The Church with No Foundation: Evaluating the Teachings of Pastor Andy Stanley

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Andy Stanley, son of the late Charles Stanley and senior pastor of North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Georgia, describes his ministry in terms that echo the Apostle Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians: “I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22).¹ Stanley believes that becoming “all things to all people” in a “post-Christian” culture requires radically changing the way the church communicates the Christian faith.² These changes include “unhitching” from the Old Testament,³ jettisoning phrases like “the Bible says,”⁴ and relying, instead, on the events that led to the Bible’s composition, the resurrection of Jesus Christ being the foremost.⁵ According to Stanley, preaching that relies on the authority of “the Bible” is indecipherable and uncompelling to contemporary people who do not believe it to be inspired. To speak of the Bible as authoritative is dangerous for Christians because the entirety of the Christian faith then rests on the reliability and accuracy of a book that many historians and scientists have called into question. Undergirding Stanley’s arguments, however, lies an anthropology, soteriology, and doctrine of revelation in direct conflict with what God has revealed. Stanley’s program for winning the post-Christian back to Christianity, ironically, strips the church of her most powerful instrument for evangelism, discipleship, and apologetics: the Word of God.

Anthropology: What Is the Human Condition?

Within the realm of Christian theology, the term anthropology is usually employed when discussing the spiritual condition of the human person. What was Adam like before he fell? Into what condition have human beings fallen? What are fallen persons able to do and what are they unable to do? What are the differences between the regenerate person and the unbelieving person? What will the human condition be when Christ returns and raises the dead? Of these anthropological inquiries, the question regarding what fallen human beings are able to do is central to assessing Andy Stanley’s methodology of ministry.

Stanley’s methodology can, with some caveats, be situated within the broader category of the seeker sensitive movement pioneered by the late Robert Schuller in the mid-twentieth century and carried into the late 1990s and early twenty-first century by men such as Rick Warren and Bill Hybels. Former seeker-sensitive pastor Paul Carter explains “the basic logic of the seeker sensitive movement” this way: “We would get people in the door by playing contemporary music, singing contemporary songs, speaking contemporary jargon and addressing contemporary issues.”⁶ The key anthropological assumption of the seeker sensitive movement is that the hostility or apathy many people have toward the church is not a spiritual antipathy toward God but a rejection of inaccessible liturgies, irrelevant, harsh, or out of touch preaching, and traditional hymns that no longer resonate with modern people. The church’s “out-of-touchness” is the obstacle standing between these seekers and happiness in Jesus.

Andy Stanley’s church has embraced many of the outward forms of the seeker sensitive approach — the screens, the lights, the stage — but his program is more substantive than a simple appeal to felt needs. For Stanley, the primary reason people don’t go to church and/or ultimately leave the church is that churches approach a “post-Christian” culture with a message that assumes a Christian culture. “In a post-Christian society,” he says, “people have been exposed to Christianity…but are opting out for a different worldview, a different narrative through which to make sense of the world. In a post-Christian society, people know the stories; they just don’t believe ‘em. Or in many cases, they don’t believe ‘em anymore” (emphasis in original).⁷

In such a world, appeals to biblical authority and phrases like “the Bible says” will not connect. Why would people who dismiss the Bible care about what the Bible says? Stanley claims that “Appealing to post-Christian people on the basis of the authority of Scripture has essentially the same effect as a Muslim imam appealing to you on the basis of the authority of the Quran….The Quran doesn’t carry any weight with you.”⁸

In such a world, teaching people that Christianity rests on the authority of the Bible is dangerous. When young people go to college, for example, they’ll be surrounded by highly educated people who will poke holes in the historicity of biblical events such as the account in Genesis of Noah’s flood and the story of Jonah’s being swallowed by a large fish. If a person’s faith depends on the Bible being entirely true, when any part is shown to be unreliable, his or her faith will collapse like a deck of cards.⁹

The way, according to Stanley, to avoid these pitfalls is to stop “leveraging the authority of Scripture and [begin] leveraging the authority and stories of the people behind the Scripture….[because] the foundation of our faith is not an inspired book but the events that inspired the book…the pivotal event being the resurrection” (emphasis in original).¹⁰

The anthropological assumption beneath Stanley’s program, as Jeff Durbin points out, is that the unbelieving person is in a spiritually neutral condition.¹¹ He has, apart from grace, the natural capacity to choose to believe or not to believe. The onus, therefore, rests on the church to find the right messaging to appeal to the consumer. This assumption has a pedigree that goes beyond the seeker sensitive movement to Charles Finney and the anxious bench of the Second Great Awakening and even further to the Pelagians and semi-Pelagians of the fifth century.¹²

The spiritual condition of fallen humanity is not one of neutrality but of hostility toward God. It is not that people do not have enough information about God or that they have innocently misunderstood the information they have received, or that they have not heard the message delivered in an appealing, persuasive, or effective way. Rather, building on his argument in Romans 1:18–21, St. Paul explains that the natural condition of fallen humanity is one in which God’s existence and nature are known universally, but that this knowledge is willfully suppressed in unrighteousness. That is, to the extent that an unbelieving person is ignorant about God, he or she is culpable for that ignorance since it is the result of a moral choice of the will. Fallen people are, therefore, “without excuse” for their unbelief.

While all human beings seek happiness and fulfillment, the fallen person searches for those things apart from God, not in or with or through Him. Indeed, Paul writes in Romans 3:10–11, “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God.” Later, Paul explains that this hard-heartedness cannot be overcome by human effort or agency: “The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot” (Romans 8:7). The word translated “mind” does not refer to just the intellectual faculties of the human brain, but to what we might call the will or the governing principle of the person. The fallen person has set himself or herself against God and therefore cannot submit to God because he or she will not submit to God.

John puts the same truth this way, “The light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (John 3:19). It is not that the light has not been seen or understood; it is that the light has been seen, understood, and rejected in favor of darkness. Despite all of Jesus’ public miracles and signs, most people rejected Him in the end. As solid as the evidence for the Resurrection, no event, however miraculous, will persuade fallen human beings to believe in the God he already knows and hates. Jesus Himself says this explicitly, “If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead” (Luke 16:31). This is a truth that significantly undercuts Stanley’s emphasis upon preaching the Resurrection as an event apart from the authority of the Scriptures.

In John 6, Jesus feeds more than 5000 people by multiplying five loaves of bread and two fish. The next day, the same crowd searches for Jesus, who tells them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst” (John 6:35). Jesus knows that despite what they have seen, they will reject Him. So He says to them, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6:44). The hostility of the heart must be overcome, and Jesus teaches that only God can do that. How God does that — soteriology — is the subject of the next section.

Soteriology: How Are Human Beings Born Again?

Soteriology is the study of salvation. Salvation, for the individual (setting aside for the purposes of this article questions of election and predestination), begins at the moment of regeneration. Because the fallen heart is mortally hardened in its hostility against God, the cure cannot be superficial. There must be a total renovation of the human soul. The phrase Jesus chose to describe this renovation to Nicodemus in John 3 is “new birth.” “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). By using the picture of birth to describe regeneration, Jesus highlights the human incapacity to effect this change upon or within himself. Infants cannot choose to be conceived nor do they pull themselves out of the womb. They are passive recipients to life. So are we. God, by His Holy Spirit, quickens or breathes life and light into the heart and mind and soul where before there had been only darkness and death. The fruit of this miraculous work of God is faith (Ephesians 2:7–9).

But what is the instrument the Spirit uses to effect this change? Paul speaks of the Christian as a new creation, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). The believing heart and mind given to you at your new birth or regeneration is a new creation wrought by God. At the first creation, God spoke and said, “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3). God created all things by speaking them into existence, by His Word.

The Word of God, as John tells us, is Christ Himself, who was with God in the beginning and who is God (John 1:1–14). The New Testament teaches that the means by which the Spirit gives new birth to sinners is also by the Word, the word from and about Christ who is the Word. As Jesus washes His disciples’ feed at the Last Supper He says, “The one who has bathed does not need to wash, except for his feet, but is completely clean. And you are clean, but not every one of you” (John 13:10). Jesus is not merely talking about washing feet or bodies with water. By “clean” Jesus refers to His disciples’ spiritual condition.¹³ With the exception of Judas, Jesus has made them His own. How has He done this? The answer comes later in the same discourse. Speaking in John 15:1–3 of Himself as the true vine and the Father as the vinedresser who “cleans” or “prunes” the vine,¹⁴ Jesus says, “Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you” (John 15:3). Jesus is the Word, but here He speaks of His own spoken Word which bears His own power to make fallen sinners clean, new creations.

This is a widely taught principle in the New Testament. James writes in his epistle, “Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures” (James 1:18). Peter writes the same in his first epistle, “since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God….And this word is the good news that was preached to you” (1 Peter 1:23–25). Paul also writes, “faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17). The word of Christ is the instrument that opens deaf ears.

It is here that Stanley’s great folly of divorcing the proclamation of the Resurrection from preaching that relies on the power and authority of the Word of God is exposed. The Word of God breathed out in the Scriptures, which features as God’s climactic act of redemption the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, does not persuade living people to believe solely by the weight of the evidence. The Word of God raises dead people to life. It softens hardened hearts. It opens blind eyes and deaf ears. Stanley would have the church lay down her sharp two-edged sword¹⁵ in favor of mere persuasion.

Andy Stanley’s flawed anthropology and soteriology is rooted in his flawed doctrine of revelation.

The Doctrine of Revelation

Divine revelation, broadly defined, is God’s disclosure of Himself and His works to His creatures. Theologians distinguish between natural revelation, God making Himself known in the things He has made in creation, and special revelation, God disclosing Himself personally in words, visions, miracles, through angels, culminating in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. We have already seen that the Son of God is the Word of God. But Jesus the Word refers to and upholds as God’s revealed Word the law and the prophets (Matthew 4:4, 5:17–18; John 10:35), and He commissions His apostles to bear His Word to the world (John 14:25–26, 16:12–15) as His emissaries and ambassadors (Matthew 28:18–20; John 20:21; Acts 1:8). When Isaiah prophesied to Hezekiah that God would give him fifteen more years of life (2 Kings 20:5–7), Isaiah did not communicate his own impression of what God might have said. God spoke through Isaiah. How, precisely, we cannot say, but somehow the Spirit carried Isaiah along so that he spoke the very words God had given him to speak without error.¹⁶ Likewise, when those same words were written down, the Holy Spirit so superintended the writing of the human author so that he wrote the Word of God. All the Scriptures are, as Paul puts it, “breathed out by God,” and therefore, “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16–17).

To recognize that the words of the prophets and apostles, whether spoken or written, or spoken then written, or simply written in the form of historical narrative or letter or gospel or any other form, are “breathed out by God” is to recognize that they are living words by which the living God accomplishes His will. As God declares through the prophet Isaiah, “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it” (Isaiah 55:10–11).

Stanley agrees that the Scriptures are God’s inspired Word, that they are inerrant, and that they are infallible. Referring to his tutelage under the late Dr. Norman Geisler, Stanley writes,

He began the semester with the premise, “Something exists.” From there he built an argument for the existence of God, miracles, the historical reliability of the New Testament documents, the resurrection and finally the infallibility of the Old Testament based on Jesus’ statements regarding the Hebrew Scriptures. It was life changing. I’ve been drawing from that well for over 30 years. So when I read about and hear about my incoherent view of Scripture, my liberal leanings, how embarrassed my father must be, I smile and think, You have no idea. So for anyone out there who is still a bit suspicious, I affirm The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. Heck, I studied under the man who co-authored the whole thing. (emphasis in original)¹⁷

It is possible, however, to have the right understanding of what a thing is but then fail to grasp the implications of the thing you have understood. If I am sick and have been prescribed medicine that I understand will cure my sickness, but I refuse to take the medicine, I’ve not grasped the implications of my understanding. This is the incoherence with which Andy Stanley has been charged. He knows that Scripture is the breathed out inerrant Word of God, but he doesn’t grasp the implications of his knowledge.

This incoherence is evident in his analogy to the Quran: “Appealing to post-Christian people on the basis of the authority of Scripture has essentially the same effect as a Muslim imam appealing to you on the basis of the authority of the Quran.”¹⁸ The Quran has no power because it has not been breathed out by God. The Quran cannot bring souls to salvation because the Quran is an earthly book.¹⁹ The Bible is the Word of God. Stanley understands that but does not grasp the implications. If he did, he might take Paul’s charge to Timothy to “preach the word” (2 Timothy 4:2) as God’s charge to himself as well and to all preachers.

A central plank of Stanley’s program as it relates to divine revelation is his relegation of the Old Testament to the obsolete background of the Christian faith. He argues that preaching from the Old Testament is detrimental to the cause of evangelism and apologetics and not helpful in discipleship either.²⁰ Because early “Church leaders [at the Jerusalem Council recorded in Acts 15] unhitched the church from the worldview, the value system, and the regulations of the Jewish Scripture [Old Testament],”²¹ so should we.

Part of his argument is theological. Since Jesus has fulfilled the law and has given us His own commandments, why go back to what the author of Hebrews calls obsolete?²² Here Stanley conflates the Mosaic Covenant, specifically the sacrificial system and the ceremonial laws, with the Old Testament Scriptures as a whole. The author of Hebrews shows that Jesus is our eternal high priest who intercedes for us in the heavenly temple (Hebrews 7–9); that His one sacrifice for sin was the true and final sacrifice of which the Levitical sacrifices were mere types and shadows (Hebrews 10); that, therefore, the system of sacrifices and regulations that go with them are obsolete (Hebrews 8:13). The author of Hebrews never suggests that the books of the Old Testament themselves are obsolete, just the Temple system.

On the basis of Peter’s vision in Acts 10 of the unclean animals and the Lord’s words, “What God has made clean, do not call common” (Acts 10:15), and the subsequent indwelling of the uncircumcised Cornelius and his household at their conversion by the Holy Spirit, the church determined in Acts 15 not to require Gentiles to be circumcised or to keep the ritual purity and dietary laws. The Council did not decide to unhitch from the “worldview” or “value system” of the Old Testament. In fact, as we’ll see below, the New Testament is replete with appeals to the Old Testament as relevant and authoritative for both Jewish and Gentile Christians.

Part of Stanley’s argument is pragmatic. The Jerusalem Council decided not to require the Gentiles to follow the Levitical purity laws so “that we should not trouble those of the Gentiles who turn to God” (Acts 15:19). Stanley uses that text as pretext to argue that since Gentiles of our day (unbelievers) find the Old Testament so difficult to accept, we ought not to require them to accept it.²³ We should not trouble them. But the Jerusalem Council did not make a pragmatic decision to dismiss the Old Testament. The Council made a theological decision regarding the necessity of circumcision and the purity laws of the Mosaic covenant based on divine revelation (see above).

Part of Stanley’s argument is historical. Before the books of what we call the Old and New Testaments had been bound together in the one volume that we call the Bible, Stanley claims, Christianity had already so spread throughout the Roman Empire that Emperor Constantine, seeking a way to unite the people under his rule, chose Christianity as the vehicle.²⁴ This proves, Stanley argues, that the Christian faith spread in a hostile environment on the basis of the eyewitness accounts of the apostles, proclaimed from generation to generation, not on the foundation of a book that hadn’t even been put together yet.²⁵ The Old Testament Scriptures (Stanley prefers to call them the “Jewish” or “Hebrew” Scriptures presumably to differentiate them more sharply from the New Testament) played a key role in Christian preaching within Jewish settings but not, according to Stanley, among the Gentiles. Copies were too expensive to produce and one would have to go to the synagogue to access them. The Old Testament played a minor role in the church until the emperor Constantine lifted the legal sanctions against Christianity in the fourth century and bestowed imperial favor that allowed for the first “Bibles” as we know them to be produced.²⁶ The point of Stanley’s retelling of history is that people “believed Jesus loved them before the Bible told them so.”²⁷

The highest estimate I’ve come across for the percentage of Christians in the Roman Empire before the reign of Constantine is ten percent.²⁸ There were much higher concentrations of Christians in urban areas than in rural ones, and Christianity managed to make inroads into elite circles, all of which supports Stanley’s claim that Christianity spread widely before the compilation of the Bible as we know it. It may well be, moreover, that Constantine saw the persecutions under previous emperors as detrimental to the unity of the Empire and found the organized ecclesiastical offices of the church beneficial; this, then, contributed to his decision to legalize Christianity and bestow imperial favors on the church. It should be noted, however, that Eusebius reports that Constantine told him personally that he had a vision before the Battle of Milvan Bridge in which he saw the chi-rho symbol (Christus Rex, Christ the King) and heard the Lord say to him, “In this sign, conquer.” Affixing the symbol to the shields of his soldiers, Constantine won the battle and became Emperor. The emperor attributed his conversion to his vision.²⁹

Stanley is simply wrong about the role the Scriptures of both the Old and New Testaments played during this period. Reading the apostolic writings, the apostolic fathers, and the ante-Nicene fathers, one finds that they overflow with arguments, applications, instruction, and deductions drawn from the Old Testament. The church of these three centuries certainly proclaimed the Resurrection of Christ, but neither the apostles themselves nor the fathers after them drew the sharp dichotomy Stanley imposes on Christians between proclaiming the event of the Resurrection and grounding the meaning of that event in the authority of the Old Testament and the writings of the apostles (the Scriptures).³⁰

Stanley points to Peter’s proclamation of the gospel to Cornelius and his household (Acts 10:34-43), and to Paul’s teaching to the philosophers in Athens (Acts 17:22–34), to argue that in Gentile settings, as opposed to Jewish ones, the apostles did not ground their preaching in the Scriptures of the Old Testament as they did in Jewish settings.³¹ This is perhaps true when it comes to initial encounters with Gentiles ignorant of the God of Israel,³² but once Gentiles are integrated into the church, that ceases to be true. The apostles expect Gentile believers to be as familiar with the law and the prophets as their Jewish brothers and sisters, and to receive their writings as carrying the same authority.

Paul’s argument regarding justification by faith in Romans 3–5 and Galatians 2:15–4:7, both passages addressed to mixed communities of Jews and Gentiles, hinges on understanding God’s covenant with Abraham and its relationship to His covenant with Moses, knowledge of the Patriarchs, and familiarity with the Psalms. Likewise, in 1 Corinthians 9:9–10, Paul grounds his argument that apostles deserve to be compensated for their labors in Deuteronomy 25:4 — “For it is written in the Law of Moses,” Paul writes, “‘You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain.’” In the next chapter, Paul warns the Corinthians not to forsake Christ like those who took part in the Exodus, despite being “baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:2–4). In Romans 13, Paul turns to four of the ten commandments to explain that “The one who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,’ and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Romans 13:8–9).

In his closing words to the Roman church, Paul writes: “Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but has now been disclosed and through the prophetic writings has been made known to all nations, according to the command of the eternal God, to bring about the obedience of faith — to the only wise God be glory forevermore through Jesus Christ! Amen” (Romans 16:25–27). The instrument through which God has revealed the mystery of Christ to “all nations” is “the prophetic writings,” shorthand for the books of the Old Testament. These hardly represent the sentiments of an apostle who thinks the Old Testament has no power or relevance for or bearing upon Christian Gentiles.

Peter compares the church to a temple of living stones and refers to believers as priests of God through Jesus Christ (1 Peter 2:5), imagery that draws deeply on Levitical themes. Fallen angels, Noah, Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot, and Balaam all make an appearance in 2 Peter 2. In 2 Peter, the apostle sets the apostolic witness alongside the writings of the prophets, bearing the same authority. He writes in 2 Peter 3:1–2, “I am stirring up your sincere mind by way of reminder, that you should remember the predictions of the holy prophets and the commandment of the Lord and Savior through your apostles.” In the same chapter, Peter writes, “There are some things in them [the letters of Paul] that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures” (2 Peter 3:16). Paul’s writings are, according to Peter, Scripture.

Turning to the three centuries following the apostolic era, applications of the Old Testament continue apace both in church teaching and practice.³³ One of the earliest heresies Irenaeus mentions (the refutation of which Tertullian devotes a whole book³⁴) is the Marcionite heresy, which broke out in AD 140. Marcion taught that the god of the Old Testament is a rigid and cruel deity. He created matter, imprisoning human beings in the flesh, and imposed strict laws and judgments on the human race. Jesus is not that god’s Son, but a God of grace and light who sets human beings free from the Old Testament god’s laws and liberates the human soul from its flesh. Marcion cut the entire Old Testament out of his bible and retained only edited versions of Luke and ten Pauline epistles. Marcion’s excommunication confirmed the necessity and authority of the Old Testament for Christian faith and theology. In subsequent centuries, the church fathers leaned heavily on the Old Testament, using it both for apologetic purposes and for developing and defining the doctrines of the Trinity and the two natures of Christ.³⁵

But the Old Testament wasn’t merely for educated theologians. Justin Martyr describes a typical Christian worship service:

And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and, as we before said, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought.³⁶

Every Sunday, “the memoirs of the apostles” (the books that would later make up the New Testament) or “the writings of the prophets” (the Old Testament) would be read. Justin Martyr’s description is not merely anecdotal. Larry Hurtado, historian of early Christianity, explains that “Additional evidence of the use of Old Testament writings is found in the many early Christian copies of these texts. Indeed, the single most frequently attested text in identifiably Christian manuscripts of the first three centuries is the Psalms, and there are multiple early Christian copies of other Old Testament texts as well.”³⁷ The early Christian community, far from unhitching from the Old Testament, read, studied, and depended upon it for worship and faith.

The reason Christians have used the phrase that Stanley rejects, “The Bible says,” is not because they are making some historical claim about the history of the compilation of the Scriptures. They are appealing to the authority, reliability, and power of God’s revelation. That appeal doesn’t depend on the compilation of divinely inspired books being finalized. Referring to the authority of “the Scriptures” or “the Law and the Prophets,” as Jesus and the apostles do (e.g., Matthew 5:17, 7:12, 21:42, 22:40; Mark 12:24; Acts 28:23; Romans 9:17; James 4:5) is no different than the modern person referring to “the Bible.” That the Bible wasn’t bound together into its final form until the fourth century is irrelevant. The appeal is to the authority of divine revelation that can be traced back to the Scriptures themselves.

The Reverend Matthew M. Kennedy (MDiv, VTS) is the rector of The Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton, New York, and Canon for Preaching in the Anglican Diocese of the Living Word.

NOTES

1. Stanley writes, “Two statements serve as a North star for our churches. One from the apostle Paul….Paul writes, ‘I have become all things to all people so that BY ALL POSSIBLE MEANS I might save some.’” Andy Stanley (@AndyStanley), X post, September 29, 2025, 7:58 AM, emphasis in original, https://x.com/AndyStanley/status/1972632078815461698. Scripture passages quoted by the author in this essay are from the ESV.
2. Andy Stanley with Thomas Horrocks, “Andy Stanley: Why ‘The Bible Says So’ Is Not Enough Anymore,” Outreach Magazine, May 20, 2018, https://outreachmagazine.com/features/19900-the-bible-says-so.html.
3. Michael Gryboski, “Christians Must ‘Unhitch’ Old Testament from Their Faith, Says Andy Stanley,” Christian Post, May 09, 2018, https://www.christianpost.com/news/christians-must-unhitch-old-testament-from-their-faith-says-andy-stanley-223818/.
4. Stanley, “Why ‘The Bible Says So’ Is Not Enough Anymore.”
5. Stanley, “Why ‘The Bible Says So’ Is Not Enough Anymore.”
6. Paul Carter, “Why I Abandoned Seeker Church,” The Gospel Coalition, August 23, 2018, https://ca.thegospelcoalition.org/columns/ad-fontes/abandoned-seeker-church/.
7. Stanley, “Why ‘The Bible Says So’ Is Not Enough Anymore.”
8. Stanley, “Why ‘The Bible Says So’ Is Not Enough Anymore.”
9. Andy Stanley, “Who Needs God? Part 3: ‘The Bible Told Me So,’” Sermon, North Point Community Church, Alpharetta, GA, July 17, 2018, YouTube, video 27:59 (statement at 5:30), https://youtu.be/I_ArfwxAXpo?t=330.
10. Stanley, “Why ‘The Bible Says So’ Is Not Enough Anymore.”
11. Premier Unbelievable?, “Andy Stanley vs Jeff Durbin — Unhitching Christianity from the Old Testament?,” moderated by Justin Brierley, virtual discussion between Andy Stanley and Jeff Durbin, May 31, 2019, YouTube, video 133:39 (statement at 36:17), https://youtu.be/yji0fqtVEw8?t=2174.
12. Michael Horton, “The Disturbing Legacy of Charles Finney,” Monergism, 2021, https://www.monergism.com/disturbing-legacy-charles-finney.
13. The “you” in the Greek of John 13:10 is plural, “you all.”
14. The verb translated “prunes” (καθαίρει) in John 15:2 comes from the same root as the adjective translated “clean” in John 13:10 (καθαρός). Jesus is speaking of the same divine act of redemption using different pictures — bathing first, then pruning.
15. “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12).
16. “For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21).
17. Stanley, “Why ‘The Bible Says So’ Is Not Enough Anymore.”
18. Stanley, “Why ‘The Bible Says So’ Is Not Enough Anymore.”
19. Jared C. Wilson makes this important point here, Jared C. Wilson, “3 Nagging Problems with Andy Stanley’s Approach to the Bible,” The Gospel Coalition, October 4, 2016, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/3-nagging-problems-with-andy-stanleys-approach-to-the-bible/.
20. Premier Unbelievable?, “Andy Stanley vs Jeff Durbin”; cf. 100huntely, “Andy Stanley — Full Uncut Interview,” June 18, 2019, YouTube, video 49:45 (statements beginning at 39:29), https://youtu.be/emRPPoqkFPY?si=ZQ3-Guk2HW3AEtNA&t=2367; Gryboski, “Christians Must ‘Unhitch’ Old Testament from Their Faith, Says Andy Stanley.”
21. Andy Stanley, “Aftermath, Part 3: Not Difficult,’” Sermon, North Point Community Church, Alpharetta, Georgia, April 30, 2018, YouTube, video 39:44 (quotation at 33:20), https://youtu.be/pShxFTNRCWI?t=1973.
22. Stanley, “Aftermath, Part 3: Not Difficult”; see also Premier Unbelievable?, “Andy Stanley vs Jeff Durbin” (for context, statements at 1:09:39–1:13:40); cf. 100huntely, “Andy Stanley — Full Uncut Interview” (statements at 29:22ff.).
23. Stanley, “Aftermath, Part 3: Not Difficult” (see especially statements at 37:56ff.).
24. Stanley, “Who Needs God, Part 3: ‘The Bible Told Me So’” (statements begin at 17:50)
25. Stanley, “Who Needs God, Part 3: ‘The Bible Told Me So’” (statements begin at 18:37).
26. Stanley, “Who Needs God • Part 3: ‘The Bible Told Me So’” (statements at 18:55 –21:00).
27. Stanley, “Who Needs God • Part 3: ‘The Bible Told Me So’” (quotation at 21:05).
28. Keith Hopkins, “Christian Number and Its Implications,” in Sociological Studies in Roman History, ed. Christopher Kelly (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 439–40, https://gwern.net/doc/philosophy/religion/1998-hopkins.pdf.
29. Eusebius, Life of Constantine 1.28–32, curated by Paul Halsall, Fordham University, https://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/source/conv-const.asp.
30. Here’s a good overview: L. W. Hurtado, “The Formation of the Christian Bible,” Modern Reformation, November 1, 2010, https://www.modernreformation.org/resources/articles/the-formation-of-the-christian-bible.
31. Stanley, “Why ‘The Bible Says So’ Is Not Enough Anymore.”
32. Even so, Peter’s words to Cornelius’s household, and Paul’s to the Athenian philosophers, are steeped in biblical themes and truths without citing specific passages.
33. Hurtado, “The Formation of the Christian Bible.”
34. See Tertullian, Against Marcion, accessible at New Advent, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/03121.htm.
35. Kyle Hughes, “How the Early Church Found the Trinity in the Old Testament,” Logos, April 27, 2023, https://www.logos.com/grow/hall-trinity-in-the-old-testament/.
36. Justin Martyr, First Apology 67, trans. Marcus Dods and George Reith, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1., ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe (Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885), revised and edited by Kevin Knight, New Advent, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0126.htm.
37. Hurtado, “The Formation of the Christian Bible.”