Briefly I wanted to address the whole Andy Stanley thing. I don’t follow him, and have only heard of him[1] as he has popped up here and there by making some startling claims in regard to the biblical reality. He has done it again; only this time it is very egregious, and so it is has caught my eye. In a sermon he preached at his church just recently he made the claim that the Apostle James in the church council held in Jerusalem, covered in Acts 15, ‘unhitched the Jewish Scriptures (the OT) from the Christian’ (my paraphrase). Wesley Hill and others have responded noting the similarity of Stanley’s teaching to the ancient heretic, Marcion; and I think that has some grist to it. I simply wanted to state something I already stated about this on Facebook, just a short word on the tomfoolery that Stanley is proposing. I think the reason this bothers me so much is because Stanley has massive influence on regular church people; people who will follow him, and what he teaches them. Hopefully some of these people will have discernment and question what Stanley is telling them about the Old Testament, and maybe do some searching around on the internet and elsewhere to get a more critical read on things. In an attempt to at least signal a direction for folks like that I wanted to say something; so here’s what I wrote on Facebook earlier:

I should say: you can see Stanley’s concern (if you listen to his sermon in full), but he is horrifically wrong in the way he attempts to bring resolution for struggling Christians. You don’t point away from the God of the OT, you point to him through Jesus Christ; one in the same God. You teach people how to read the OT as if Jesus is its reality; as if ‘In the Beginning—was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God—God created the heavens and the earth’; as if the first word of the OT is grounded in the reality of the NT; as if the first things are shaped and conditioned by the last things. The continuity is Jesus Christ; as Christians we don’t abandon the whole cultic system (priestly, sacramental, land, temple, law-code, covenant, etc) we understand that all of that is the conceptual framework within which the incarnation makes sense; because it started proleptically, in the narrative at least, as soon as Genesis 3.15). Jesus is the Torah of God for us, without the Torah we would have no understanding whatsoever of the significance of the Christ in anyway. Christ did not come to abolish but to fulfill the Torah; and all those in him by the Spirit fulfill the righteous requirements of the Torah, which are: to love God, and to love our neighbor as ourselves; on this hang all the Law and Prophets. Come on Andy!

More can certainly be said; Wesley Hill has said more. Any good biblical theology will say more. Thomas F. Torrance has said more about the inextricable relation between Israel and the mediation of Jesus Christ to the nations in his wonderful little book The Mediation of Christ; I recommend that you get your hands on Torrance’s book and read it, he will give you a good theological exegetical reasoning for rejecting Stanley’s teaching.

If you would like to watch the sermon in question in full click here (he explicitly makes his ‘unhitch’ claim at approx. 33:30). Maranatha!

[1] Andy is actually Charles Stanley’s son; maybe you’ve heard of Charles if not Andy.