Cliff Taylor

If you’re going to use my books to let me guide your reading of the Bible, then you probably want to know something of where I’m coming from. This account should help you to know that.

After studying Maths in Manchester and Theology in Cambridge, I spent nearly twenty years in full-time Christian ministry, regularly preaching and teaching through the Bible. After that, I joined a Pentecostal church and spent another twenty years teaching Maths, Statistics and Computing in schools and Further Education colleges. Now that I’ve retired, I’m still doing some Maths teaching, and am using a lot of time writing books.

My grandfather, John Taylor, left his work as an apprentice blacksmith, and became a colporteur, distributing tracts around villages in the west country. As his work developed, he became a minister and evangelist who was radically opposed to the Modernist views which were prominent in the churches of his time.

His son, my father, – Cliff Taylor, like me – was also a minister, but never aligned himself with any particular school of theology, although he retained his father’s suspicion of anything too liberal. When I was studying theology in Cambridge [or ‘Divinity’ as it’s called there], much of the teaching was firmly in the liberal camp. Through my first few years in full-time ministry, I gradually worked out which of those teachings I could retain, and which I had to reject in favour of a more traditional position. Still, like my father, I’ve never signed up to the teachings of fundamentalism in any of its varieties.

My main issue with fundamentalism is that it’s a man-made doctrine which requires the Bible to adhere to its ideas. To me, that’s an impertinence. I’d much rather read the Bible, remaining open to what it says, warts ’n’ all. In that way, I hope to present a recognisably traditional message without rejecting too much of the scholarship of the last hundred years.

On several occasions, I’ve run a ‘Bible in a year’ course. My “Bible Walkthrough” volumes are an expansion of that course. It worries me when Christians only ever use the Bible as if it’s a promise box – they flick through its pages until they find a form of words which seems to address their situation, and then they take that extract as God’s Word to them. But such extracts need to be checked out against the ‘whole counsel of scripture’. In other words, we need to have a good overview of God’s Word so that we can see if our understanding of a particular verse fits the big picture properly. The Bible Walkthrough series is designed to accompany you as you do the kind of Bible reading that will help you to get that overview.

The Walkthrough series is concerned with your understanding of what the Bible actually says, but it doesn’t do much to deal with what the Bible says particularly to you. That needs a more detailed reading which is addressed in my “New Testament Commentary” series, of which the first few volumes are already online. These volumes don’t have the kind of formal introduction to each book that you might expect in a commentary. That sort of introduction is covered in the Walkthrough series, so you might like to precede one of the Commentary volumes with the relevant Walkthrough book.

One issue which is not properly addressed in the Bible is the doctrine of the Trinity. This is an approach which developed in the early church, using the ideas then current in a Hellenistic culture. As Christians are still supposed to assent to this doctrine, it’s rather embarrassing that the doctrine is so hard to understand. My book, “The Trinity, a worshipper’s guide”, offers you a way through that dilemma.

An issue which bedevils some people’s reading of the Bible is the way that some words are used in the Bible in a quite different way from how we use them today. My book, “Not for the Press”, looks at some examples of that problem, offering some relevant background on the use of those words in the Bible. [The title relates to one example which puzzled me when I was young.]

My hope and prayer is that, as you use my books, the Bible will become more intelligible to you, and more likely to be used by the Lord to address his Word to you.