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Essay / Biblical Beliefs and Authority in the Bible - 531
The Bible, a foundational collection of Christian texts, contains the fundamental principles and core beliefs of the faith. To say that the Bible has authority is to say that what it says about how everyone should live their lives is true and should be followed. To finally understand why the Bible has authority, we must turn directly to God. HD McDonald, in his excerpt from the Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, states that "the authority of the Bible is established by its own assertions." This means that the words written in the Bible do not strictly belong to the one who wrote them since the words come from God himself. The writer simply served as a scribe. The Bible repeatedly affirms that God is perfect and without fault. Therefore, as the ultimate power, he has authority over his people and shapes the expectations they have of them. He reveals his authority to humans by giving them a revelation, which Elmer Towns defines in his book Theology for Today as "the act by which God gives us knowledge of himself which we could not otherwise know." The entire text of the Bible I...