Andy Stanley: Untethered

I grew up in the evangelicalism of Charles and Andy Stanley in the 90s. I would listen to them preach every Sunday, mainly his dad but he would often times fill the pulpit for his dad, and one or the other would be heard in my house every Sunday night. I did ministry at an early age, my first ministry experience, in the Southern Baptist Church closest to me. I've run in evangelical circles most of my Christian life, going to Moody, being involved in various evangelical churches and organizations, etc. I get where Andy is coming from. I get what he is trying to do. He has good intentions. The problem is that we all know the road that good intentions often pave.

Andy has adopted an apologetic approach that untethers the gospel from the inerrancy of Scripture and tethers it instead to just the event of the resurrection and the Scripture as a reliable history. Hence, the Old Testament can be untethered from the event and possibly even the New Testament for that matter, except when it comes to the New Testament being reliable in relating the history of the event.

The problem is that the apostles did not tether their preaching of the gospel to the event of the resurrection, but rather to the Scripture's reliable interpretation of the event. In other words, it wasn't just the need of the event to have taken place. It is instead that the event must be reliably interpreted. Some guy dying and raising from the dead is worthless unless we know that this is in accordance with God's inerrant promises in the Scripture, in accordance with Scripture's inerrant witness to who God is and who Jesus is, etc. all feeding into the interpretation of this event. If that interpretation is unreliable by being errant, then the event can be interpreted in numerous ways (e.g., the apostles stole the body, Jesus wasn't really dead, Jesus revived in the tomb, just one of many weird cases where people come back from the dead, the devil raised him, it was a magic trick, etc. etc.).

So the preaching is tethered to Scripture's inerrant inerpretation of the event, not merely to the event. So if Scripture is proven to be errant/mistaken/unreliable in its interpretation of other events, then there is no reason to take it as reliable on this one. Hence, to destroy inerrancy (not detailed inerrancy) in the Scripture, then the apostle's interpretation of the resurrection is unreliable, since they interpreted and proclaimed it in the light of that Scripture, assuming its relaibility in its interpretation of what God has said, done, and promised. The two cannot be divorced.

When Andy attempts to argue that the two are separated because the resurrection would have occurred whether we had a Bible or not is misunderstanding the issue. The issue is not whether the event would have occurred, but whether the event can be reliably interpreted and proclaimed without the Bible, and the answer to that is absolutely not. Without a reliable revelation, knowledge is impossible, and that includes knowledge of what to make of this Jesus rising from the dead.

To untether the inerrancy of Scripture, therefore, from the proclamation of the resurrection is backward and fatal. It is the resurrection that must be interpreted by the Word of God that is believed, not the Word of God believed because of the resurrection. Believers were made by God thousands of years before Jesus rose from the dead by giving a word through prophets, dreams, and angels. They were made believers in the Word of God at Sinai and beyond without a resurrection. The supernatural gift given by God to allow a person to see the always reliable and accurate truth of what the Bible proclaims as the correct interpretation of all of the events given therein, and indeed, life itself, is given apart from the event of the resurrection, not as a result of it.

To tether the faith, therefore, to the uninterpreted event would be to do something very much unChristian and non-apostolic, and indeed, because faith comes from hearing the Word of God, it would be to make false believers.

What this means is that we cannot divorce our preaching of Christianity from our preaching the Bible as the infallible Word of God and the necessity of one to submit his mind to its interpretation of all things (events, morality, theology, etc.) it intends to interpret.

The irony is that Andy is not even doing what he says he is. He isn't tethering the proclamation of the resurrection to the event and the Bible's historical reliability but to its actual infallible ability to proclaim the correct interpretation of the event, which assumes that the Bible is infallible in its interpretative track record of history of the other events it seeks to communicate, its ideas of God in those events, their theological and ethical purposes, who Jesus is, etc.

Obviously, the New Testament believers did not have all of the Bible, but the question is whether they had all of the revelation that we now have in our Bibles today. There is nothing to suggest they did not. So the framing of the issue in terms of whether the Bible or the resurrection came first is a non-issue. The real question is whether infallible revelation, both in the Bible they had, and the apostolic witness and prophesy they had to supplement it until the canon was complete must accompany the event in order to interpret it correctly. And the answer is unequivocally that it must.

The danger of this sort of convoluted speaking is that it attempts to bypass belief in the Word of God in order to make converts and save those who are doubting from their zealous college professors who want to undermine the faith with ridiculous strawmen of what would otherwise be a robust doctrine of inerrancy. But the shield in the arsenal of the believer is faith, and the proclaimed Word of God is the sword. No other replacement will do, and to argue otherwise is to untether these poor souls from the only genuine protection God gives them from the onslaught of the devil's reinterpretation of all things, including the resurrection.