The likely Democratic nominee to challenge Kansas Senator Roger Marshall (R) is making headlines for unflattering parallels to the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, James Talarico. Like Talarico, Pastor Adam Hamilton is adept at couching his progressive views in Christian language to make them appear more moderate. But the beliefs he holds - such as claiming the Bible is full of errors - are not compatible with orthodox Christianity. While Kansas will not hold its primary until August 4, polls show Hamilton leading a sizable field by a healthy margin. For more than a decade, Hamilton has been the lead pastor of Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, the largest United Methodist Church in America and the 74th-largest church overall, with an attendance of 9,600 in 2025. Strangely, however, Hamilton has not used his magnificent platform to "contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3). Quite the opposite, in a January 17, 2022 sermon, Hamilton devoted minutes to describing a conversation he had with a pastor who believed in inerrancy, and who had challenged him to a debate. The sermon was titled, "Is the Bible true?" Hamilton apparently concluded that it is not. "We know the overarching message of Scripture is trustworthy, and God speaks through it," Hamilton allowed. "But, if you find one error, you're going to throw the whole thing away? That seems like a pretty shaky faith." Hamilton claimed to know of "hundreds" of mistakes in the Bible. For illustration, he chose a single example, the Bible's answer to the question, "Where did Jesus ascend to heaven from?" Since Hamilton chose this out of an alleged hundreds of examples, he must believe the evidence or clarity of this example to be particularly compelling. What is the mistake? Hamilton explained, "In Luke's gospel, Jesus ascends to heaven from the Mount of Olives by Jerusalem. In Matthew's gospel, Jesus ascends to heaven from Galilee. ... They can't both be right. So, one of them is wrong." Hamilton argued that this discrepancy shook the inerrancy position a great deal, while it did not shake his own position at all. "I don't really care whether it happened in Jerusalem or in the Galilee. It just doesn't make any difference to me. It happened," he stated. "And, knowing that Matthew and Luke wrote their gospels 50 years after the time of Jesus, it doesn't surprise me that one of them thinks it happened in the Galilee, and one of them thinks it happened in Jerusalem. They may have had different traditions that were teaching them." Hamilton added, "It doesn't really matter because the important thing is that Jesus ascended to heaven, and before he did he promised to come back. And he gave the Great Commission before he left." This rationalization reveals everything. Hamilton's admission that he doesn't "really care" about the details signals that he did not read the biblical text all that closely. By contrast, Christians committed to the inerrancy of Scripture must investigate Scripture closely to reconcile details that appear difficult. In this case, the solution to an alleged "mistake" in Scripture is simple: Matthew never records Christ's ascension. He records Jesus teaching his disciples on a mountain in Galilee after his resurrection (Matthew 28:16-20), but Jesus had plenty of time in the 40 days between his resurrection and ascension (Acts 1:3) to travel to Galilee and then return to Jerusalem. Why does Matthew choose to record this teaching instead of the ascension? For one thing, this is where Jesus gives the Great Commission, a fitting end to a biography of his life. For another, with the Sermon on the Mount, this mountainside teaching creates a bookend that presents Jesus as a new Moses, authoritatively delivering God's instructions to his people. But Hamilton seems to overlook these simple answers because he is more interested in searching for contradictions than for truth. Furthermore, Hamilton's statement that it "doesn't make any difference" whether the gospel authors reliably recorded events as they happened suggests that it does not matter whether they are reliable eyewitnesses. In fact, his speculation that "they may have had different traditions that were teaching them" implies that the gospel authors were not eyewitnesses at all. This creates a problem for Hamilton because he seeks to retain part of Scripture's testimony while he jettisons the rest. "The important thing is that Jesus ascended to heaven, and before he did he promised to come back. And he gave the Great Commission before he left." How do we know any of those things? Because they are recorded in the gospels. But if the gospels are unreliable histories, then how can we know that these things are true? In fact, how can we know that Jesus rose from the dead, that he was crucified, that he even existed? Christianity is a historical religion, and these are the facts on which it is based. If the record of these events in the gospels is unreliable, then the whole religion is unreliable, and no one should put their faith in it. Hamilton likely does not realize that, by devoting so much time to undermining Scripture, he is inadvertently giving his hearers reason to doubt the faith he professes to teach. If Scripture were only the work of human authors, absolute inerrancy would be an impossibly high standard, since "Everyone utters lies to his neighbor" (Psalm 12:2). But, in fact, Scripture claims to be the word of God (2 Timothy 3:16), and "it is impossible for God to lie" (Hebrews 6:18). On its own terms, then, a single error would discredit Scripture's claim to divine authority. It would demote the Bible not just to the level of other great books, but even lower - since a core claim of Scripture would be proven false. Hamilton explained his position more fully in a 2014 interview about his book, "Making Sense of the Bible: Rediscovering the Power of Scripture Today." "Christians do not hold, as Muslims do, that our holy book was dictated by God," he began. Avoiding another heretical viewpoint is a sympathetic reason for a Christian to stumble into another erroneous position (e.g. Arius going to extremes to avoid Modalism), but it does not justify error. Divine inspiration is not a binary choice. Rejecting the dictation theory does not require affirming that the Bible is simply a collection of human perspectives. "The biblical authors were people like us," Hamilton argues. "The biblical authors wrote in particular times, for particular audiences, out of a particular context. Part of rightly interpreting Scripture is reading it in the light of what we can know about its historical and cultural context, the author's purposes in writing and knowing something about the people they were writing to." This is all true, as far as it goes. But we must also affirm that "no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit" (2 Peter 1:20-21). Here, prophecy does not simply mean a prediction of the future, but a word received from God and transmitted to the intended audience. Thus, Peter intends his saying to apply to all of Scripture. This guidance (not dictation) of the Holy Spirit means that Christians can rightly name the words of Scripture as the words of God. In fact, the inspired author himself does so in Hebrews 3:7, "Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says," followed by a lengthy quotation of Psalm 95:7-11. Hamilton seems to overlook Peter's comment. He does cite 2 Timothy 3:16, but he claims that the word translated "God-breathed" (theopneustos) is an unexplained metaphor that should not be taken too far. He then appears to take his reasoning as a license to make the word mean whatever he wishes. "When I think of inspired, I think of God-influenced. This leaves open a variety of ways in which the biblical authors were influenced by God." Yet words do not have infinite meaning. If, as Hamilton suggests, Paul coined this word for use on this one occasion, then Paul likely had one specific meaning in mind. And, given the connection between Scripture and the Spirit in other texts, it would be a mistake to overlook the conceptual connection in Greek between breath and Spirit (pneuma), just as the English words "inspired" and "Spirit" share a root. By claiming that a compound word combines the roots for God (theos) and Spirit has nothing to do with the Spirit of God, Hamilton is going out on quite an unsteady limb. Hamilton seemed to interpret Scripture from a postmodern framework of socially determined morality. "My premise is that the Bible is the words of people who were influenced by God, and yet who were also shaped by the times in which they lived," he said. "The violence attributed to God in the Bible is a serious issue that Christians must address. It is inconsistent with the character of God described in many places in the Old Testament, and certainly inconsistent with the Word of God revealed in Jesus Christ who calls his followers to love their enemies." Unsurprisingly, this approach led him to explain away biblical morality on - the reader may have guessed already - marriage. Hamilton offers "two different arguments regarding homosexuality. First, he argues that condemnations of homosexual behavior by Moses and Paul were not intended to condemn homosexuality per se, but only homosexual behavior combined with other sins. "In the entire Old Testament we find only two expressions of same-sex intimacy: Gang rape and pagan temple prostitution," said Hamilton. The most obvious inference from this fact would be that homosexuality is an inherently perverted form of sexual expression. Hamilton prefers to infer - from an utter lack of evidence - that it is perfectly normal. Second, Hamilton argues that "the Bible is complex and, while influenced by God, it is not dictated by God." He equates biblical condemnations of homosexuality to the Bible's lack of condemnation of slavery, reasoning that, since Christian convictions on slavery have evolved, so should Christian convictions on homosexuality. Ultimately, both of these arguments are refuted by Jesus's pattern of biblical reasoning in Matthew 19. For the surest guide to moral questions of his day, Jesus reached back not to the code of Sinai but to the order of creation. There, God created every person in his image as male and female (Genesis 1:27) and ordained marriage as a one-flesh union of one man and one woman (Genesis 2:24). This teaching grounds the Christian opposition to same-sex marriage, just as the inherent equality of human dignity in creation grounds the Christian opposition to slavery. Ultimately, what Hamilton puts forward is not an innovative and persuasive new position on Scriptural authority that Christians should adopt, but a recycled position in plausible, new garb. It is "Christianese" draped over a framework of Critical Theory. "Conservatives often suggest homosexuality is an issue of biblical authority. ... The issue is not authority, it is our assumptions about the Bible and the way we interpret it," Hamilton claims. But authority is the issue here. The issue is whether the Bible is the authoritative word of God to which all people must submit their thoughts and lives, or whether we should sit in authority over it, judging it as the error-pocked words of man. Since Hamilton argued the Great Commission is still important, let's look there. The context of that command is Jesus's declaration, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me" (Matthew 28:18). This confidence provides hope and encouragement to the disciples Jesus sent out "as sheep in the midst of wolves" (Matthew 10:16). Do we recognize the authority in Jesus's words? Do we acknowledge, as he told his disciples, "everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms" (Luke 24:44). Do we submit to the "Spirit of Jesus" (Acts 16:7), who "opened their minds to understand the Scriptures" before his ascension (Luke 24:45)? Do we dare claim that Jesus's holy word is full of errors?