If we pick up the Bible as God's word and at the beginning read with trepidation, then the whole of the Bible is so read. This book was written to help Christians navigate some of the forces of modernity, which have crept into the church and influenced the way Christians view the reliability of the biblical creation account and more generally the Bible. Its purpose is to encourage readers to see the steadfastness of God's word as a way of making sense of our lives and the world we live in....

How is it possible to hold a New Testament ethic to love one's enemies and pray for their physical infliction, shame, death, and suffering of family members? And yet, the Psalter, the prayer book of the Church, contains such prayers. In modern times, the Church has adopted a semi-Marcionite attitude towards these troubling texts, excluding whole psalms or parts from liturgies and private use. But as the age of "terror" dawns upon us, we are finding that these texts speak of unchanging real...