Our friends at The Gospel Coalition have been posting a series of beautifully-produced video roundtable discussions between different pastors. One recent discussion between Don Carson, John Piper and Tim Keller about Biblical authority caught my attention:

The video is only six minutes long, but there are enough ideas in there to keep you thinking for days. There’s no question that doubt, uncertainty, and relativism have become dominant in the Western approach to religion. This presents an obvious problem for pastors and preachers, who are called to confidently preach Biblical truth in the face of deep skepticism of any claim to authority. How can pastors teach the Bible authoritatively while being sensitive to the fact that people are approaching the Bible with an increasing variety of assumptions and backgrounds?

My favorite quote from the discussion is by Tim Keller, who neatly sums up the difficulty pastors face in this environment:

What I’m afraid is [that these trends give] a lot of young guys the feeling that no one really knows. It’s almost impossible to be sure what these texts are saying except for a few of them… “Well, who knows what the Bible says about that really? There’s so many different views.”

He goes on to argue that despite this overwhelming challenge, pastors have to get over it, do their homework and be authoritative.