Can the Bible Be Trusted? | The Branch

"It is everything it claims to be. It's human. It's this human document that has this divine inspiration to it." - Pastor Chris Reed

For many people, the journey of faith does not fall apart because of a single dramatic moment. It unravels slowly, often through questions about the Bible itself. Questions about its reliability, its history, its apparent contradictions, and the ways it has been used to harm people can quietly erode a person's confidence in scripture long before they ever use the word deconstruction.

In this episode of The Branch Podcast, Pastors Matthew Johnson, Chris Reed, and Anthony Lombardi sit down to address those questions directly. As part of the ongoing Reconstruct series, the conversation works through five common tensions people bring to scripture and five personal distorters that shape the way people read it. What makes this conversation different is who is having it. All three pastors describe themselves as skeptics. None of them arrived at their convictions without doing the hard intellectual and spiritual work of wrestling with these questions personally.

One of the most clarifying moments in the episode comes when Pastor Chris Reed reflects on what his graduate studies revealed about how scripture was formed. Learning about the human processes behind the Bible - how it took shape over centuries, how manuscripts were copied and transmitted, how the canon was confirmed - was, as he describes it, unsettling at first.

But that process led him somewhere important. Rather than undermining his confidence in scripture, it gave him a more honest and durable framework for understanding what the Bible actually is. It is not a document that fell from heaven in its final form. It is a human document shaped by human history, language, and culture - and it carries within it the divine inspiration of God.

Pastor Anthony Lombardi makes a similar point when he describes what he calls the condescension of God. Because God is infinite and humanity is finite and time-bound, God consistently steps into human context to make himself known. He uses human language. He works within human culture. The Bible is, in that sense, exactly what God intended it to be - a revelation of himself delivered through the means his people could receive and understand.

Pastor Anthony Lombardi recaps the Sunday message that prompted this episode, walking through several of the most common reasons people struggle to trust the Bible.

The first is the reality that Christians have used the same Bible to justify vastly different beliefs and behaviors - including racism, abuse, and the defense of slavery. Pastor Anthony Lombardi is clear that this is a genuine problem, rooted in the fact that every reader brings a cultural lens to the text. The answer is not to abandon the effort of interpretation but to do the hard work of understanding what the original authors intended and what the overall narrative of scripture reveals about the heart of God. Lazy interpretation has caused enormous harm throughout history. Careful, humble, community-shaped interpretation is what the text requires.

The second tension involves cultural practices in scripture that appear immoral or outdated. Here, Pastor Anthony Lombardi points to what theologians call progressive revelation - the idea that God has been working within broken human cultures across history, not endorsing every cultural norm he worked within, but consistently pointing toward his design for human flourishing. The trajectory of scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, reveals a God who is always moving toward restoration.

The third tension is one Pastor Chris Reed addresses with striking honesty. He acknowledges directly that the Bible has, in fact, been changed over time - that textual variants exist, that manuscripts differ, and that translations have been adjusted as earlier documents have been discovered. But the key point is that none of these changes touch the theological core of the faith. Scholars estimate approximately 99% accuracy of the original manuscripts, and every significant variant is documented in the footnotes of responsible translations. The same God who inspired scripture has also overseen its preservation.

The fourth tension - the apparent difference between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament - is one Pastor Anthony Lombardi calls a widely assumed but ultimately unsupported idea. Read carefully and completely, the Old Testament reveals a God of remarkable patience. Pastor Matthew Johnson adds that even the exile of Israel, often cited as evidence of divine harshness, was a measured and merciful response to 490 years of repeated rebellion. The God who disciplines in love throughout the Old Testament is the same God who invites repentance and offers forgiveness in the New.

The fifth tension concerns apparent conflicts between scripture and science or history. Pastor Anthony Lombardi's response is direct: the Bible was not written to answer the questions modern readers bring to it. It is not a science textbook. It is not a history book. It is primarily a book of theology - God revealing himself, his character, and his purposes to the world. When readers demand that scripture answer questions it was never intended to address, confusion is the predictable result.

The second half of the conversation turns from common objections to personal distorters - lenses through which people read the Bible that have less to do with the text itself and more to do with the reader.

Pastor Chris Reed speaks to the distorting effect of personal pain, church hurt, and disappointment. His insight is precise: people often go to the Bible looking for intellectual answers to emotional wounds, and when those answers do not satisfy, they conclude the Bible has failed them. The real need, he suggests, is emotional healing alongside intellectual understanding. The Bible does not always provide the silver bullet verse for a person's specific pain, but it consistently confirms that the pain is real, that God is present in it, and that he will one day bring it to an end.

Pastor Anthony Lombardi addresses the distorting effect of modern culture. Every person reads scripture through a lens shaped by family, ethnicity, nationality, and lived experience. The danger comes when that cultural lens becomes the standard by which God himself is judged. When a reader decides that the Bible is acceptable only where it agrees with their existing moral framework, they have effectively placed themselves in the position of highest authority. Scripture, Pastor Anthony Lombardi argues, is meant to shape culture - not the other way around.

The third distorter is rebellion - the simple human resistance to being told what to do. Pastor Matthew Johnson connects this to Judges 21:25, where everyone doing what is right in their own eyes leads not to freedom but to chaos. The distorter here is not primarily intellectual. It is a posture of the heart.

The fourth distorter is social media and shallow information. Pastor Anthony Lombardi draws a pointed distinction between sincere doubters who genuinely want to engage with hard questions and people who have adopted lazy intellectual arguments without examining them. TikTok clips and social media posts that claim the Bible has been corrupted beyond recognition are not evidence. They are noise. And mistaking noise for evidence prevents the kind of serious engagement that could actually lead somewhere.

The fifth distorter is the failure of Christian representatives. Pastor Anthony Lombardi's point here is one of the most important in the episode. People's choices do not equal God's intent. The hypocrisy, legalism, and abuse that have characterized some expressions of Christianity throughout history are not what Jesus taught, and they are not what scripture endorses. In fact, Jesus himself confronted the religious leaders of his day for precisely these failures. The same people that skeptics point to as reasons to reject the Bible - Jesus pointed to as well.

What holds the entire conversation together is the posture all three pastors share. Pastor Anthony Lombardi describes an encounter with Jesus that preceded his intellectual investigation of scripture - and then a determination to follow the evidence wherever it led, without assuming the conclusion in advance. Pastor Chris Reed describes a graduate-level education that raised more questions than it answered, and a faith that grew more honest and more resilient through the process.

Pastor Matthew Johnson puts it this way: his faith is not ultimately founded on the Bible. It is founded on a personal relationship with Jesus. The Bible is not the source of salvation. Christ crucified and risen is. The Bible is the record and the revelation of that reality, and it is a trustworthy one - but the center of faith is the person of Jesus, not the document alone.
For anyone who has found themselves asking whether the Bible can actually be trusted, this conversation is an honest and substantive place to begin.

If this conversation has stirred something in you and you are looking for a community where questions are welcomed, and faith is explored with honesty and depth, The Tree Church would love to have you.

The Tree Church gathers every Sunday at 9:00 AM and 11:00 AM at two locations in central Ohio. Whether you are in the Lancaster area or closer to Logan, there is a campus near you.

• Lancaster Campus: 721 N Memorial Dr, Lancaster, OH 43130, USA
• Logan Campus: 36 Hocking Mall, Logan, OH 43138, USA