Timothy K. Beal
Timothy Beal is Distinguished University Professor, Florence Harkness Professor of Religion, and Director of h.lab at Case Western Reserve University. He has published sixteen books, including When Time Is Short: Finding Our Way in the Anthropocene (Beacon Press, 2022) and The Book of Revelation: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2018), for which he won a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has also written popular essays on religion and culture for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Christian Century, among others.
Tim was born in Hood River, Oregon and grew up near Anchorage, Alaska. He now commutes between Cleveland, Ohio, where he works, and Denver, Colorado, where he lives with his wife, Clover Reuter Beal, a Presbyterian minister. They have two grown kids, Sophie and Seth.
“Bible debunkers and Bible defenders are kindred spirits. They agree that the Bible is on trial. They agree on the terms of the debate, and what’s at stake, namely its credibility as God’s infallible book. They agree that Christianity stands or falls, triumphs or fails, depending on whether the Bible is found to be inconsistent, to contradict itself. The question for both sides is whether it fails to answer questions, from the most trivial to the ultimate, consistently and reliably. But you can’t fail at something you’re not trying to do. To ask whether the Bible fails to give consistent answers or be of one voice with itself presumes that it was built to do so. That’s a false presumption, rooted no doubt in thinking of it as the book that God wrote. As we have seen, biblical literature is constantly interpreting, interrogating, and disagreeing with itself. Virtually nothing is asserted someplace that is not called into question or undermined elsewhere.”