What does Tribe teach about bible trustworthy?
Drawn from the message where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At Tribe, the teaching on whether the Bible can be trusted starts with a simple but demanding image: a hat rack. Brian Sauvé introduced this picture to get at a question most people don't ask out loud. Every belief you hold is like a hat, and the hook you hang it on is the narrative that supports it. The problem he named is what he called the principle of the biggest hook: the most compelling narrative is the one most likely to attract your belief, and compelling and truthful are not the same thing. For a hook to actually hold weight, the truth it represents has to be objective and transcendent, meaning it is true whether or not anyone believes it or acknowledges it. He used gravity as the example. A hook that cannot bear real weight will eventually break, no matter how attractive it looked going in.
When someone in the room raised the honest question of what to do if the hook of Christianity already felt like it had failed them, Brian drew a careful distinction. The hook of Jesus himself is not the same as nearby hooks that are easy to confuse with it: a gifted personality, a popular theology, a denomination. Those hooks are human, and human hooks break. He said you can always trust the hook of Jesus, and that people often get talked off that hook before it ever has a chance to bear any weight at all. Psalm 119 verses 1 through 8 was where he grounded all of this in scripture, pointing out that nearly every line in that passage describes someone who has deliberately chosen which hook to hang their beliefs on.
The phrase at the end of that passage, please don't give up on me, landed as the most honest moment in the room. Brian asked everyone who could relate to raise their hand. The teaching at Tribe holds that the Bible is not one compelling story competing against other compelling stories. It is the hook that holds because what it says is true whether or not any of us decide to trust it.
Taught from Psalm 119:1-8 · Romans 12:1-2 · Matthew 6:19-21
The passage taught · 1 Corinthians 6:18
18 Flee sexual immorality! “Every sin that a man does is outside the body,” but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- June 23, 2024 Sex, Money, and the Bible Brian Hunter uses a hat-rack analogy to explore what we anchor our beliefs about the Bible, money, and sex to, and whether those anchors can actually hold the weight.