Andy Stanley Says It Doesn’t Matter if the Bible is True, so long as it’s ‘Mostly Reliable’

North Point Community Church “impastor” Andy Stanley continued his disastrous attempts to shoehorn his idiosyncratic hermeneutic into a Christian apologetic for the deity of Christ and the truth about the Christian faith, picking up where he left off last time by arguing that in our presentation of the veracity of Christianity, it doesn’t matter if the bible is true, so long as it’s ‘mostly reliable.’

Yet as always, this is woefully misguided. Everything we know about Jesus is from the Bible. Everything we know about the identity of Jesus is relayed to us in the scriptures. If they are not infallible and inerrant, giving us the absolute truth about Christ and what he did and who he is, including his resurrection, we would have nothing and would know nothing. How would you know all the things about Jesus if you can’t depend on the Bible’s reliability to tell you about Jesus? For Stanley, he is undaunted, explaining in his March 20, 2022 sermon:

Whether you’re leaning in, or leaning out. The question I would encourage you to wrestle with because it is really the only question worth wrestling with, is not Does God exist? I mean, that’s fun to talk about, you know, there’s things on both sides of that written on both sides of that, that’s fun to talk about, I love all that stuff. But that’s not the real question.

Neither is it ‘Is the Bible True?‘ Because for some of you, the reason you’re exiting faith is you’ve decided you don’t believe the whole Bible is true. Well, we could talk about that as well. But that’s not even the critical question. Neither of those are the critical questions. The critical question is a question that unfortunately, the church- its not your fault. It’s a question that you haven’t been challenged to ask in any kind of critical way or significant way, because the church hasn’t challenged you to ask it and that’s the fault of people like me, it’s the fault of the church.

But the issue when it comes to leaning toward faith, or moving away from faith, the issue and the question to ask is this question: ‘is Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John a reliable account of actual events?’ That’s it. It all comes down to this. Is the Gospel- we call them gospels, the good news of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John,- these four ancient first-century documents that depict the life and teaching of Jesus, if any one of these, not even all of them, if any one of these is a reliable account of actual events, even if it’s mostly reliable, then if that’s true, then you need to, and I need to sit up straight and pay attention.

Because at the end of these four accounts of the life of Jesus, they all culminate with the same end, there is an event that makes his story worth telling.

Editor’s Note:

For a brief reminder of the various theological controversies surrounding Stanley, he made waves for encouraging Christians to essentially throw out the Old Testament, arguing that believers should “unhitch” themselves from portions of Old Testament Scripture. He went on the warpath against doctrine in general, claiming that “unity is more important than theology.”

Stanley argued that Jesus’ birth and the events surrounding the nativity doesn’t really matter, thus casting doubt upon his supernatural birth by saying “If somebody can predict their own death and then their own resurrection, I’m not all that concerned about how they got into the world” and “Christianity doesn’t hinge on the truth or even the stories around the Birth of Jesus.”’

Stanely has been on a roll since the pandemic hit, telling members that the “Foundation of our Faith is not the Whole Bible,” that the Lord does not require them to meet for church, that George Floyd was “This Generation’s Samson,” and to “Sleep late and skip church” during Father’s Day.

Stanley continues to be in our spotlight due to his theologically bankrupt behavior. Recently, he claimed, “Here’s an uncomfortable fact: white people fear black men” and went on a woke Critical Race Theory tirade by arguing “it’s not enough to be ‘not racist,’ you must be ‘anti-racist,” before telling them that they’re all racists in their hearts. This was a few months after he lamented the fact that churches were fighting the government to stay open and have their church services, saying he was embarrassed by it. 

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