Unlike the narrative of another Abrahamic religion, God has not sent a man to tell us about a book, but has given us a book that tells us about a man. I cherish the book because it was instrumental in leading me to the Man. The God we love, serve and obey is a living God. Not a book.
To be clear, this is not meant to be critical of Islam or the holy book of the people of Islam or their prophet, but to distinguish the two regarding a fundamental difference. The bibliolatry of certain fundamentalist groups has more in common with historic Islam than with historic Christianity.
Dr. Bird, while I understand why you want to defend Andy Stanley's take, thinking that there is some alignment with his view on Scripture with yours, but after several years of once following his teachings and even defending him myself, I have come to realize that there are trends in his theology that are concerning.
His book, Irresistible, contains bits and pieces that I realize I could not ignore. Particular, pg. 93, 110-11, and other sections where Stanley emphasized how the Old Testament Scriptures were fulfilled in Jesus, and thus, while they are inspired, it does not mean they hold any authority anymore towards the Christian. He attempts to break down the relevance of the OT Scriptures by nuancing that yes, it is part of our Canon, but that Canon was created well after Church, and the Church did fine without the OT Scriptures for a long time.
On pg. 155-158, he would make this statement:
"Jesus treated the Hebrew Scriptures as authoritative. Paul insisted they were God-breathed. Peter believed Jewish writers were carried along by the Holy Spirit. But they never claimed their faith was based on the integrity of the documents themselves."
This was part of his conclusion that it was a mistake for the Church to have taken in the OT Scriptures, that were Jewish, and make them apart of our faith as Christians.
Other Biblical scholars such as Carmen Imes, and Brent Strawn, have noticed this devaluation of the OT from Stanley's writings, sermons. Strawn's book, "The OT is Dying" goes into the danger of losing OT familiarity, something of which Stanley in his church sermons for the last couple of years has trended towards.
Finally, his view on the OT has eventually led to his church's partnering with Matthew Vines' Reformation Project back in Feb 2023, hosting a conference that pushed Side A open and affirming theology, something of which Stanley admitted his church had been doing for the past decade quietly. This was also around the same time when Stanley's views on the OT began to become more prominent in his books, appearing in Deep and Wide, in his sermons, and later in Irresistible.
I say all this as a once fan of Stanley's work, but over the years, especially when I realized his views on Acts 15, the Jerusalem Council, did not mesh with the research from other scholars who did not see the Council as addressing tableside fellowship, but something more profound and deeper to the unity of Jew and Gentile, I began to reexamine how I understood what Stanley was doing.
Anyhows, please accept this as a gentile pushback. I used to be a defender of Stanley, but have had to take a step back and reexamine his works across the board.
Mike, I'm not defending everything Stanley says everywhere and all the time, but on this issue, I think he's right. He is remarkably similar to N.T. Wright's view on the topic.
I appreciate that clarification, my concern has more to do with more practiced theological convictions that the OT scriptures have reached an obsolescence status due to Jesus’s fulfilling of the Law, conflating legal statutes with all of the breadth of the OT writings. His reasonings in Irresistible appeared more motivated to move away from the OT (particularly OT violence) due to objections from the New Atheism when his books came out.
I agree that the authority ultimately comes from the Triune God and there is a beauty when a reader encounters the Spirit enlivening the words as one reads. I think I’ve become more cautious to Stanley’s works after seeing how his views on the OT has led to practiced out theology that I cannot support and I know due to his relegation that the OT is not an authoritative text, it makes findings common basis difficult.
It is interesting that Peter and Paul probably would have thought that the Book of Enoch, Testament of the Patriarchs and other non-canonical books were also inspired and worth quoting or alluding to.
Thanks for this. Your reference to the Southern Baptists dispalys what Andy Stanley is (and has been) concerned about for years. The Father, Son, and Holy Bible mindset.
We also should keep in mind that he is certainly not anti-Bible. In the decades of sermons I have heard from him, he at least once in each sermon strongly encourages the congregation to read their Bibles.
I whole heartedly agree with your views about Jesus’ authority and the Bible. I’m not sure that Andy Stanley is saying the same thing. My concern with Brother Stanley is that he is part of a growing group of American pastors whose views have been significantly influenced by secular culture, and who are now in search of a hermeneutic by which they can justify what they have already decided to believe. It gives me no pleasure to think this. I have great respect for Brother Stanley as a church builder, but a great church builder who rejects the authority of scripture may end up doing more harm than good.
Hi Mark, yes, I'm not gonna agreeing with Stanley on everything, every time, in every instance, but on this topic, I think he, me and NTW are remarkably close.
I agree with N.T. Wright .. but I would add to his sentence in brackets ( ) : " This authority, we discover, has to do with the Holy Spirit. And the whole church is then, and thereby, given authority to work within God’s world as his accredited agent(s) ( as presented upon the foundation of the witness of the Apostles ) " .. Michael J. Kruger has recently added to the debate " The Question of Canon - Challenging the status quo in the New Testament debate " Inter-Varsity Press, Norton Street, Nottingham , England. 2013. .. If you can't locate a copy, then I would be happy to mail my copy down to you on a lend basis.. I also observe that the verse in question, is given in the Aorist tense ( Ἐδόθη - is given )and therefore my view is that the authority is in the discourse between the risen Lord and His Apostles as his chief witness. So the Aorist focuses the moment of the discourse purely upon the Lord alone.. And also it is the passive voice.. So I agree with N.T. Wright ..
Yes. This is where I am now at having been raised Southern Baptist and serving as an SBC pastor for 30 years. It took a JOB experience to reset my faith framework, but as it rebooted I realized I had been worshiping the Bible all those years more than I had Jesus. One thing you will never hear asked in any SBC setting (seminary, church, or otherwise) is "How did the early church do so well without the New Testament?"
I totally agree with you. Jesus says “I am the way, the *Truth,*, and the life.” So Jesus Himself is Truth - to me that means that ultimately Truth is found in a person, not in doctrines or “eternal truths” or whatever else, but a living person. And when we are in relationship with Truth, we are changed by Him. The Bible is vital to show us who Jesus is - I was a member of a church for a while who claimed to follow Jesus but then never really dived much into Scripture to see who Jesus actually is. So the Bible is very important, but isn’t the ultimate revelation of God, Jesus is.
Andy’s point was hit and miss. The Bible is witness to and receives authority in God. I wish Andy had pointed out that the Bible’s authority is derivative of God’s and that the whole of the Scriptures is the recording of God’s speech-acts. I love this concept of speech-acts; if God’s speech is his actions then the Bible derives authority because it proclaims those same speech-acts.
What Andy is saying needs to be heard and it needs to be taken into context. And it needs to be deeply thought of because Christians are being pulled in every direction by both sides of the pendulum, progressive or fundamentalist.
How does this relate to what Orthodoxy calls "Holy Tradition."
"Unlike many conceptions of tradition in popular understanding, the Orthodox Church does not regard Holy Tradition as something which grows and expands over time, forming a collection of practices and doctrines which accrue, gradually becoming something more developed and eventually unrecognizable to the first Christians. Rather, Holy Tradition is that same faith which Christ taught to the Apostles and which they gave to their disciples, preserved in the whole Church and especially in its leadership through Apostolic Succession."
I fully agree with your take on this. I will mention however that there are those that so emphasize this difference, and so elevate the authority of Jesus relative to the Bible, that false interpretations of the Bible can more easily occur. I think we need to realize God is a good author and He has given us a book we need. Of course it must be rightly interpreted and understood, but apparently God felt we needed it to protect us from undue subjectivity in our relationship to Him!
Thanks for this. I live in Louisiana where apparently the governor thinks authority is found through posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom tho he continues to cut many non profit funds. Now apparently Oklahoma schools may be required to have the whole bible in each classroom because that should be the authority. I love scripture and learning from it but when we place it above the authority of Jesus himself we are headed in downfall. Just my thoughts from my average perspective. 😊
My first concern is with Andy's casual description of a Bible that was more or less slapped together 300 years after the fact. This ignores the manuscript evidence where whole gospels, epistles and fragments appear much earlier. The gospels and letters were often carried from city to city, and copied before sending them on to the next church. Communities of faith may not have had the entire NT in one volume, but they cherished the records they did have. Andy seems to imply that the Bible suddenly appeared around 300 AD as the product of a council, rather than the councils ratifying the books that had been taken and used as authentic for generations going back to the apostolic era.
My second concern is that untethering Christian faith from the OT certainly seems like a different pattern than the methods of Jesus. And that is deeply troublesome.
Without a magisterium or strong link to church tradition as the Holy Spirit guiding the church, what is one left with but biblicism? Is it the case that Liberal Protestants use textual criticism to endlessly reinterpret the text and fundamentalist Protestants use textual criticism to try to find the definitive meaning of every text. Whereas Christ as the authority through his apostles (the church as pillar and foundation of the truth) means we have clearer lines of authority and orthodoxy.
We only know about the triune God thru Scripture. We would know almost nothing definitively about who God is and who Jesus was without the Old and New Testaments. These are our only witnesses of infallible truth about the nature of who God is and what He has done salvifically down thru the ages. Before the gospels and letters of the New Testament were written, we had the apostles themselves spreading that message and some of them (including close associates) writing it down with an ability to write without error. These had to be written for our sake before they died otherwise there would be NO Jesus to remember of all of His words and works and therefore we all would be still waiting for that Messiah promised by His prophets. The apostles possessed that oral testimony of all that Jesus said and did until they passed from the scene of history. When they did pass from the scene, they left us the many things(but not all) that God did thru His Son and thru His apostles whom He called to be the foundation of His Church himself being the cornerstone. How do we know this? Through His Holy Word. The gospel preached about the Word made flesh and then those Words inscripturated is not God, but it is His powerful Word/message able to saves souls from sin and eternal death by the power of God's Holy Spirit which can make the spiritually dead live.
A lot of good points there Bill, especially about the need to write down what the accounts of Jesus. I would suggest that while the trinity is implicit in scripture we don’t automatically arrive at a trinitarian formulation just by reading scripture. Arius was a student of scripture but his interpretation (I understand that it was the majority opinion in his day) was found to be wrong. The church councils clarified the meaning of the scriptures as to the nature of God. This seems to be the work of the Spirit guiding the church into all truth.
I've always thought that Romans 1 says God has made something of himself known to every human heart. Does the Holy Spirit need a text to work in someone's life? I doubt it.
Second thought, may or may not be related -- Jesus said our greatest commandments are to love God and our neighbors as ourselves. Seems like this could be done without knowing how to read.
Unlike the narrative of another Abrahamic religion, God has not sent a man to tell us about a book, but has given us a book that tells us about a man. I cherish the book because it was instrumental in leading me to the Man. The God we love, serve and obey is a living God. Not a book.
To be clear, this is not meant to be critical of Islam or the holy book of the people of Islam or their prophet, but to distinguish the two regarding a fundamental difference. The bibliolatry of certain fundamentalist groups has more in common with historic Islam than with historic Christianity.
I concur Peter!
Dr. Bird, while I understand why you want to defend Andy Stanley's take, thinking that there is some alignment with his view on Scripture with yours, but after several years of once following his teachings and even defending him myself, I have come to realize that there are trends in his theology that are concerning.
His book, Irresistible, contains bits and pieces that I realize I could not ignore. Particular, pg. 93, 110-11, and other sections where Stanley emphasized how the Old Testament Scriptures were fulfilled in Jesus, and thus, while they are inspired, it does not mean they hold any authority anymore towards the Christian. He attempts to break down the relevance of the OT Scriptures by nuancing that yes, it is part of our Canon, but that Canon was created well after Church, and the Church did fine without the OT Scriptures for a long time.
On pg. 155-158, he would make this statement:
"Jesus treated the Hebrew Scriptures as authoritative. Paul insisted they were God-breathed. Peter believed Jewish writers were carried along by the Holy Spirit. But they never claimed their faith was based on the integrity of the documents themselves."
This was part of his conclusion that it was a mistake for the Church to have taken in the OT Scriptures, that were Jewish, and make them apart of our faith as Christians.
Other Biblical scholars such as Carmen Imes, and Brent Strawn, have noticed this devaluation of the OT from Stanley's writings, sermons. Strawn's book, "The OT is Dying" goes into the danger of losing OT familiarity, something of which Stanley in his church sermons for the last couple of years has trended towards.
Finally, his view on the OT has eventually led to his church's partnering with Matthew Vines' Reformation Project back in Feb 2023, hosting a conference that pushed Side A open and affirming theology, something of which Stanley admitted his church had been doing for the past decade quietly. This was also around the same time when Stanley's views on the OT began to become more prominent in his books, appearing in Deep and Wide, in his sermons, and later in Irresistible.
I say all this as a once fan of Stanley's work, but over the years, especially when I realized his views on Acts 15, the Jerusalem Council, did not mesh with the research from other scholars who did not see the Council as addressing tableside fellowship, but something more profound and deeper to the unity of Jew and Gentile, I began to reexamine how I understood what Stanley was doing.
Anyhows, please accept this as a gentile pushback. I used to be a defender of Stanley, but have had to take a step back and reexamine his works across the board.
Mike, I'm not defending everything Stanley says everywhere and all the time, but on this issue, I think he's right. He is remarkably similar to N.T. Wright's view on the topic.
I appreciate that clarification, my concern has more to do with more practiced theological convictions that the OT scriptures have reached an obsolescence status due to Jesus’s fulfilling of the Law, conflating legal statutes with all of the breadth of the OT writings. His reasonings in Irresistible appeared more motivated to move away from the OT (particularly OT violence) due to objections from the New Atheism when his books came out.
I agree that the authority ultimately comes from the Triune God and there is a beauty when a reader encounters the Spirit enlivening the words as one reads. I think I’ve become more cautious to Stanley’s works after seeing how his views on the OT has led to practiced out theology that I cannot support and I know due to his relegation that the OT is not an authoritative text, it makes findings common basis difficult.
It is interesting that Peter and Paul probably would have thought that the Book of Enoch, Testament of the Patriarchs and other non-canonical books were also inspired and worth quoting or alluding to.
Thanks for this. Your reference to the Southern Baptists dispalys what Andy Stanley is (and has been) concerned about for years. The Father, Son, and Holy Bible mindset.
We also should keep in mind that he is certainly not anti-Bible. In the decades of sermons I have heard from him, he at least once in each sermon strongly encourages the congregation to read their Bibles.
I whole heartedly agree with your views about Jesus’ authority and the Bible. I’m not sure that Andy Stanley is saying the same thing. My concern with Brother Stanley is that he is part of a growing group of American pastors whose views have been significantly influenced by secular culture, and who are now in search of a hermeneutic by which they can justify what they have already decided to believe. It gives me no pleasure to think this. I have great respect for Brother Stanley as a church builder, but a great church builder who rejects the authority of scripture may end up doing more harm than good.
Hi Mark, yes, I'm not gonna agreeing with Stanley on everything, every time, in every instance, but on this topic, I think he, me and NTW are remarkably close.
I agree with N.T. Wright .. but I would add to his sentence in brackets ( ) : " This authority, we discover, has to do with the Holy Spirit. And the whole church is then, and thereby, given authority to work within God’s world as his accredited agent(s) ( as presented upon the foundation of the witness of the Apostles ) " .. Michael J. Kruger has recently added to the debate " The Question of Canon - Challenging the status quo in the New Testament debate " Inter-Varsity Press, Norton Street, Nottingham , England. 2013. .. If you can't locate a copy, then I would be happy to mail my copy down to you on a lend basis.. I also observe that the verse in question, is given in the Aorist tense ( Ἐδόθη - is given )and therefore my view is that the authority is in the discourse between the risen Lord and His Apostles as his chief witness. So the Aorist focuses the moment of the discourse purely upon the Lord alone.. And also it is the passive voice.. So I agree with N.T. Wright ..
Yes. This is where I am now at having been raised Southern Baptist and serving as an SBC pastor for 30 years. It took a JOB experience to reset my faith framework, but as it rebooted I realized I had been worshiping the Bible all those years more than I had Jesus. One thing you will never hear asked in any SBC setting (seminary, church, or otherwise) is "How did the early church do so well without the New Testament?"
I totally agree with you. Jesus says “I am the way, the *Truth,*, and the life.” So Jesus Himself is Truth - to me that means that ultimately Truth is found in a person, not in doctrines or “eternal truths” or whatever else, but a living person. And when we are in relationship with Truth, we are changed by Him. The Bible is vital to show us who Jesus is - I was a member of a church for a while who claimed to follow Jesus but then never really dived much into Scripture to see who Jesus actually is. So the Bible is very important, but isn’t the ultimate revelation of God, Jesus is.
Andy’s point was hit and miss. The Bible is witness to and receives authority in God. I wish Andy had pointed out that the Bible’s authority is derivative of God’s and that the whole of the Scriptures is the recording of God’s speech-acts. I love this concept of speech-acts; if God’s speech is his actions then the Bible derives authority because it proclaims those same speech-acts.
What Andy is saying needs to be heard and it needs to be taken into context. And it needs to be deeply thought of because Christians are being pulled in every direction by both sides of the pendulum, progressive or fundamentalist.
How does this relate to what Orthodoxy calls "Holy Tradition."
"Unlike many conceptions of tradition in popular understanding, the Orthodox Church does not regard Holy Tradition as something which grows and expands over time, forming a collection of practices and doctrines which accrue, gradually becoming something more developed and eventually unrecognizable to the first Christians. Rather, Holy Tradition is that same faith which Christ taught to the Apostles and which they gave to their disciples, preserved in the whole Church and especially in its leadership through Apostolic Succession."
https://orthodoxwiki.org/Holy_Tradition
I fully agree with your take on this. I will mention however that there are those that so emphasize this difference, and so elevate the authority of Jesus relative to the Bible, that false interpretations of the Bible can more easily occur. I think we need to realize God is a good author and He has given us a book we need. Of course it must be rightly interpreted and understood, but apparently God felt we needed it to protect us from undue subjectivity in our relationship to Him!
Thanks for this. I live in Louisiana where apparently the governor thinks authority is found through posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom tho he continues to cut many non profit funds. Now apparently Oklahoma schools may be required to have the whole bible in each classroom because that should be the authority. I love scripture and learning from it but when we place it above the authority of Jesus himself we are headed in downfall. Just my thoughts from my average perspective. 😊
My first concern is with Andy's casual description of a Bible that was more or less slapped together 300 years after the fact. This ignores the manuscript evidence where whole gospels, epistles and fragments appear much earlier. The gospels and letters were often carried from city to city, and copied before sending them on to the next church. Communities of faith may not have had the entire NT in one volume, but they cherished the records they did have. Andy seems to imply that the Bible suddenly appeared around 300 AD as the product of a council, rather than the councils ratifying the books that had been taken and used as authentic for generations going back to the apostolic era.
My second concern is that untethering Christian faith from the OT certainly seems like a different pattern than the methods of Jesus. And that is deeply troublesome.
So what you’re saying is that it is not a case of “what came first? The chicken or the egg!” 😆
There are two types of believers:
Those who worship the God of the Bible, and those who worship the Bible as God.
Both claim they are doing it the right way.
Without a magisterium or strong link to church tradition as the Holy Spirit guiding the church, what is one left with but biblicism? Is it the case that Liberal Protestants use textual criticism to endlessly reinterpret the text and fundamentalist Protestants use textual criticism to try to find the definitive meaning of every text. Whereas Christ as the authority through his apostles (the church as pillar and foundation of the truth) means we have clearer lines of authority and orthodoxy.
We only know about the triune God thru Scripture. We would know almost nothing definitively about who God is and who Jesus was without the Old and New Testaments. These are our only witnesses of infallible truth about the nature of who God is and what He has done salvifically down thru the ages. Before the gospels and letters of the New Testament were written, we had the apostles themselves spreading that message and some of them (including close associates) writing it down with an ability to write without error. These had to be written for our sake before they died otherwise there would be NO Jesus to remember of all of His words and works and therefore we all would be still waiting for that Messiah promised by His prophets. The apostles possessed that oral testimony of all that Jesus said and did until they passed from the scene of history. When they did pass from the scene, they left us the many things(but not all) that God did thru His Son and thru His apostles whom He called to be the foundation of His Church himself being the cornerstone. How do we know this? Through His Holy Word. The gospel preached about the Word made flesh and then those Words inscripturated is not God, but it is His powerful Word/message able to saves souls from sin and eternal death by the power of God's Holy Spirit which can make the spiritually dead live.
A lot of good points there Bill, especially about the need to write down what the accounts of Jesus. I would suggest that while the trinity is implicit in scripture we don’t automatically arrive at a trinitarian formulation just by reading scripture. Arius was a student of scripture but his interpretation (I understand that it was the majority opinion in his day) was found to be wrong. The church councils clarified the meaning of the scriptures as to the nature of God. This seems to be the work of the Spirit guiding the church into all truth.
Bill, respectfully, am not sure of that. I have a profoundly disabled friend- he can neither read or understand scripture.
Does he know nothing of God.......?
I've always thought that Romans 1 says God has made something of himself known to every human heart. Does the Holy Spirit need a text to work in someone's life? I doubt it.
Second thought, may or may not be related -- Jesus said our greatest commandments are to love God and our neighbors as ourselves. Seems like this could be done without knowing how to read.