Humans have a strange need to defend God. Somehow deep-wired into us is a desire to protect God from God's own actions. (At least the central poetic section of) the book of Job argues forcefully that this desire is wrong, humans cannot make God just because we lack the necessary inforation to understand. Indeed the very desire is impious! (As the formulaton above "make God just" makes clear by its phrasing - this desire is blasphemy, setting self over God.)

Claude is running a series about one of the ways many Evangelicals are tempted to commit this impiety, saving the Bible from itself. The reasoning seems to go:

• the Bible is God's word
• therefore it can contain no error
• my Bible seems to say that Joshua wrote the book that follows Deuteronomy or that Amos wrote the book that has his name on it
• but scholarship shows that these people are very unlikely to have written these books
• therefore scholars are wrong and not proper Bible-believing Evangelicals 

The result is a whole industry that seeks to protect the Bible (and the God to whom it belongs) from itself. Great Bible readers of the past were more careful in their reading of the Bible, and less inclined to believe that they knew better than God! On the date of Joshua (one regular candidate for such "defense") Calvin wrote:

As to the Author of this Book, it is better to suspend our judgment than to make random assertions.