Andy Stanley and Jesus vs. the Bible
Can we play off Jesus against Scripture?
A Sermon on the Authority of Jesus
Back in July 2024, Pastor Andy Stanley preached a sermon called Broken and Grateful where he allegedly pitted Jesus against the Bible. Watch it here from 4:41-6:20.
He was discussing Matt 28:18 where Matthew reports:
Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
On the basis of this text, Stanley told his congregation:
Here's what he said, “all authority,” little Greek word pas, it's not like a fancy word, it just means “every, all.” All authority in heaven and on earth, heaven and on earth, that's pretty much everything, right? Heaven to earth, all authority and heaven and earth has been given by my Father to me.
This statement has been reduced to simply another statement or another verse in the Bible equated with every other statement or verse in the Bible, and that is tragic, because Jesus said this 300 plus years before the first Bible was ever assembled. And when I say assembled, the Bible was assembled, they took the Hebrew text and a version of the Hebrew text, they took the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, they took the letters of Paul and others and they put 'em all together in one book. And somebody named it the Bible, we don't know when. We don't know who did, which means “the books” is all it meant. Like let's just call it the book, not very creative, but it stuck, the Bible.
300 something years after Jesus made this statement, when Jesus made this statement, and Matthew wrote it down, Matthew wasn't writing the Bible. He's documenting an event. And your savior, my savior, if you're a Christian, claimed to be the ultimate authority.
Or to put it another way, if you use this language, the Bible says that Jesus is our ultimate authority, not the Bible. That the Bible infers, if you just take the Bible as if the Bible had a voice, the Bible proclaims that Jesus, your Savior and King is your ultimate authority.
More importantly, Jesus said that Jesus is our ultimate authority. And in ignoring the implications of this statement is how church leaders have gotten by with so much harmful nonsense century after century after century. Because somebody like me, because I'm so well acquainted and well versed in the verses of the old and New Testament, somebody like me can use and misuse, apply and misapply the Bible in such a way that I can justify pretty much anything you want to do.
I’ve italicized the real contentious points about Jesus rather than the Bible as our ultimate authority. Pastor Andy copped a lot of flack from people about this as if he was pitting Jesus against Scripture or denying scriptural authority. I think both charges are false.
So I’m going to defend Pastor Andy Stanley!
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The Case Against Pastor Andy
First, yes, there is a Jesus vs. the Bible crowd. It is usually theological progressives who say that the God of the OT is a monster and OT Laws are plain stupid, Paul was a misogynist bigot, John of Patmos was a raving lunatic with violent fantasies, but at least we have Jesus. But I don’t think that is Pastor Andy’s schtick.
Second, yes, Scripture is more than a witness to Jesus, it has authority itself. John Starke is good on this point. I don’t think Pastor Andy would deny that, but he could have made it more explicit. My concern is that he treats Matthew as a witness to revelation but not as revelation itself. There is a school of thought that says the Bible is the record of revelation, like the Exodus and Easter, so that the Bible is only the human attestation of revelation. In which case, the Bible is not revelation but is merely the record of revelation. Viewed in isolation, Pastor Andy could be guilty of that view. I don’t think that is his view, but I think he’s unwittingly close to it.
Why I Am Actually with Andy Stanley On This Point
If you have read or watched my take on biblical authority, you’ll know that I argue that the Bible is not an authority in itself, but because of the Holy Spirit speaking in it, and because it carries the words and witness of Jesus. The Bible’s authority is derivative of God’s authority and its authority must be nested within the triune economy of revelation and integrated with pneumatology and Christology.
In addition, I think we need to remember that our authority is indeed the Word, but the Word exists in its threefold form: The Word incarnate (Jesus), the word prophesied and proclaimed (Prophets, Apostles, and even Preachers), and the word inscripturated (biblical canon). You cannot play one Word off against another Word since they are all rooted in the self-disclosure of the one triune God.
However, the incarnate Word is, as Karl Barth saw, the ultimate self-disclosure of God. Remember, John did not say, the Word became a book, but the Word became flesh. Hebrews does not open by saying, “In the past, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by the ESV Study Bible, which he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe.” Jesus is the ultimate, truest, most important revelation of God’s Word to us when he became one of us! This Word has all authority on heaven and on earth. And, as Stanley himself notes, that is a biblical judgment about Jesus.
As it goes, the apostolic fathers were kind of “Red Letter Christians” in the sense that they prized and preached the words of Jesus. The second and third generations of Christians quoted Jesus’ words and teachings more than anything else. Listen to what Ignatius of Antioch says: “For I heard some people say, ‘If I do not find it in the archives, I do not believe in the gospel.’ … “But for me, the ‘archives’ are Jesus Christ, the unalterable archives are his cross and death and his resurrection and the faith that comes through him” (Phild. 8.2). Jesus trumps any written record for Ignatius.
Furthermore, Scripture, Paul in fact, tells us what the centre of faith is: “For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 3:11). There is a grave error committed if you deny this fact!!!
I don’t want to pick on Southern Baptists, but if you compare the 1963 BFM and the 2000 BFM, you find a subtle yet highly problematic change. In the 1963 BFM, it states that “Therefore, the sole authority for faith and practice is Jesus Christ whose will is revealed in the Holy Scriptures.” But this is changed in the 2000 BFM to “Our living faith is established upon eternal truths.” In other words, the BFM 2000 removes “Jesus Christ” and replaces him with “eternal truths.” It replaces our Deliverer with Doctrine!!! Just because my main way of knowing Jesus is through the Bible does not make the Bible the center of my faith. That would be like saying that the Priest/Pastor who says, “I now pronounce you man and wife” is the center of my marriage.
Plus, what was the centre of people’s faith before the invention of the printing press? Making the Bible central to anything or anyone assumes mass production of Bibles and a highly literate Christian population which has not been true for most of church history. So it is anachronistic too.
But if ye believe not me, then consider the words of N.T. Wright from a lecture he did years ago:
Beginning, though, with explicit scriptural evidence about authority itself, we find soon enough—this is obvious but is often ignored—that all authority does indeed belong to God. ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’. God says this, God says that, and it is done. Now if that is not authoritative, I don’t know what is. God calls Abraham; he speaks authoritatively. God exercises authority in great dynamic events (in Exodus, the Exile and Return). In the New Testament, we discover that authority is ultimately invested in Christ: ‘all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth’. Then, perhaps to our surprise, authority is invested in the apostles: Paul wrote whole letters in order to make this point crystal clear (in a manner of speaking). 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). From an exceedingly quick survey, we are forced to say: authority, according to the Bible itself, is vested in God himself, Father, Son and Spirit.
I think Ignatius of Antioch, N.T. Wright, and Andy Stanley all agree on this basic point, Jesus is indeed our highest authority, and it is the Scriptures that witness to him, and that witness is and continues to be an authority.
But what do you think?
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.