The real Jesus is revealed and authenticated by the New Testament By Richard D. Land, Christian Post Executive Editor for Christian Post
Earlier this week, The Christian Post contributor Mark Creech wrote an op-ed, “Andy Stanley’s tweet about the Bible is seductive and harmful,” referring to a now-deleted tweet by Rev. Andy Stanley, pastor of North Point Community Church, which said:
“The Christian faith doesn’t rise and fall on the accuracy of 66 ancient documents. It rises and falls on the identity of a single individual: Jesus of Nazareth.”
Like Creech, I was involved in the “Conservative Resurgence” in Southern Baptist life in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. While it was true that moderates and liberals were badly overrepresented in the denomination’s organizational and educational apparatus, the vast majority of rank-and-file Southern Baptists believed that the Bible was inerrant and had “truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter.”
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One reason this representational imbalance developed in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and early ‘70s was precisely because of the confusion generated by affirmations like Rev. Stanley’s Twitter statement.
Andy Stanley’s tweet does surface a vitally important theological issue that at best generated a great deal of doctrinal confusion, and at worst masked significant doctrinal drift. Whatever Rev. Stanley meant by his statement, he violated one of the most important responsibilities a Christian leader must take very seriously — to not be misunderstood.
I will leave it to Rev. Stanley to explain more what he did, or did not, mean by making the statement that he did.
However, I want to pivot from individual personalities to the issue itself, because it raises perhaps the most central epistemological issue in Christianity – “How do we know what we know?” and “How do we know who Jesus is?”
The surface emotional appeal of the statement that our faith “rises and falls” on the person of Jesus, not the Bible is clear. This sentiment has echoed down through the generations of the Christian faith in various forms such as “No King but Jesus!” and “My only confessional statement is ‘Jesus is Lord.’”
However, in reality, what this sentiment does is set up a false dichotomy between Jesus and the New Testament. When people tell me, “I worship Jesus, not the Bible,” I ask them, “I believe in the Jesus who is the virgin-born, incarnate son of God. Which Jesus do you mean? I believe in the Jesus who said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life, no man cometh unto the Father but by me.’” Which Jesus do you mean?
