A Boy Asked One Question at a Funeral. It Took Sixty Years to Answer.
Rev. Dennis McCullough’s In Search of Biblical Truth challenges what most Christians were taught and never questioned
It started with a contradiction nobody else seemed to notice.
At a family funeral, a young boy listened as the pastor said their loved one was “walking hand in hand with Jesus.” Minutes later, the same pastor read that “the dead in Christ shall rise first.” If the soul was already in heaven, why would it need to rise?
He asked. The pastor told him he was too young to understand. But to that boy, Dennis “Chip” McCullough, the answer landed differently. The pastor didn’t know.
That moment cracked open something that never closed.
Bible colleges, ancient language courses, a Doctor of Ministry degree, decades of study fed by one stubborn need: to know whether the Bible says what he was taught it means.
In Search of Biblical Truth is the result. It reads not like a lecture but like a conversation, sometimes uncomfortable, often surprising, between a lifelong churchgoer and the questions nobody around him would sit with.
Take the serpent. Most Christians grow up believing Satan disguised himself as a snake in Eden. McCullough asks something so simple it stops you: why wasn’t Eve afraid? Why wasn’t she surprised when it spoke? And why does God punish it like an animal, cursing it to crawl and eat dust, if it was a fallen angel? He follows the Hebrew. The answer will unsettle a lot of people. The serpent was never Satan. It was exactly what Genesis calls it. A beast of the field.
That is one chapter. He keeps going. The “Lucifer” of Isaiah 14, never an angel’s name but a Latin word for the morning star, aimed at the king of Babylon. The burning hell most Christians grew up fearing, not Scripture but Dante. The pre-tribulation rapture, invented in the 1830s. The Magi, never at the manger.
These are not small claims. McCullough knows it. He has watched family walk away mid-conversation and been dismissed by professors who could not produce a Bible reference for what they taught. He has sat with conclusions that cost him relationships and earned silence where he hoped for dialogue.
But there is no bitterness here. Frustration, yes, and a directness born from years of being told he was wrong without being shown why. Underneath it is something harder to wave off, a care for what the text says in its original languages, and for the people who deserve to read it on its own terms.
This is a book for anyone who noticed something did not add up but never felt permission to say so. McCullough is saying it.
About the Author
Rev. Dennis “Chip” McCullough was born on April 14, 1945, in Greenville, South Carolina, into a working-class family in the cotton-mill villages of the upstate. His father fixed looms at Poe Mill. His mother worked the weave room before training as a licensed practical nurse. Church was woven into everything, not so much a choice as something you inherited along with the red clay and the Sunday clothes.
McCullough’s road to ministry was anything but straight. He served as a military instructor, raised a family, and carried questions about Scripture that most people around him would not sit with. That restlessness led him through seminary, Bible colleges, and years of independent study in biblical Hebrew, Greek, and the customs of the ancient world. He pursued a Doctor of Ministry degree not for the title but because he needed to know, on his own terms, whether the Bible was true and whether he had ever understood it.
He has preached in churches across the South and Midwest, from small congregations near Metter, Georgia, to a pulpit in Joplin, Missouri. He belongs to no single denomination and makes no claim to the final word. What he does claim is a willingness to follow the text wherever it leads, even when it leads away from everything he was raised to believe.
In Search of Biblical Truth is his first book.
If something in your own reading of Scripture never quite added up, if you have carried a question you were told not to ask, this book was written with you in mind. In Search of Biblical Truth is available now in e-book, paperback, and hardcover:
Media Contact
Company Name: authors book publishing
Contact Person: Dennis Rae McCullough
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Country: United States
Website: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H4BWCGL6
