Hi there. Welcome everyone to this brand new course. I'm Dr. Nick Liebisch.
I'll be your instructor for this course. I'm so, so excited to have you be part of this. It's entitled Scripture 101, a general introduction of the Bible. And it's one of our two foundational courses for Scripture Introition.com, one of which being is a 40 part series of salvation history where we put all the Bible together.
It's the most thorough introduction to salvation history that exists that I'm aware of at least. And then this course, a 10 part series on what the Bible is. Because so many people, they say the Bible is the word of God. We read it in masses, preachers give sermons on the Bible, denominations everywhere.
I love it. We have it in small groups and devotionals everywhere. It's everywhere. But we have some really important questions that we have to answer first.
Beginning with divine revelation, like the Bible contextualized and God's desire to reveal himself to us. In fact, that's going to be the topic of next week's lecture. So divine revelation, and we need to understand where did the Bible come from? Did it just fall from the sky in perfect King James English with those little tabs there on the side and golden gilded edges and little table of contents and glossary in the back?
No, it didn't. The Bible came to us organically through tradition in authority of the church. I want to talk about the reliability of scriptures. It is the Bible reliable because you hear all the time people say, well, the Bible that we have today is just copies of copies of copies of copies.
And so it's actually not a faithful replica of what was originally written. So we can't trust it. And inspiration and errantcy, what does this mean? We say the Bible is inspired all the time.
It's the word of God. What exactly does that mean? And what doesn't it mean? There's proper models of understanding and inspiration and errantcy.
And there is improper models or theories. We need to look at that. Interpreting a scripture is important. Not just anybody.
In fact, we're going to look at all the verses. St. Peter says, prophecy of scripture is not a matter of one's own interpretation. You just can't just pick it up and be like, oh, I know exactly what the Bible says here and I this authoritative interpretation.
That's just nonsense. Now, we need to understand the overview of salvation history. Just a one hour overview. That's going to be quite difficult.
But we're going to do that. We're also going to look at Jesus Christ. He claims to be divine. Well, how so?
Because some people will say, Jesus never claimed to be divine. You can't find that in the gospel. We're going to look at all that. The identity of Jesus Christ is what it's all about.
And then finally, we're going to look at the Bible in prayer. I think I'm missing some of the topics in there, but this is kind of an overview of what we're looking at in this course. The Bible in prayer, because ultimately reading of scripture goes beyond just an academic exercise, right? Looking at the scriptures, the languages and how we all do fit together.
The scriptures is our Lord, our Heavenly Father communicating to us through the Son, Jesus Christ, in order to have a relationship with us. So as we even see in this lesson here today, it's our Heavenly Father's love letter. So we engage in our Lord in a relationship and a dialogue of prayer. So we're going to look at all of these foundational fundamental topics.
So which hopefully then when you read the scriptures, you read whatever book, you know, from the prophets or the gospels or Paul's letters, whatever it is, you really have this, you know, firmly planted in your mind as to why we believe what we believe about scripture. That it's not like any other book. You see? So I'm really excited about that.
So this first lesson as we kick off the series is just what is the scriptures and what I like to do is introduce the Bible and we're going to go over a lot of these main topics kind of like in a sequence and kind of a narrative sequence of what we want to talk about and why because there is a logical flow to all of these topics. Okay. So you have your notes in front of you. If you don't have them, you can just print them right off the website, you can log in and print them off there as you did when you got into class.
What I like to begin with is this part one looking at scripture with fresh eyes because the Bible is something else altogether. It is much greater, much more impactful, much more powerful than any other piece of literature, work of literature that exists. I know that's a bold claim, but it's true. It's greater than Homer.
It's greater than Shakespeare. It's greater than Jane Austen. It's greater than, I don't know, you're feeling the blank. It's greater than anything.
It's not just a book of children's stories. A lot of people like to reduce it to these great children stories or myths or epics or fairy tales because you've got mila and he climbs onto this boat with all these animals and the world is covered in water and there's a flood and isn't that cute, right? And then you've got Moses and the plagues and the Red Sea and all those cute little stories and Abraham and David and Goliath and all this stuff. But it's so much more than just children's stories and it's more than myths or epics or anything like that.
It's true history as we're going to see. It's true history, but it's biblical history. You have to understand our understanding of history is not necessarily the same as their history. It is true history.
All right. We'll see this in Genesis here. It's true history, God truly created man and woman. These are our first parents.
Well, I'm getting ahead of myself. Look at all of this. They are true historical events. So the scripture is also more than just a collection of wise sayings or moral admonishments.
It is that, but again, it's more than that. In fact, we have a whole literary category in scriptures called the wisdom literature. So you are going to find moral admonishments there. You're going to find the Ten Commandments and Jesus teaches us in the Sermon of the Mount and throughout his whole public ministry how we are to love God and to love our neighbor.
They are moral admonishments. It's much more than just be kind to each other. It's much more than just follow the golden rule. It has to do with our relationships and with God and with others.
But we don't want to really reduce it to that. Like a collection of self-help stuff. It's more than just inspiration or I read it and I'm inspired to be good. I'm inspired.
Yes, it is that, but it's so much more than that. And it's more than just another holy book all the time in my conversations with students or people online even. People say, oh, the Bible is just another holy book. There's so many other holy books out there.
You've got the Quran for Islam. These are all written in your notes. You've never heard of them before. The Tibicata with Buddhism, Vedas is Hinduism in America.
There's the Book of Mormon. There's always a couple of Mormons knocking on the doors saying I'd like to talk with you about Jesus and Joseph Smith. And they pull out the Book of Mormon next to the Bible. And one of these things is not like the other.
The Bible is not just another holy book. What we believe, Catholics and Protestants, what we believe about scripture and what I want to demonstrate to you as we go through this 10-part series is that scripture is the inspired word of Almighty God. Thus it is true. It is good.
It is beautiful. It is true good and beautiful. So it's not just fairy tales. It's not just myths.
It's not epics. It's not any of these things like inspirational book. It's the word of God. It really truly is the word of God.
It's the greatest book ever written as it's famously called here. It's truly a worldwide bestseller, which is so interesting to me. It's the number one best seller. If you go online and Google it and you find out how many copies of the Bible has been sold there's something like 5 billion copies, which honestly seems like a conservative number to me.
But 5 billion Bibles in various languages is pretty impressive. There's 800 million Quran. I mean, obviously these could be fact-checked. You just got to go on who really knows the number.
Honestly, but something like 800 million Quran have been sold, 120 million books of Mormon. So we see 5 billion Bibles. That's incredible. It truly is the worldwide all-time bestseller.
And not only that, but there's millions and millions of books that are published about the Bible. Devotionals, scholarly articles, books of different sorts. There's courses that are taught in colleges and universities, whether they're good or bad. There's little courses on the Bible because everyone recognizes it is the most influential literary book out there.
Even non-believers who don't think it's the word of God have to recognize this is an incredibly important book. So we think it's and we believe and we're convinced that it is the word of God as Catholics and Protestants. And I think the worldwide bestseller is something to show that. And there are various stories and verses and teachings and idioms that have permeated our history, our literature, our language, things like cast the first stone or the writing on the wall.
Just a couple that come to mind here. This comes from scripture. And there's so many more. I just mentioned just a couple of them here.
So like our whole culture, you want to study the scriptures just to kind of understand our language or culture. It typically isn't the West at least rooted in Judeo-Christian values. It's becoming less and less the case, unfortunately, to our great time. Boom, really.
But it has permeated our culture here. And the Bible does provide answers to the big questions about life. If we're paying attention, if we're not distracted out there by all the noise that the culture throws at us with screens and movies and social media and all the rest of it, right, we have questions about life. Like who am I?
Where do I come from? Where am I going? Does God exist? What's the problem of evil, etc., etc., you know that there'd be a philosopher or have a philosophy to agree to ask these basic questions about life.
You just have to be paying attention and you have to care to find the answers. Well, the scriptures is, again, I was going to share with you heavily in the next lesson, is our Heavenly Father's love letter to us. It's his own self-revelation to us. And so he gives us the answers to these questions about life.
And so therefore, it has changed the lives of billions of people. I find this absolutely mind-blowing. You don't find stories of people who read Homer's Iliad or Shakespeare or, like I said before, Jane Austen or whatever it might be, whatever your great work of literary art is. You don't find people converting from a life of sin in their own words, whether unhappy, they're frustrated about life, they're miserable or whatever it is.
And then they read the scriptures, they encounter Jesus Christ and they convert. But the scriptures have converted billions of people really worldwide for the past two thousand years. That's mind-blowing. That never really happens with other religions really, not to this extent at least.
So it really is therefore a heaven-sent treasure. A heaven-sent treasure is what Pius XII calls it. The quote is right here in your notes. A heaven-sent treasure that we need to cherish beautifully, cherish devotedly.
We need to faithfully study it. We need to ardently love it. It's a love letter in fact, which is in this next quote in your notes you're going to see it's from Vatican to it's called Beyverbum, a paragraph 11 Beyverbum. If you're not aware of this, it means the word of God.
It's a fantastic document from Vatican to divine revelation and scripture. So if you read with me here, it says, in the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet his children and talks with him. The scriptures are heavenly Father's love letter. It's him communicating to us, revealing himself to us.
And I'm sorry, but the Quran doesn't do this. The Venice doesn't do this. The Book of Mormon doesn't do this. Only scripture, and I know that might be really hard to swallow for some people.
Only scripture, only the Old New Testament together is our Heavenly Father's love letter to us. And that's something that we should read. If you're married to somebody or you're engaged to somebody and they write you a love letter, you don't just look at it and say, oh, that's kind of nice. You talk that on the shelf and you let it collect dust.
Well, that's what too many of us do with our Heavenly Father's love letter. We talk about that on the shelf and it begins to collect dust. And we shouldn't do that. We need to cherish it.
Because all scripture reveals Christ ultimately. God wants to reveal himself. Ultimately, the fullness of his revelation is the person of Jesus Christ. And that's why we're going to go towards and lead towards an end in the Bible in prayer, that lesson number 10, which will come up in a number of weeks from now, how we need to enter into that relationship with Christ.
All scripture speaks Christ. I got a great quote for you in your notes, Catechism of the Catholic Church. That's the abbreviation CCC. Pereograph 134 says this, all sacred scripture is but one book.
And this book is Christ. Because all divine scripture speaks Christ, all divine scripture is fulfilled in Christ. And that's what we're going to see in all of our scripture studies on this website, scripture and church.com, but also other teachers of scripture. You want to see how the new and the Old Testament fit together.
It's not like they're divided like the God of the Old Testament is some wicked vindictive harsh God and everything gets better when Jesus comes along. No, they're go together, right? They form one whole and that whole is Jesus Christ. So we need a no scripture.
There's a famous line here from Saint Jerome. I quoted all the time, ignorance of scripture is ignorance of Christ. And this is something that teaches us a harsh lesson. Like if you don't know scripture, you don't know Christ as you should, you know, no scripture, K in O W is as the line goes, K in O W, no scripture, no Christ, all right, K in O W, no scripture, no Christ.
And there's some truth to that. I mean, it's kind of a simplification, of course, but there's some truth to the fact that if you know scripture and you study it and you pray over it and you communicate to God, you're going to fall in love with Jesus Christ. That's what all this is all about. Okay.
So all scriptures centers on Jesus Christ. Therefore, if we wanted to devotion to Jesus, we have to have a devotion to the Bible. You know, we need to treat, there's a lot of online, you know, memes and social media posts out there that circle from time to time about like, how, what if we treated the scriptures, we treated our cell phones, you know, if we forgot our cell phone at home, we turn around and go get it and we check it like if we're at a stop light or, you know, we've got some 10 minutes to fill in the doctor's office and we bust out our Bible and we read some scripture that would change our lives because again, we're coming into contact with Jesus Christ. All right.
So we don't want to have just also a fifth grade level of scripture. Oftentimes, this happens in Catholic circles, but also in Protestant circles. I know because I was raised to Protestant. What often happens is the formation of an individual person stop somewhere around junior high or high school and then they go into the world and then the world just kind of corrupts them and and shakes them out of the truth and beautiful and they fall away.
We need to have more than just a superficial fifth grade knowledge of scripture. I mean, what if we only had a fifth grade education in general? We didn't study math or science or literature or history or logic or any of these types of things, we would be in deep deep trouble when we get out to the real world. Same thing is true with our formation of our faith.
Okay. So let's begin to open up this particular lesson. Now let's look at a really fantastic quote of the Catechism, quoting David Revan. How we can begin to see how scripture is the words of God and the words of man and we're going to unpack that as we go along.
Sound good? Alright. So let's look here at this next section of your notes. Hi, I'm Dr.
Nick. Thank you so much for watching this clip. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did and you want to access the entire lesson and the entire course, come visit us over at scripture and tradition.com and join our community of students.
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