Matt Chandler on Authority of Scripture

Scripture alone is the final, only infallible authority

THE POSITION

In a 2009 interview with John Piper he describes how he met a congregation that knew little of the Bible when he arrived in 2002: he offered to answer any question from any text and told them Scripture is what they must submit to. In his 2017 foreword to Sam Storms's Practicing the Power he says he holds "a high view of the scriptures as the inerrant Word of God." Nothing read places tradition or a teaching office beside Scripture, but nothing read addresses that question head on either, so the cell leans rather than affirms.

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ABOUT THIS FIGURE

Lead pastor of teaching at The Village Church in Flower Mound, Texas, since 2002, and from 2012 president, later chairman, of the Acts 29 church-planting network. He is known for joining Reformed soteriology to openly continuationist practice, a pairing he has described as feeling like a theological orphan. This entry rests on his 2009 interviews and conference messages with Desiring God, a 2011 Tabletalk interview, his 2017 foreword to a book by Sam Storms, a 2024 podcast transcript, press reports of his sermons, The Explicit Gospel (2012, with Jared C. Wilson) as reviewers quote it, and his church's statement of faith, which is used only where a cell says so.