The call for a global debate on biblical authority in recent articles written by Steve Chalke has prompted several critical analyses from theologians and Christian writers.
The Principal of Oak Hill College, London – Michael Ovey – says that since Jesus is the revelation of God, He must provide the primary lens for faithful reading of the Bible. He finds however that what Steve Chalke says about the Bible is not in line with what he says about Jesus.
“The risk is if we decouple Jesus from what the Bible says about him, then when we talk about Jesus, really all we are talking about is our own personal abstraction and ideal of what Jesus should have been,” he said.
Mike Ovey emphasises that being consistent in what we think is really hard but it also matters a great deal because it helps us avoid the kind of hypocrisy where we say one thing and do the opposite.
He refers to Steve Chalke’s comments that Christianity is not in the end simply about a book but about a person who is “the only authentic, true and complete reflection of God” and points up the inconsistency between what Chalke says about the Bible and about Jesus: “He does not see the Bible in the same way Jesus does, and to this extent he does not follow through on Jesus as the focal point of our faith.”
The Oak Hill Principal goes on to say,”All in all, then, Jesus’s attitude to scripture seems quite like the conservative approaches that Steve Chalke so evidently despises. At its sharpest, the problem here is not so much his attitude to scripture, but rather his attitude to Jesus in the failure to follow through his perfectly right initial point that Jesus is the norm for us.”
Meanwhile, Dr. Peter Saunders of the Christian Medical Fellowship suggests that while Steve Chalke says he wants to draw people to Jesus, his teaching on the Bible risks leading them away.
He says that although Chalke as a celebrity Christian speaker is “critical of what he sees as Richard Dawkins’ rather superficial and juvenile conclusions, he now risks unwittingly giving credence to the new atheism which he rejects, by recycling some of the tired arguments of Dawkins and others as grounds for his own loss of confidence in biblical authority.”
Dr Saunders is concerned that in an age of celebrity, Chalke’s popularity poses a real danger particularly for young Christians who are encountering the new atheism and need to be adequately equipped to deal “not just with Dawkins and his ilk from outside the camp, but also with the arguments of Chalke from within it.”
Peter Saunders sets out an eight-point list of the biblical teaching which Chalke rejects, providing his own short comment about each item.