Seems Andy Stanley, pastor of Northpoint Church, is once again in hot water over another “foolish statement” he made. In this piece over at Patheos, Grayson Gilbert takes Pastor Andy to task:
If anyone has not heard by this point, Andy Stanley, being infamous for making some foolish statements about the nature of the church and the scriptures, has done it yet again. Yet the interesting thing here for those paying close attention, is that the recent debacle over him making the claim that Christianity doesn’t hinge off of the biblical account of the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, is really just the outworking of his previous statements. Incidentally, it also mirrors the decent into liberalism and unbelief – more clearly, it is the preamble to that notable thundering of ol’ Harry Emerson Fosdick who asked, “Shall the Fundamentalists win?”
Fosdick stood on the mount of liberals, decrying the virgin birth, making exceptions to the inerrancy of the scriptures, and eventually came to deny the literal resurrection of Christ. His reason: fundamentalists were intolerant for making claims that such things could not be denied while one remains a Christian. Ultimately, he divided the secular and the sacred in expressing that science, reason, and modernism could not be harmonious with such historic doctrines. I’ll concede on the point that modernism and Christianity are not compatible; interestingly, one of these things has already faded away.