This Week in Witchcraft - S1:E20

Andy Stanley’s Move Away from Scripture-Centered Preaching

Welcome to This Week in Witchcraft. The elements have been conquered with intense heat, and witchcraft has become more cosmopolitan. Can you spot it out in the wild? I'm Dylan Hamilton, and with me are Michael Derham and Andrew Hudson.

Our fellow podcaster who could not be here tonight, David Kassin, has sent in his own witchcraft that he has found out in the wild. Actually, it's not really in the wild, it's within the church this time.

So Michael, I'd like you to take it away for us.

Right. All right, so our listeners may be familiar with the name Andy Stanley, a pastor of a church out in Atlanta, Georgia, and he has said many things in the past. Are you sure he wants to be known as pastor?

I don't know. Maybe he's a CEO. Sorry. Perhaps he's a life coach for a personality-driven organization. Didn't he say he doesn't really like to be called pastor? Well, yeah, I can't keep up with what he says, but he did say something about unhitching ourselves from the Old Testament.

Oh, yeah, I remember that. He said some other things as well. Now his latest thing is saying that he doesn't want to say following phrases in his sermons anymore. He doesn't want to say the Bible says, he doesn't want to say the Scripture says.

He doesn't want to, in his preaching, give a sense that Christian life or Christian living or Christian understanding is to be tied to a text. For appealing for his change in his direction moving forward, he appeals to what it was like in the early church.

We want to do things the way that the early church did it. Now, this is a spell that has been used many, many times in the beginning of divergent false teaching, false churches, and so on. This is a spell like, well, we're going to be like the early church, and when someone says that, there are all sorts of problems that come with that that I think needs to be very carefully thought through.

But in this case, he says concerning the early church, he says, obviously, there was Scripture. He knows that there was an Old Testament. He knows that even in the early church, some of the books of the New Testament were being written and disseminated.

He says this, however, but they did not, especially in the first century, build the Christian faith on the back of a text. Nobody could read. Nobody owned one, meaning, I guess, owned a Bible. What drove the first century Christians was an event.

Now, there are so many problems with this expression that it's difficult to untangle. This is a bit of soothsaying that just makes everything so amorphous and confusing that it's hard to penetrate. However, when we, first of all, when we read the Bible, when we read the New Testament, the more we read the New Testament and the Old Testament together, the more we realize how much Old Testament is in the New Testament.

Amen. How many allusions and quotes and the patterns and the themes of the Old Testament, having been fulfilled in Christ, are being declared in the preaching of the gospel throughout the whole New Testament.

We are told that all Scripture is inspired and profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, that the man of God would be adequate, equipped for every good work.

This is Paul writing in the first century to a first century pastor about Old Testament Scripture being profitable in all these different ways, and this is how people are discipled and brought up to fruition and to maturity in Christian faith.

This is Paul, first century apostle, writing to a first century pastor about the use of Scripture in the life of the church. Nobody could read. A lot of people could read. All sorts of people could read, and if they didn't have a copy, it was read to them.

The culture, the rabbinical culture of the synagogue was very strong. Wherever there was ten men, you'd have a rabbi, and there'd be a reading of the Scripture on a regular basis. Young people like Timothy were brought up at their mother's knee, learning the Psalms, learning the Scriptures, learning the Shema, teaching the Scriptures.

Nobody owned one. There was a eunuch that came up from Ethiopia and bought a copy of Isaiah and was reading it on the way back, and Philip was able to get in there, and Philip, get this, Philip got into the chariot with this eunuch, and they read.

They could read. They could read the Bible, and this guy even owned a portion of the Bible, and they read it together, and he led him to Christ through Isaiah, which was a text, a Bible text. What's going on here?

Why the desire to say, I don't want to say the Bible says, or the Scripture says anymore in my preaching? That's not how they did it in the early church. It was all about an event, it wasn't about text.

What's going on here? Is it the claim that the Word of God is not authoritative?

It almost seems like a form of projection to me. Maybe Andy Stanley can't read it as well as he would like to, and he's projecting that back onto everybody in that rich rabbinical culture as if I can't read it.

It's a closed book to him? Right. I mean, that's the only thing I'm coming to when I'm hearing this as well, is he's not making the connections that he needs to, so he just comes up with his own answer.

I think it's a very difficult book for Andy Stanley, and I say that because of the way that he expresses himself. I had to take extra homiletics courses in my seminary degree because of some accreditation issues where I lost whole classes, and it was an interesting thing.

But in my second go-around in homiletics, my professor had us watch a sermon given by Andy Stanley, and this was about 2012 maybe? It was about 10 years ago. And in addition to the sermon, there was an interview that was written out in text form so we could read it ourselves, and it was just transcripted out for us to read.

And in the sermon, he begins to tell the story of a couple who had a hard time, and the husband and wife split up and began to live in separate quarters, and it was very rough. And they had received some help from some people in the church who prayed for them and loved on them and so on and so forth.

Well, the man who left his wife behind began a homosexual relationship with another man, and they began to live together. And this woman, still raising the kids, took up with a boyfriend. And then her daughter, of course, she ended up with a boyfriend as well, and there was this extended family that was involved.

And so this story continues on, and this homosexual couple wanted to go to a different campus of this church, of Andy Stanley's church, because they didn't want to go to the same campus they were before because of the estranged marriage.

And this homosexual couple wanted to volunteer to minister in the church, greeters, greeting everybody that comes in, shaking their hands, giving them programs, whatever. And this, of course, was not possible because of the situation, right?

And he explains, the problem was not that the men were in a homosexual relationship. That wasn't the problem. The problem was the man had not yet divorced his wife, and there wasn't a clean break, and that was the issue.

So counseling them so that he would go ahead and properly divorce his wife so that he could live with his homosexual partner in freedom. Then they were able to be brought on as ushers and volunteers at this other campus.

And the story gets even better in the reconciliation of the whole group, because on a Christmas special they all decided to come together and they sat on the front row or near the front. Here was the homosexual couple, the ex-wife with her new boyfriend, the daughter and her new boyfriend, and all the various extended appendages.

And Andy Stanley wraps it all up by saying, ha, here is the modern Christian family. A play on the sitcom, The Modern Family. The modern Christian family, he says. Look at all the love and acceptance and reconciliation that has occurred here.

That was his sermon. That was his sermon. And that was 2012-ish? That was 2012. Ooh. Now Paul says that false teachers proceed from bad to worse. Now back at this time he was also being consulted about his preaching style.

He had 24 ,000 people on the rolls. How could he be wrong? So people were consulting him about preaching, because he was an obvious expert. And he said that this fad of preaching expositionally, passage by passage through books of the Bible, he said, it's cheating.

That was his word, cheating. It's too easy, he says. He says the real job of the pastor is to exposit his congregation, to exposit his audience. That's who he needs to exegete. He needs to exegete them.

And then the Bible comes in as a helpful analogy and illustration to help us on to how we're supposed to all follow Jesus. Now he kept to his principle of exegeting his audience because he saw who was in his congregation, who was in his audience.

He saw this family. He exegeted their experiences. He had some Bible verses that he shared, but they were only illustrative of their experience to support them in what they were experiencing, to then make their experience and the way he interpreted it as normative for the kind of loving, supportive reconciliation that should be happening in everybody else's families as well.

Now this is back in 2012. And now he says, I want to unhitch the Old Testament from the New Testament. He said, I want to say the Bible says, or the scripture says anymore, am I preaching? Well that's consistent with what he said 10 years ago.

He's not expositing the text anyway. He's not preaching the Bible. He says that's cheating. He's exegeting his audience and it's about their experiences and he wants to tie their experience with the experience or the event of the resurrection and he wants to call that Christianity.

But in so doing, you have vacated the meaning of the resurrection. You have vacated the meaning of the event. You have vacated any opportunity for the people that you're preaching to to be confronted with the truth of the one true God in Jesus Christ whom he has sent so they may have eternal life because he refuses to proclaim the message of God inerrantly, infallibly, eternally afforded us in the Holy Scriptures.

I can't help but think of false prophets tickling the ears. Oh yeah, that's Smooth Things Club. Yeah. And the irony of it is you're going to have so many people with these false gods coming into your congregation that they're eventually going to war against each other and you won't know which ears to tickle anymore.

Yeah.

Authority, Experience, and the Early Church

This sounds shocking that he would say, you know, it's not about a text. Nobody could read. We shouldn't be using the Bible. It's about an event. Yeah. That sounds very shocking. You know, unhitching the Old Testament sounds very shocking, but he's been working towards this for a very long time.

This has been his trajectory. And his motivation, has he laid that out like why he's moving this way or is it just something that we can just see?

This is about reaching people, right? This is all about reaching people and showing love and compassion and helping people. I was listening to one of the sweater vest dialogues between Doug Wilson and James White and they made the comment and probably quoting somebody, you know, but made the comment that God manifesting himself to man and revealing who he is to man is a far different thing, far different thing than man declaring to God what he should be, right?

How he should be to them, that the orientation of the Bible is about God revealing himself to us. He's the standard. He's the authority rather than man declaring unto God this is what we would prefer.

It's completely different. And in this case, trying to present God in a way that is appealing to the tastes of men, well, you really can't do that if you stick with the Bible. So that's an unfortunate thing, but it's a matter of authority.

It's a matter of authority. Is human experience authoritative? Is human experience authoritative or is the Word of God authoritative?

In Isaiah 26 verses 1 through 11, which I had the pleasure of reading in church this past Sunday, verse 9 reads, At night my soul longs for you. Indeed, my spirit within me seeks you diligently. For when the earth experiences your judgments, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.

Their experiences of judgment should teach of his righteousness. And I think we may be able to tie that in to what you just said right there about their experiences not having the authority, but their experiences and judgment will teach them who is in authority and they will learn that.

Do you have anything else to add, Andrew?

The name of Andy Stanley will perish and the name of Christ will reign forever. Amen. Amen.

Amen to that. Well, I think that wraps it up today for Witchcraft. What do we have to suggest to counter it?

Media Recommendations and Closing Thoughts

Yeah, I recommend a series of interviews and kind of a documentary style, but it's put out by A .D. Robles, who has a YouTube channel and he has a new series, kind of a long form format called the Rise and Fall of the Gospel Coalition.

And just talking about, you know, this, this component of modern evangelicalism, where did it come from? You know, how does it operate? What is the trajectory and why is it part of it's kind of a mystery, you know, too, because I mean, you can go on there and you can find helpful articles.

There's been helpful media that they have produced. There's been conferences that they've put on that have helped people before. And there are names that are attached to this loose, you know, coalition that these authors and pastors who have published books that have been beneficial to the saints.

And at the same time, there is so much other things that are just unhelpful and unbiblical and subversive that flow through the whole thing. A .D. is trying to, you know, parse that and show in the mess what is what.

And so it's an interesting, interesting set of interviews and some background and some history and some context that I think is helpful. I tend to be someone who looks for evidence, truth. So this discussion about where does truth arise from experience or God's word, it makes me think about some of the obfuscations that are also happening in current American economic discussion and some of the attempts for politicians to paint the picture to be something different than it is.

And I'm going to cover a or suggest a podcast named The Wolf Street Report, where he tends to focus upon what is actually happening with the numbers, with economy, housing market, monetary inflation, those types of things to help counteract the lies with the truth of the numbers.

Does he come from a specific school of economics or is he just kind of a general macro guy?

He's a general macro guy, but he leans towards what the Austrians teach with sound monetary theory and also just not being convinced with the lies of hedonic quality adjustments with what they treat the CPI or quote unquote inflation with.

Sugar coating, might we call it?

Yes. Okay, well, my suggestion is go figure. It's tendential to fiction, but it is Will and the World, How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. It's a biography of William Shakespeare and little is really known about Shakespeare, but there's a lot of documentation that we can use to piece together some of his background, some of his business dealings, which are quite impressive.

But it's by Stephen Greenblatt and I just started recently, but I've listened to a podcast or two about Shakespeare and a couple of the biographies that I've just bought. And I'm interested in Shakespeare as a businessman personally, because that's where I think most content creators have the toughest place of launching from because they tend to be creative minds and they struggle to know how to market to find the audience that they need, but also to attract that audience to stick with them and become loyal patrons of their work.

So Will and the World by Stephen Greenblatt.

And that wraps it up for today. We're always very thankful for our listeners tuning in every week and for supporting us by rating, reviewing and sharing the show. And we hope you can join us again for another week of uncovering and rebuking witchcraft in the modern world.