancy isn't interested in any of those kinds of things.

  D. A. Carson

  Writing, People, Awkward

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• The truth of the matter is that inerrancy is simply a way of saying that there are no errors that call into question the truthfulness of Scripture wherever Scripture is making truth claims.

  D. A. Carson

  Errors, Matter, Way

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• I can say that it's 10 miles from my home to Trinity, when in fact that's not quite right, it's off by about 10%, but nobody would say that I'm telling a lie or making a mistake when I rounded off because that's the way we speak and rounded off terms regularly.

  D. A. Carson

  Mistake, Lying, Home

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• A wrong understanding is interested in precisionism. That is it tries to say that the Bible can't be telling the truth if it says that Jesus was such and such a distance from some place or other and in fact the distance is off by 15% or something like that. There are all kinds of grounded figures and so forth.

  D. A. Carson

  Jesus, Distance, Understanding

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• The Bible is not interested in precisionism unless the context indicates that precision is particularly important.

  D. A. Carson

  Important, Precision, Not Interested

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• The New Testament writers I think conceive of their inspired Scripture writings as flushing out, bringing to articulation, expounding and so on the climactic revelation in the son, but this in self-conscious fulfillment of the promises and covenants that were already made to God's chosen people in Old Testament times.

  D. A. Carson

  Writing, Son, Thinking

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• It's not as if the New Testament writers came along and said, "The culmination of Old Testament books is more books, New Testament books." In some ways they thought instead of the culmination of Old Testament books being Christ himself, the word incarnate as the opening verses of Hebrews 1 put it. In the past God spoke to the fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his son and the son is revelation.

  D. A. Carson

  Father, Book, Son

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• The New Testament writers did not invent a doctrine of Scripture they inherited it.

  D. A. Carson

  Doctrine, Scripture, New Testament

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• In terms of applicability to today's world, many people are trying to domesticate Scripture so as to get the PC answer, the politically correct answer on a wide range of subjects, whether it's homosexual marriage, or a certain view of government, or a certain view of eschatology or whatever. At the end of the day we want also to encourage the kind of reverent handling of Scripture that wants to be corrected by Scripture, that is more eager to be mastered by Scripture then to master it.

  D. A. Carson

  Government, Homosexual Marriage, Views

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• Some have argued that the Christian notion of Scripture is not epistemologically sustainable. It's not philosophically possible with rigor to uphold the Christian understanding of Scripture.

  D. A. Carson

  Christian, Understanding, Scripture

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• There is no sense in which Mohammed is viewed as a writer.

  D. A. Carson

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• We want to fan the flames of Christians for whom inerrancy and the authority of Scripture are not mere shibboleths, but part of her life beat, part of the beating heart of what makes them tick. They revere Scripture, not because Scripture becomes an idol, but because it discloses God who is especially come after us in salvation and redemption through the person of his son, his cross, his resurrection, the full sweep of the gospel.

  D. A. Carson

  Christian, Heart, Son

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• Others have questions about how it is that God and human beings can both be speaking through the one document such that you can see and read the personalities of the human authors with their individual vocabularies and literary genres, and yet this is nevertheless the word of God. How can that be? This is quite a contrast with Islam, for example, which holds that the Koran has been dictated in Arabic by God and as a result Mohammed is nothing more than the one who memorizes the word so as to pass it on. There is nothing of human contribution.

  D. A. Carson

  Vocabulary, Literary Genre, Personality

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• Authority can mean different things to different people. For example, some document or other may be authoritative for particular group even though it's not reliable. It's just that the group has accepted that document as authoritative for their group. And some documents are truthful and reliable but they are ignored, so they have no authority for that particular group.

  D. A. Carson

  Mean, People, Groups

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

• When Christians speak of the authority of Scripture, because Christians believe that this word, even though it's mediated through many different human authors, nevertheless is God breathed and is revealed by God and is utterly reliable and all that it says, with all of its different literary genres, it's trustworthy and without mistake or distortion. It is trustworthy and therefore, because it is from God it has God's authority.

  D. A. Carson

  Christian, Mistake, Believe

  Source: www.booksataglance.com