Hard Sayings by Trent Horn

Hard Sayings
A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties
by Trent Horn

Have you ever read something in the Bible and just scratched your head, or been challenged by a skeptic to explain a seemingly scandalous verse?

Trent Horn can help.

In Hard Sayings, Trent looks at dozens of the most confounding passages in Scripture and offers clear, reasonable, and Catholic keys to unlocking their true meaning.

Trent Horn addresses questions like the Bible being full of "bad" history, women being portrayed as less valuable than men, or that God is a murderous tyrant. Each chapter breaks down the reason for the questions and shows the Catholic explanations that help shed light on these objections. This  book would especially be good for someone who was teaching RCIA or who continually is having the Bible held up as a mass of contradictions.

Horn breaks down the confusing passages into three groups:

• External Difficulties - when the Bible seems at odds with modern knowledge
• Internal Difficulties - when there are contradictions between passages or 
• Moral Difficulties - where evil actions seem endorsed by God's commands

As he works through the sections and objections, Horn is also methodically educating the reader about the Bible as literature. This culminates in his Bible-reading rules. These include things like reading passages in context of the larger work, checking your translation against the original language, and that the authors weren't divine stenographers.

I knew many of those concepts, but a few were new when thinking about discussing the Bible. For example, the Bible is allowed to be a sole witness to history, incomplete is not inaccurate, and the burden of proof is on the critic, not the believer.

Hard Answers is an accessible, balanced work that I'll be keeping as a reference. Definitely recommended.