The purpose of this doctoral-project is to address the millennial generation's loss of confidence in the Bible as God's authoritative word. Many young adults wonder if a thoughtful person can still seriously believe that God wrote a book. Today, there are an unprecedented number of sophisticated attacks on the origin, credibility, and reliability of the Bible and these attacks are being evaluated in a personal and social context where secularism is undercutting the possibility of spiritual and moral knowledge, and skepticism toward institutional religion is at an all-time high. In the absence of a thoughtful response to these challenges, a new generation will continue to see their confidence in the authority of the Bible erode.;In order to address this problem, it is necessary to engage the following urgent challenges: (1) anti-intellectualism in Christianity; (2) skepticism regarding the historical Jesus; (3) discovering what the earliest Christians believed; (4) defining the nature and scope of the New Testament canon; (5) engaging questions of authorship and pseudonymous New Testament writings; (6) claims of textual changes and corruption; (7) claims of biblical contradictions; (8) claims that the Bible is unscientific; (9) claims that the Bible is immoral (specifically sexist, racist, homophobic, and genocidal); (10) confusion over the doctrine of Scripture; and (11) that there is no privileged or objective interpretation of the biblical text. It is the conclusion of this project that these challenges can be reasonably addressed and that young adults can have confidence that God has authoritatively spoken in the Bible concerning life's most important questions.
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