All Christians believe that the Bible is the Word of God in some way. This is why for all Christians, the Bible has authority.
‘All Scripture is inspired by God.’ 2 Timothy 3:16
They hope to read the Bible and to hear (in some way) the voice of God within it.
Literalists
Literalists believe that it is word for word the word of God and must be taken literally in all ways.
- This means that the Bible cannot contain any mistakes. Everything in it is true.
- In some way it was God that wrote the Bible, not humans.
- If the Bible seems to contradict itself, there must be some reason for this.
- If the Bible seems to contradict science, then scientists must be wrong.
Fundamentalists
Fundamentalists are very similar to literalists, but they believe that we can interpret the words a bit.
- All the Bible was directly inspired by God and so cannot contain errors.
- The Genesis story is correct, but the word for ‘day’ might mean ‘a period of time’.
- For example fundamentalists believe that the world was created in six days and that Adam and Eve were the first humans.
Conservatives
Conservatives believe that the Bible is inspired by God but written by human writers.
- It is God’s message in human words.
- Some of the personal beliefs and interests of the writers has come into their books.
- The Bible is not a science book – there is no problem in believing in evolution and seeing the creation story in Genesis as poetic.
- Conservatives look for truths in the message of the Bible. Some of these are that God created the world, spoke through the prophets, came to earth in Jesus, who died and rose from the dead and so on.
Liberals
Liberals believe that the writers of the Bible were inspired like any good writer.
- The Bible contains spiritual truths not literal truths.
- The Bible can help people to come closer to God in some way because the writers are sharing their experiences of God in some way.
- Many parts of the Bible are symbolic and poetic.
- There is a big range of beliefs among liberals.
- For example, some may believe all Jesus’ miracles are symbolic – others may believe that the healing ones happened, but things like the walking on water did not
