Who needs God?

Pastor Andy Stanley tackles tough questions of faith

North Point Community Church Pastor Andy Stanley created controversy through the way he has approached the inerrancy of Scripture in his current sermon series “Who Needs God.”

The premise of the series is that Stanley believes the rise of the religious “nones,” those who have left their faith but have not fully embraced the conclusions of atheism, is partly because young people are given “faith-based answers to fact-based questions.”

Most of the conflict centers on Stanley’s third sermon in the series, titled “The Bible Told Me So.”

BIBLE — The Georgia pastor’s sermon series discussed the topic of inerrancy and caught the attention of many in the process. Photo credit: Google Images

BIBLE — The Georgia pastor’s sermon series discussed the topic of inerrancy and caught the attention of many in the process. Photo credit: Google Images

Stanley essentially said the Christian faith is not dependent on believers’ abilities to defend the entire Bible, calling the task “next to impossible.”

He said when science calls into question the biblical account of creation, Christians are told by other believers, and even pastors, to just have faith in the Bible, similar to a “the Bible says it, that settles it” form of apologetics.

Or when archaeologists dispute the account of the walls of Jericho crashing down or the exodus from Egypt, they are told that the Bible is inspired and therefore perfectly accurate.

Though biblical scholars and some scientists do provide evidence for the biblical accounts, their voices are drowned out in the midst of college academia and professors that create doubt in students’ minds about their childhood faith.

Stanley instead advocated for focusing attention on the resurrection of Christ and allowing that truth to inform the rest of someone’s beliefs about the Bible.

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His logic is that the resurrection proved Christ was God, and therefore all of his words, including those about the Old Testament accounts such as Adam and Eve or the flood, can be trusted.

“If a man can predict his own death and resurrection and pull it off, I just go with whatever that man says,” Stanley often says.

Stanley found himself on the hot seat by those who believe his apologetics are a form of “old liberalism,” as David Prince, an assistant professor at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky wrote.

Prince believes Stanley’s methods are “spot inerrancy,” where someone can choose which parts of the Bible he or she believes are true and which parts are not.

“(Stanley) speaks as if his view is a cutting edge apologetic position for our time or an innovative evangelistic strategy, but what he is advocating has historically had a name — liberalism,” Prince wrote on davidprince.com.

But Stanley, who makes it clear that his sermons are preached with the un-churched in mind, chooses to not force unbelievers to take an uninformed leap into inerrancy without presenting his case for why Christians believe the whole Bible.

Not everyone approaches the Scriptures with the presupposition that they are inspired, but if the resurrection account is true, it follows that the Christian faith is as well.

Even the disciples were not convinced of Christ’s deity until he rose from the dead.

Therefore, one place to start in examining the reliability of the Scriptures is the resurrection.

Paul even wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:14 that the faith is meaningless without the resurrection.

Apologist Ravi Zacharias explained the importance of the historical fact of the resurrection in informing how to view the rest of Scripture.

“Even the Bible that Christ gave us is sustained by the miracle of the resurrection,” Zacharias said in an interview with Enrichment Journal.

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As the U.S. moves toward a post-Christian society, Christians could be less effective in asserting the inerrancy of Scripture without also presenting a case for it.

While previously, people were open to the “the Bible says it, that settles it” argument, people today are less likely to accept its inerrancy from the start.

In 2014, the researchers at the Barna Group found that “the number of those who … believe that the Bible is ‘just another book of teachings written by men that contains story and advice’ has nearly doubled from 10 percent to 19 percent in just three years.”

While Christians should not shy away from asserting the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture, we should understand how to present the case without making what appears to be, in the mind of an unbeliever, a blind assertion of authority.

“If a pastor says, ‘all we need is the Bible,’ what does he say to a man who says, ‘all I need is the Quran?’” Zacharias said in the interview.

The irony of the criticism is that Stanley and his critics all arrive at the same conclusion: The Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God. His critics just question the logic he uses to get there.

Though Christians believe the truthfulness of the whole Bible can be reasonably defended, starting with the case for the resurrection is not flawed logic. It is a starting point for those who have come to doubt their childhood faith.

Clarke is the managing editor.

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