Andy Stanley Molests the Bible’s Authority in a Now-Deleted Tweet

North Point Community Church “impastor” Andy Stanley continued his seemingly lifelong goal of using an idiosyncratic hermeneutic that rips Jesus away from the scriptures, telling his 40,000-member church in a sermon and repeated in a since-deleted tweet:

There is one glaring flaw that must be pointed out upfront: 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.

Stanley explains, however:

“The truth is, Christians are not expected to believe what we believe based on a collection of ancient manuscripts written by men who never met each other over the course of hundreds of years in a time when everybody was superstitious, and everybody believed in the gods and there was no modern science…The foundation of our faith is far more substantial than that. It’s far more sustainable than that.

That is one hell of a way to describe the God-breathed scriptures. He continues in the same vein:

The Christian faith does not rise and fall based on the accuracy or the inerrancy of 66 ancient documents that we call books of the Bible. It rises and falls on the identity of a single individual, Jesus of Nazareth. (Editor’s note. Which we only know about from those 66 books)

Then, Stanley makes the point multiple times that even if three of the gospels are wrong and are not true, so long as at least one of them is true, then we’re good to go:

“Here’s the question that you’ve never been invited to ask- and it’s not your fault at all. It’s the church’s fault- the question to ask when it comes to ‘Is Christianity something even worth taking seriously or even worth considering?’ The question is this: Is Matthew, Mark, Luke, or, not and, or John, are reliable accounts of actual events? This is the issue.

This is the question when it comes to Christianity: is the gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John any one of the four, a reliable account of actual events? Because if any one of these four is an actual account, a reliable account of actual events, then what they say about Jesus of Nazareth is true. ….As we’re gonna see, the Bible only became a collection of these extraordinary ancient documents because of what happened in the church in the 300 years following the first century. So if even one of the Gospels or the accounts of Jesus’ life is true, then you need to lean in.

He makes this curious claim:

I think in Luke’s case, like many of us who write, he wrote and rewrote and wrote and rewrote the first line of his account of the life of Jesus, over and over and over, in fact, it’s so good that the very first word has historical relevance.

Then finally says this:

“Luke is not writing the Bible. Luke didn’t have any idea there would ever be a ‘the Bible’. Luke didn’t know if his document would survive the first century. Luke had no idea if anyone would read it, other than the person he’s writing it for. He’s not writing the Bible. The Gospel of Luke isn’t part of the Bible. The Gospel of Luke is something that… was included in the collection of documents that was eventually titled ‘The Bible’, because of what the story contained when it was written, who wrote it and what it said about Jesus.

Luke was documenting the life and teaching of Jesus, which means we shouldn’t take Luke seriously because it’s in the Bible. We shouldn’t take the Gospel of Luke seriously because it’s in the Bible. Luke’s account, Luke’s account of the life of Jesus was written 300 years before the Bible was assembled, as we said a minute ago. So Luke’s account- this is important- his account of the life of Jesus didn’t become reliable when it was placed in the collection of documents we call the Bible. Luke’s account of the life of Jesus was included in the Bible because Luke’s account was considered reliable.”

Stanley spends the rest of his sermon obsessing over Luke’s attention to detail and almost seems to hinge the truthfulness of Luke’s account on the fact that the author recounts the care in which he investigated everything and for which purpose, but this hermeneutic he’s using would not apply or transfer over to the rest of the scriptures. You’re not going to open up the book of John and make that argument fit. Still, this lines up with other speculation and assertions he’s made about the bible in the past, such as his belief that Christians needs to “establish the Gospels as the text that informs their faith, not the entire Bible” and “The Christian faith did not begin with Genesis. The Christian faith began with Jesus.”

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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