Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path~ Psalm 119:105 KJV
A while back I listened to an interview with mega-church pastor Pastor Andy Stanley. Like, most American Christian leaders I have read several of Andy Stanley’s books. Some of them I liked, others not so much. To be perfectly truthful, up until about ten minutes into the podcast I would not have classified myself as either a fan nor a detractor of Mr. Stanley. I was fairly middle-of-the-road on the whole topic of Andy Stanley.
But then.
He did something that quite frankly, shocked me (and I am not easily shocked), Andy Stanley (a Christian pastor) made a case for radically decreasing the use of the Bible in preaching and evangelism. Andy Stanley believes strongly Christians ought to stop steering seekers towards the Bible and what it says about issues. Instead we should point them to the resurrection of Jesus Christ and teach them how to love others. The following quotes were taken directly from the interview.
They sum up the essence of the podcast fairly succinctly:
“The Bible did not create Christianity. Christians created the Bible…. What created Christianity was the first Easter morning…”
“In the culture and in the marketplace and in the public square, we have to shift the focus from the Bible to the Resurrection. Because the Resurrection is completely defensible now just as it was in the first century.
“I think [some people] put [the Bible] in the place of Jesus.”
“All the New Testament imperatives that we find after the gospels are simply applications of Jesus’s new covenant command to love as I have loved you. The Apostle Paul wasn’t coming up with new rules and new laws.”
Sigh.
It is not my intent or desire to malign, besmirch or vilify Mr. Stanley (I generally do my best to avoid that sort of thing). Rather, I want to highlight five things that inevitably happen anytime Christians intentionally or unintentionally choose to minimize the importance of the Bible.
First,
We lose our true north-
The Bible is more than just a book filled with dusty old ideas. The Bible is our true north (Psalm 12:6, Psalm 119:1-176, 1st Peter 1:24-25). It is the one thing fallible humans can count on to act as a reliable guide anytime human wisdom fails us (as it inevitably does, sigh.). Without the Bible to act as a compass we quickly begin to lose our way and devolve into doing our own thing and our own thing is very rarely the right thing (Proverbs 3:5-6). Without the Bible guiding us we become like the Israelites in the book of Judges where every person did what was right in their own eyes and struggled mightily because of it (Judges 21:25).
We devolve into myth and superstition-
Andy Stanley correctly points out that few (if any) early Christians had access to personal copies of the Bible. This is because few people could read and books as we know them today simply did not exist. The scrolls that did exist were prohibitively expensive for all but the most outrageously wealthy of people. However, this situation was far from optimal. Because few people had access to the Bible the church frequently fell into fits of heresy and individual Christians were prone to superstition, mystical thinking and believing all kinds of weird things about God. This problem reached an apex just prior to the reformation when even well-educated church leaders were commonly biblically ignorant and spiritually lost. Without an ongoing emphasis on knowing the Bible we will almost certainly follow in their footsteps.
We construct our own weird standards of right and wrong-
The great thing about the Bible is that it spells out in no uncertain terms exactly what is right and what is wrong (Exodus 20:1-17, Matthew 5-7, 1st Corinthians 6:9-11, Galatians 5:19-21). This prevents Christians leaders from playing favorites (most of the time) and applying standards of behavior to some people and not to others. It also keeps Christians from simply adopting the standards of an ever changing culture (1st Thessalonians 4:4-5, 1st Peter 4:3).
We become hopelessly reliant on subjective definitions of right and wrong-
We know exactly what sin is because sin is clearly defined in Ephesians 5:3-7, Galatians 5:19-20, 1stCorinthians 6:9-10 and Romans 1:21-31. We know what love is because God spelled it out for us in 1stCorinthians 13. We know when divorce is morally acceptable because of Jesus’ teaching on the subject in Matthew 19:4-9. Without these and other teachings found in the Bible we are left to decide for ourselves the definitions of key issues. Anytime foolish humans are left to define right and wrong for themselves there will be some monster who decides that it is a loving act to kill people he or she finds distasteful or burdensome. It’s simply a fact that life gets really weird, really fast without hard and fast definitions of right and wrong.
We doom ourselves to repeating the mistakes of the past-
Most of the New Testament letters were written to correct wrong thinking concerning various doctrinal issues. When we willfully ignore the vast storehouse of wisdom and knowledge contained in the Bible, we doom ourselves to making the same mistakes early Christians made. The only difference between those early believers and us is that we are without excuse because God has graciously given us everything we need in the word of God to avoid the doctrinal errors of the past.
All we have to do is obey it.
Thank you, for pointing this out. Often people omit the other half of what Jesus says to the woman accused of adultey: “sin no more.” This, after being rescued from sin and pointing out to the accusers that they too have sin, is a loving command from Jesus, our Lord and Savior.
#6. Our relationship to God Himself suffers because we ignore what He Himself has said to us (through men moved by the Holy Spirit—2 Peter 1:21).
Excellant point… I wish I had made it 😉