The Apostles' Test — The One Test Your Faith Needs
The One Test Your Faith Needs
We’re at a crossroads in Christianity. Megachurch pastor Andy Stanley has said that we need to “unhitch from the Old Testament.” Churches worldwide are starting to denounce the Bible as fallible, poetic fables from misinformed men. Many Christians are eager to dismiss the Bible’s standards for purity, holiness, and righteousness. Consequently, things like the six days of creation, pre-marital sexual abstinence, and keeping the Sabbath are no longer universally embraced throughout modern Christiandom.
Against this, I would like to pose two theological questions:
Is the Bible meant to be understood as true?
Is the Bible meant to be prescriptive?
For clarity, I would encourage all to answer those questions either “yes” or “no.” We can mince words later.
For me, the only logically viable answer is “yes” — to both questions. I believe wholeheartedly that the Bible is true and that the Bible is meant to be prescriptive. Furthermore, anything less than a resounding “yes” to those questions is dangerously illogical (is theoillogical a word?). I’ll explain…
The Importance of the Apostles
Every worldview has a jumping off point; a subjective philosophical belief from which everything else follows. From that belief, we then build lives, societies, and religions to test the truth of our jumping off point. For Atheists, it’s the Big Bang or alien seeding. For Buddhists, it’s karma. The divine authority of the Bible is my jumping off point.
So what is the Bible and how can we understand it?
History and Scripture tell us that about 2,000 years ago a group of Jewish students wrote down the teachings of their rabbi. They catalogued his life, his philosophies, and many of his interactions. And they also wrote down some of the things they’d learned from and experienced as a result of knowing their rabbi. Those eight (or possibly nine) students were among those known as the Apostles, and they wrote what we know today as the New Testament. Their rabbi was Yeshua (Jesus).
Almost everything we know about Yeshua comes from the writings of the Apostles; specifically Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter, James, and Jude (and possibly another who may have either written or contributed to the book of Hebrews). There are some other historical sources too, but the lion’s share of the history of Christ comes from the accounts given by those guys. And, in light of this, Christ is actually one of the most documented non-governmental figures of the ancient world. For context, there are four-times more then-contemporary primary sources chronicling the existence and teachings of Christ than there are for Socrates, who had two, and infinitely more than we have for Alexander the Great, for which there are essentially none.
The Apostles knew each other, vouched for one another, and independently corroborated one another’s accounts of Christ. And for it, they were tortured, imprisoned, exiled, and ultimately killed. As such, the New Testament has to be taken as a whole. One cannot discredit Luke without discrediting Paul who wrote about Luke. And one cannot discredit Paul without discrediting Peter. And so on. Their accounts and their credibility are interwoven.
From the Apostles’ writings, the entirety of Biblical and Christian theology flows. What they believed was a product of their rabbi’s lessons. They taught what they had learned from Him. To this day, the words they wrote are our external guide to knowing the life and mind of Christ. And they wrote bold and scandalous things. They said that everything starts and ends with Christ. They said God can only be known through Christ. Moreover, they insisted that Yeshua is God, savior, Lord, absolute truth, and the source of all things. And they said that He died, resurrected, and remains alive.
Because the Apostles Said So
I said earlier that the “jumping off point” for my faith was the Bible. That’s true, but more specifically, it’s that I believe everything the Apostles wrote about Christ. From there, everything else flows.
For instance, why do I believe in the infallibility and authority of the Old Testament? After all, the Old Testament (Hebrew Tanakh) is a collection of documents written over the course of a thousand years by dozens of people and transcribed by countless others. On top of that, it has historical accounts written thousands of years after the events they allege to document. So why should a reasonable Christian believe the Old Testament to be an accurate expression of truth and God’s will?
The answer is actually simple: Because the Apostles said so.
I trust the Old Testament as divinely infallible and authoritative because that’s what the Apostles believed. They wrote that the Old Testament was Christ’s Bible; the Apostles said Christ went to synagogues and taught directly from it. And when Christ wasn’t reading directly from the Tanakh, He quoted it incessantly. And He taught the Apostles to do the same. In fact, 2,606 of the 7,967 verses — a full third — of the Apostles’ New Testament are actually quotes and direct references to the Old Testament.
Furthermore, I believe the Old Testament remains applicably prescriptive because the Apostles recorded Christ saying that it would remain as law as long as the earth remained (Matthew 5:18). I believe the Old Testament is true because Christ’s Apostle Paul wrote that “all Scripture [then, the Old Testament] is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). Because I believe the Apostles’ New Testament, I believe the Old Testament. If Christ had a complaint with the Old Testament — if any part of it was inaccurate — He had every opportunity to inform His students of such. But He didn’t. Instead, He doubled down on it. And that’s where it gets problematic for those who might wish the Bible to be fallible or not prescriptive.
To understand Scripture, I believe it’s imperative to use what I call The Apostles’ Test. It is simply: Does this doctrine or behavior align with the beliefs and practices of the Apostles?
Let’s see how this plays out in our Judeo-Christian understanding of Scripture…
There are two components of the Bible that seem to cause skeptical Christians the most angst: The supernatural stories and the prescriptive statements. They don’t like literal readings of the parts of the Bible that seem miraculous or may oblige behavior against one’s own will. When such people attempt to simultaneously maintain their critique of the Biblical texts while also upholding Judeo-Christian theology, they run into major problems. It creates a fundamental logical conflict and a hell of a lot of cognitive dissonance.
Building on the Apostles’ Foundation
Many people, especially those in “Progressive Christianity,” dismiss literal interpretations of the Bible’s more supernatural stories. As examples, many don’t believe that Adam and Eve were literally the first of our species. They don’t believe in The Flood. They don’t believe Jonah survived inside a large fish. All that is just seemingly too ridiculous and unscientific to be true. At best, they believe those stories are moral folk tales. At worst, some believe them to be overtly damaging misrepresentations of history.
So does this doctrine align with the beliefs and practices of the Apostles? Specifically, how did Yeshua feel about the more scientifically implausible aspects of the Bible? To determine this, we should look to the most immediate sources of information: the Gospels and the letters written by the Apostles.
Regarding Adam, the Gospel of Luke lists Adam as being a direct ancestor of Yeshua — right along with all of Yeshua’s other human ancestors. Elsewhere in the New Testament, the books of Jude, Romans, 1 Timothy, and 1 Corinthians all cite Adam as though he was both a literal human and the first human. Naturally, so does the Old Testament.
What about Noah and The Flood? Surely an all-knowing God-man-turned-rabbi, Yeshua, wouldn’t have believed in a story that supernatural, right? Wrong again. Ignoring the noise and embellishments of people like Ken Ham, the Apostle Luke plainly lists Noah as a literal human. Yeshua talked about Noah as a historic figure. Additionally, the books of Hebrews, 1 Peter, and 2 Peter also take the same tone. They cite Noah and The Flood as proof of God’s judgement and the power of obedient faith. Ken Ham may be mistaken about Noah having dinosaurs aboard, but it’s perfectly logical and theologically consistent for any Christian to believe what the Bible actually says about the life of Noah.
But surely Jonah wasn’t real or at least didn’t stay alive inside a fish for three days, right? (You already know how this is going to turn out…) Yeshua talked about Jonah as an actual person. Moreover, He chose to use Jonah’s time within a fish as the very evidence of His own lordship.
And the list goes on. Endlessly.
Throughout the Apostles’ New Testament, Yeshua is quoted citing the Old Testament’s non-scientific miracles as though they were historic facts. Yeshua and the Apostles never discounted them as fairytales, metaphors, legends, or primitive misunderstandings. Quite the opposite, actually. Both Yeshua and His Apostles (and consequently other early Christians) used these supernatural events as proof of their own legitimacy and the soundness of their theology. So while there may be allegorical value in the story of Adam, we also should conclude that the Genesis story of Adam is actually what happened. Because that’s evidently what Yeshua taught and His students believed. And the same is true of every other miraculous account in Scripture.
Now some might argue that Christ was just going along with the legends of His time. I disagree. Yeshua’s disruptive approach to the political and religious establishment of His time is well documented throughout the Gospels. He routinely pointed out the ways in which the religious leaders had misinterpreted and misapplied Scripture. He had absolutely no qualms about calling out misinformation and bad traditions. If the supernatural, historic events of Scripture had been incorrectly documented or taught, He had every opportunity to say so. But He didn’t. Instead, He reinforced them as fact and tied them to His own credibility.
And the same goes for the prescriptive texts of the Bible. As it turns out, Christ and the Apostles held very staunchly to the authority and infallibility of the Bible. And their “Bible,” as previously stated, was the very prescriptive Old Testament. Christ practiced and taught others to practice the commandments found in the Old Testament. In suit, the Apostles did the same. Yeshua’s own brother, James, insisted that the commandments of God were a “perfect law” and that they ought to govern how one lives out their faith in Christ (James 2).
And it wasn’t just general statements and platitudes. The Old Testament provides strict rules on a wide range of behaviors. And in the New Testament, Yeshua and His Apostles are consistently advocating for obedience and respect to all of the Old Testament’s laws. In addition to following the basic codes of human morality (sometimes called the Noahide Laws), they also championed the laws that make us uncomfortable by challenging our personal autonomy, such as specific sexual standards, dietary laws, and religious schedules.
In our post-porn culture, the moral zeitgeist condones nearly all sexual behaviors, with the only criteria being the consent of the parties involved. From the Sexual Revolution to today, these hedonistic mores have made steady inroads in the Church. Today, there are professed Christians advocating for homosexual behavior, non-monogamy, transgenderism, pre-marital sexual exploration, and more. When challenged on such matters by fellow Christians, such Progressive Christians often dismiss the Biblical sexual standards as being obsolete relics of an ancient era. For instance, they commonly dismiss the Torah’s prohibition against homosexuality by alleging that it was only referring to Egyptian and Mesopotamian sex cults — not everyday homosexual behavior. Another increasingly common idea is that extramarital heterosexual behavior might also be divinely permissible. The religious sexual position — ahem — of such thinkers seems to be overwhelming divine indifference.
So again, we should subject that view to the Apostles’ test: Does that doctrine align with the beliefs and practices of the Apostles? Herein we see that the problem with those positions is the same as mentioned above: The Apostles wrote otherwise. Armed with the teachings of their Rabbi and the Old Testament, the Apostles routinely denounced homosexuality, fornication, group sex, consensual incest, adultery, transgenderism, and more. If the Old Testament’s sexual laws were no longer applicable to God’s people in the “Age of Grace,” Christ and His Apostles certainly never got the message.
Another issue to look at are the Biblical dietary laws. In the Old Testament, God issued strict prohibitions against eating certain “unclean” animals, such as pigs, rodents, and reptiles. He also gave permission for the consumption of other “clean” animals, like cows and sheep. Despite the plain-text reading of these prohibitions, there remains a wide disparity of beliefs within Christianity about the applicability of the Biblical dietary laws. Meanwhile, there are other sects of Christianity that insist that a plant-based diet is God’s preference for His people. Others prefer pescatarianism. So what was the Apostles’ opinion?
To the chagrin of vegans and vegetarians, Christ and the Apostles ate and served a lot of fish. Their friend, John, ate locusts. Yeshua talked positively about eating beef. Moreover, even after the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, in the only direct Apostolic reference to the subject, the Apostle Luke recounts a story of the Apostle Peter telling God that he had never eaten unclean or impure animals. As such, at least Luke and Peter seemed to have clearly held the belief that the Old Testament’s dietary laws were still applicable. The Apostles’ Test seems to reinforce the Old Testament dietary laws and also preclude the imposition of other religious dietary codes.
Another important area to apply the Apostles’ Test is in the area of the Sabbath. The Ten Commandments and dozens of other scriptures command God’s people to rest and assemble on the seventh day of the week. Yet that practice is no longer widespread in Christianity. So should it matter to us? I think so. Why? Because Christ kept the Sabbath and went to his local congregations on the Sabbath. Likewise, Paul did too. Those habits are recorded numerous times in the New Testament. If the Sabbath was no longer relevant — or if it were to be traded for Sunday — that doesn’t come through in the Apostle’s writings. Disregarding or reassigning the Sabbath was neither the practice nor the recorded opinion of Christ nor the Apostles.
From the foundation of the Apostles’ Test, we can then find guidance for a whole host of other doctrines and practices. For instance, we can rest in the soundness of the following practices because they were what the Apostles’ did:
Reading and exposition of Scripture
Embracing full equality regardless of race, gender, or socio-economic status
Evangelism
Vocational ministry
Lay teaching
Appointments of local congregational leadership
Weekly congregational participation
Home Bible study groups
Fundraising
Charity
Prayers of faith and healing
Prophecy
Circumcision
Baptism
Feasting (and even alcohol drinking)
The freedom to pursue either marriage or celibacy
Observance of the weekly Sabbath from sundown Friday through sundown Saturday
Observance of the Biblical holy days, such as Passover and Pentecost
Hymn singing
Etcetera
As we strive to remain rooted in the bedrock of our faith, we need to ensure that we do not compromise our theological integrity. The entirety of Christian faith hinges on what Christ taught His Apostles and the faith they expressed to the world. We ought to feel empowered to reject doctrines that run contrary to the accounts and practices of the Apostles. Anything less than that is a gateway to a fundamentally illogical and self-contradictory theology.
— John