Why Should I Believe the Bible?

Four modern theologians. Four distinct arguments. One cumulative case for trusting Scripture with your life.

Here’s a question worth sitting with: If someone handed you a book and told you it was the Word of God — would you believe them?

Most of us, if we’re honest, don’t spend a lot of time thinking about why we believe the Bible. We were raised with it, or we came to faith through it, or we’ve simply found it true in our experience. That’s not nothing. But it’s also not nothing when a skeptical friend, an unchurched grandchild, or a dark season of doubt asks a harder question — not “Is the Bible useful?” but “Is the Bible true? And how would you know?”

These are fair questions. They deserve real answers.

What follows is a survey of four of the most significant Christian thinkers working today, each making a distinct case for why the Bible deserves our trust. They don’t simply repeat each other. Historian N.T. Wright grounds the case in the hard soil of historical evidence. Philosopher Alvin Plantinga challenges the assumption that we need external proof for faith to be rational. Pastor and apologist Timothy Keller argues that the biblical story explains human experience better than its competitors. And New Testament scholar Craig Keener makes the case that the God of Scripture is still showing up in the world in ways that demand explanation.

Together, they build what apologists call a cumulative case — not a single knock-down argument, but a convergence of lines of evidence and reasoning that makes trust in Scripture not a leap in the dark, but a well-reasoned step toward the light.

N.T. Wright: The Historical Case

Tom Wright spent decades as a New Testament scholar and then as Bishop of Durham in the Church of England before becoming one of the most widely read theologians in the English-speaking world. His central contribution to the question of biblical trustworthiness is deceptively simple: if Jesus of Nazareth rose bodily from the dead, then the Scriptures that predicted, described, and interpreted that event deserve far more than polite consideration. They deserve our full faith.

What sets Wright apart is that he doesn’t treat the resurrection as a religious doctrine that believers accept by faith and skeptics politely set aside. He treats it as a historical claim that must be evaluated by the same tools we use for any other claim about the ancient world. And his conclusion, after exhaustive historical research, is that the resurrection is the most historically credible explanation for the available evidence.

The evidence Wright marshals is substantial. First, the tomb was empty — and this was never seriously disputed in the early centuries. The opponents of Christianity didn’t claim the disciples were hallucinating; they claimed the body had been stolen. That concession matters. Second, numerous individuals and groups reported encounters with the risen Jesus over a period of weeks, in varied circumstances, in ways that don’t fit the typical pattern of grief-induced visions. Third, and most striking to Wright, a community of resurrection-believing Jews began gathering in Jerusalem within weeks of the crucifixion — the very city where Jesus had just been publicly executed — and they did so at great personal risk. People do not die for a hallucination they know to be false.

“The resurrection is not a ‘religious experience’ to be privatized or spiritualized. It is a claim about something that happened in real space and real time — and historians cannot simply dismiss it without accounting for the evidence that demands it.”

Wright’s argument for Scripture flows from this: if the resurrection actually happened, then the Jewish texts that anticipated a Messiah who would suffer and be vindicated by God — texts that Jesus himself claimed to be fulfilling — are not mythology or wishful thinking. They are revelation. And the apostolic letters and Gospels that interpreted the resurrection event are not pious fabrications but eyewitness testimony about the defining event in human history.

For the person who wonders whether the Bible is just an ancient collection of human religious writing, Wright’s challenge is this: engage with the historical evidence for the resurrection. Don’t start with doctrine. Start with history. If Jesus rose, the rest of Scripture’s claims about God, humanity, sin, and redemption suddenly carry the weight of a divine author behind them.

Key works: The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003), Simply Christian (2006), The New Testament and the People of God

Alvin Plantinga: The Philosophical Case

Alvin Plantinga retired from the University of Notre Dame as arguably the most influential analytic philosopher of religion in the twentieth century. He is not a popularizer — his most important works are dense, technical, and aimed squarely at other philosophers. But his arguments have profound implications for every ordinary believer who has ever been told that faith is irrational without evidence.

Plantinga’s central contribution is what he calls “Reformed epistemology” — a theory of how religious belief can be rational, or in his technical term, “warranted,” without requiring external evidential proof. His argument runs roughly as follows: we accept many beliefs as rational without first proving them with argument. We believe other minds exist, that the past was real, that our memories are generally reliable — not because we’ve constructed philosophical arguments for these things, but because our cognitive faculties produce these beliefs in us naturally. Plantinga calls such beliefs “properly basic.”

His claim is that belief in God — and by extension, belief that Scripture is God’s Word — can also be properly basic. God has so constituted human beings with a sensus divinitatis, an innate sense of the divine, that belief in God arises naturally and properly in certain circumstances. And beyond that, the Holy Spirit works through Scripture in such a way that believers who read it with an open heart develop a deep, warranted conviction of its divine origin — not because they’ve read all the apologetics, but because their belief-forming faculties are functioning exactly as God designed them.

“The question is not whether belief in God requires an argument. The question is whether one’s cognitive faculties are functioning properly when they produce belief in God. If they are, the belief is rational — regardless of whether it’s supported by independent proof.”

This matters because a common form of intellectual pressure on Christians goes like this: “You can’t rationally believe the Bible unless you can prove it’s true by standards that don’t assume it’s true.” Plantinga dismantles the epistemological framework behind that challenge. The demand for independent, non-circular proof assumes a particular theory of rationality — one that, on examination, doesn’t hold up even in secular philosophy. We don’t require that kind of proof for most of the beliefs we stake our lives on every day.

For veterans and ordinary believers who carry deep convictions about the truth of Scripture without being able to articulate a formal argument for it, Plantinga offers something valuable: the reassurance that such conviction is not intellectually irresponsible. The internal witness of the Holy Spirit to the truth of God’s Word is not a philosophical weakness. It is a proper response of a functioning human soul to divine revelation.

Key works: Warranted Christian Belief (2000), Where the Conflict Really Lies (2011), God and Other Minds

Timothy Keller: The Coherence Case

Timothy Keller founded Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan in 1989 and spent three decades engaging some of the most secular and skeptical people in America with the claims of the Christian faith. Before his death in 2023, he became one of the most widely read pastors in the world, beloved by Christians across traditions for his ability to take modern doubts seriously while making a winsome, intellectually rigorous case for the gospel. He is dearly missed.

Keller’s approach to biblical trustworthiness doesn’t begin with textual criticism or historical evidence. It begins with a simpler observation: the biblical narrative — creation, fall, redemption, restoration — explains the human condition with a coherence and depth that no secular alternative can match.

Consider the problem of human dignity and human depravity. Secular frameworks struggle to hold both together. If we are merely the products of evolutionary processes optimizing for survival, it’s hard to explain why human dignity should be treated as sacred, or why certain things — torture, exploitation, betrayal — are not just personally distasteful but genuinely, objectively wrong. On the other hand, if humans are fundamentally good and rational, it’s hard to explain the persistence of cruelty, injustice, and self-destruction that marks every human civilization. The biblical account — that we are image-bearers of God (dignity) who have turned away from God in fundamental rebellion (depravity) — makes sense of both realities simultaneously in a way nothing else does.

“Every major objection to Christianity tends to assume a standard of justice, compassion, or rationality. But those standards themselves need grounding. Christianity provides that grounding. The critics are, without realizing it, borrowing capital from the very worldview they’re trying to refute.”

Keller also made the coherence argument from the inside — pointing to the Bible’s remarkable internal unity. Sixty-six books, written by more than forty authors across fifteen centuries, in multiple genres, from radically different cultural contexts — and they tell one coherent story, with one central character whose shadow falls across every page. The law anticipates him. The prophets announce him. The Psalms cry out for him. The Gospels reveal him. The letters interpret him. Revelation consummates him. This degree of coherence cannot be explained by editorial committee. It points to a single Author behind many human voices.

For those in your congregation who wrestle with the intellectual respectability of faith, Keller offers a model: don’t flee the hard questions. Engage them. Show that Christianity doesn’t just survive scrutiny — it makes better sense of the data of human experience than the alternatives do. The Bible isn’t trying to outrun reason. It’s inviting reason to go deeper.

Key works: The Reason for God (2008), Making Sense of God (2016), Preaching (2015), The Prodigal God

Craig Keener: The Experiential Case

Craig Keener is a professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary and one of the most prolific biblical commentators alive. His multi-volume commentaries on Matthew, John, Acts, and Romans are standard reference works in serious biblical scholarship. But Keener is perhaps best known outside scholarly circles for a two-volume work he published in 2011 that made a straightforward, empirically grounded argument: miracles happen, they are still happening today, and the Enlightenment assumption that they cannot happen is a philosophical prejudice dressed up as scientific conclusion.

In Miracles, Keener compiled hundreds of documented accounts of healings, restorations, and resurrections from around the world — many supported by medical records, multiple witnesses, and credible testimony. He is careful and methodical. He is not interested in tabloid claims. He is interested in the kind of evidence that would be taken seriously in any other context and asking why it is reflexively dismissed when it occurs in a religious setting.

His argument cuts at the root of a common objection to biblical miracles. The standard skeptical position, going back to David Hume, is that miracles are by definition the least probable explanation for any event, because natural causes are always more likely. But Keener points out that this is not a conclusion drawn from evidence — it is a philosophical assumption brought to the evidence. If God exists and is active in the world, then miracles are not improbable at all. The question of whether miracles happen cannot be settled by defining them out of existence before you look at the data.

“The uniformity of nature is a useful working assumption for laboratory science. It is not a license to rule out divine activity in the world. That ruling requires a philosophical commitment to naturalism — and naturalism is not science. It is a worldview.”

For biblical trustworthiness, Keener’s argument runs like this: the Bible is full of claims about God acting supernaturally in history — in the exodus, in the prophets, in the ministry of Jesus, in the early church. If we assume from the start that such things don’t happen, we will read the Bible as mythology. But if the God described in Scripture is real — and if that God is still acting in the world today in ways that are documented and credible — then the biblical accounts of his activity in history are not mythology. They are history.

Keener’s work is particularly valuable for those who have experienced something they cannot explain — a healing, an answered prayer that defied probability, a moment of clear divine intervention — and been quietly embarrassed about it in a culture that treats such experiences as signs of intellectual immaturity. Keener takes their experience seriously. He says: you are not imagining things. The God of the Bible shows up. He always has. And the fact that he still does is evidence that the book describing him is telling the truth.

Key works: Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts (2011), The Historical Jesus of the Gospels (2009), Acts: An Exegetical Commentary (4 vols.)

The Cumulative Case: Why It Matters That There Are Four

None of these four arguments stands alone as a decisive proof. Wright himself would acknowledge that historical argument can establish probability, not mathematical certainty. Plantinga’s epistemology tells us faith can be rational, not that it’s compelled. Keller’s coherence argument can be resisted by someone committed to holding the alternative pieces together by sheer force of will. And Keener’s miracle accounts can always be subjected to one more round of skeptical scrutiny.

But that misses the point of a cumulative case. No single strand of rope holds a ship to a dock. But weave enough strands together and you have something that holds against the tide.

The resurrection is historically defensible. Belief in Scripture can be rationally grounded without external proof. The biblical story coheres with and explains human experience better than any competitor. And the God described in Scripture is still acting in the world in ways that demand explanation. When these four lines converge — when history, philosophy, coherence, and experience all point in the same direction — the person who dismisses Scripture without serious engagement is not being more rational than the believer. They are being less so.

There is a reason the Bible has survived every era of intellectual assault in human history. Generation after generation of brilliant, skeptical minds have set out to demolish it and ended up, in case after case, as its most passionate defenders. Lew Wallace wrote Ben-Hur while trying to disprove the resurrection. Frank Morison wrote Who Moved the Stone? as a skeptic’s project and finished it as a believer. C.S. Lewis described himself as “the most reluctant convert in all of England.” The list goes on.

This is not because the Bible is immune to criticism. It is because honest engagement with the evidence keeps pointing in the same direction.

A Word for Those Who Already Believe

If you already trust Scripture, this survey isn’t primarily an invitation to rebuild your faith on argument. Your faith may rest, as Plantinga would say, on something more direct than argument — on the living voice of God speaking through the text, on the work of the Holy Spirit producing deep and warranted conviction in your soul. That is not second-rate faith. It may be the most reliable kind.

But knowing why the Bible is trustworthy — being able to articulate something of the historical, philosophical, and experiential case — is not just for your benefit. It is for the people around you. The grandchild who is drifting. The coworker who thinks faith is for people who can’t handle doubt. The fellow veteran who is drawn to something in you but can’t yet name it as Christ.

You do not need to be a theologian. But you can know this much: smart, honest, rigorous people have looked at the Bible from every angle — historical, philosophical, literary, experiential — and they keep finding reasons to trust it. You are not alone. You are not being naive. You are standing on ground that has held for two thousand years.

The Bible doesn’t ask you to ignore your mind. It asks you to bring your whole mind — along with your heart and your will — and meet the God who wrote it.

Key Scriptures: 2 Timothy 3:16–17 • 1 Peter 1:23–25 • Hebrews 4:12 • John 17:17 • Psalm 119:105 • 1 Corinthians 15:3–8 • 2 Peter 1:20–21 • Luke 24:44–47