Every time I hear Andy Stanley talk about the Scriptures, I cringe. I get this sinking feeling of slow erosion—like watching a foundation quietly wash away under heavy rain beneath a house that still looks fine from the street.
While Stanley has certainly preached rank heresy surrounding the Scriptures, sometimes the things he says aren’t really all that explosive. Sometimes it doesn’t seem obviously catastrophic on the surface. Just a steady shifting of weight away from the Word of God and onto something else—something more palatable to modern sentiment, something that, on the surface, sounds reasonable and promises to make Christianity feel more accessible.
But the more I listen to this stuff, the more it becomes clear that what’s being offered isn’t a stronger defense of the faith. It’s a subtle reordering of authority that leaves the whole structure compromised.
Stanley recently hosted John Dickson, a historian and Anglican priest, who along with Stanley, framed the argument in a way that initially sounds compelling: we don’t believe Jesus rose from the dead because the Bible says so—we believe because of historical testimony, because of early sources, because of multiple attestations, because of proximity to the events.
The Bible, in this framework, is not the starting point but the result of something prior—the resurrection itself. It’s presented as a move away from “blind faith” and toward something more intellectually respectable.
But beneath that framing lies a fundamental inversion of authority that cannot be ignored. It doesn’t simply supplement Scripture—it relocates it. And once Scripture is no longer the starting point, it is no longer the authority in any meaningful sense…
If you want to sit through it, here it is:
