Hank Hanegraaff spent nearly three decades as evangelicalism’s “Bible Answer Man” — the trusted voice fielding call-in questions about doctrine, cults, and biblical apologetics for a national radio audience. In 2017, in a move that startled many of his listeners, he was chrismated into the Orthodox Church. He has said since that nothing about his commitment to Scripture changed in that moment. What changed was the frame around it — the question of who gets to say what a passage means, and on what authority.

That question is worth sitting with, because it names something most Christians rarely examine directly. Evangelicals and Orthodox Christians will both tell you, without hesitation, that the Bible is God’s word. Watch or listen to Hanegraaff work through his own journey, though, and it becomes clear that agreeing the Bible is authoritative doesn’t mean agreeing on how it is to be read. Three differences stand out.

Private Interpretation or the Mind of the Church?

The Reformation’s great instinct was sola Scriptura — Scripture alone as the final court of appeal, over against councils, popes, and inherited tradition. It was a necessary corrective in its moment. But it carries a built-in difficulty: once every believer is handed the text and told to work out its meaning for themselves, you inevitably get as many readings as there are readers – and a marketplace of competing interpreters, all claiming the same final authority.

Orthodoxy answers the problem differently. It does not ask a believer to read alone. It hands the text over embedded in the consensus patrum — the accumulated, tested reading of the Church Fathers across centuries — what is sometimes called simply “the mind of the Church”. The individual isn’t erased, but interpretation is something received from a community stretching backward in time, not manufactured fresh by each reader.

Where Does Inerrancy Actually Bite?

Both traditions are comfortable calling Scripture “inerrant. “But watch where each one spends its energy defending that word, and you find two different postures.

A great deal of evangelical apologetic labour goes toward the edges of the text – reconciling a parable’s botanical detail with modern biology, harmonising every genealogical or chronological wrinkle, and defending precision in places Scripture itself may never have intended precision. Ask why Jesus calls the mustard seed “the smallest of all seeds”, and you’ll find volumes written to rescue the verse from a scientific charge it was never trying to answer.

Orthodoxy tends not to fight on that ground. It holds Scripture inerrant in “the main and the plain” — the things Scripture is actually for: who God is, who we are, and what has been done for our salvation — and is at ease reading a parable as a parable, an analogy as an analogy without demanding it double as a science textbook.

A Book to Study, or a Life to Enter?

Perhaps the deepest difference is this: in the Orthodox imagination, Scripture was never meant to be read in a vacuum. It belongs inside a larger, interlocking whole — Church, Fathers, sacraments — each illuminating the others. Baptism and the Eucharist, on this view, are not primarily illustrations of a truth learned elsewhere; they are held to be real points of contact with divine life, means by which a believer actually receives what the text describes rather than only reading about it.

That is a genuinely different claim than “the sacraments symbolise grace.” It says the Bible is not simply a document to be mastered by the intellect but part of a life to be entered — read, prayed, and inhabited inside a worshipping community across time, rather than studied by an isolated reader in a given generation.

Why This Matters for Us

None of this is offered to settle the argument or declare a winner. Faithful, serious Christians land in different places on these questions, and this parish includes people shaped by both instincts. But it is worth naming honestly: when an evangelical and an Orthodox Christian both say “the Bible is God’s word”, they are not always doing the same thing with that sentence. One is protecting the text from every rival authority. The other is trusting the text because it was never handed to us alone.

However you were formed, that’s a question worth sitting with rather than rushing past: not just what Scripture says, but how — and with whom we’ve been taught to read it.

This post draws on Hank Hanegraaff’s public reflections on his 2017 reception into the Orthodox Church, including his interview discussed above.