A Bishop Just Told the Church to Tear Up the Bible

Bishop Yvette Flunder did not merely question a passage. She told the church, in plain words, that parts of God’s Word should be torn out.

She said the New Testament is not the Word of God and both of the Testaments are “problematic.” She said they contain bad theology.

Then she said, with a kind of smiling violence that should make every Christian shudder, that “we need to pull those pages out.”

You can almost hear it. Thin paper tearing. A hand reaching for the Book that has outlived empires, buried tyrants, steadied martyrs at the stake and carried dying saints across the final river. That sound is more than rebellion against ink and paper. It is rebellion against the God who speaks.

Paul wrote to Timothy with the urgency of a shepherd who could already smell smoke. “Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils” (1 Timothy 4:1). That verse drags the lie into daylight and names its father.

False teaching rarely enters a church wearing horns. It comes dressed for the platform. It borrows the language of care, progress, justice, scholarship, freedom. It smiles while it poisons.

Paul says such teachers speak “lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron” (1 Timothy 4:2). A healthy conscience flinches before holy speech. A seared conscience can lay hands on Scripture and feel no fear.

That is what makes Flunder’s words so chilling. She did not merely mishandle a difficult passage. She set herself above the canon, as though she held the editor’s pen. In that moment, she followed the serpent’s old path, shifting the issue away from what God has spoken and toward what fallen people will tolerate.

Once a person claims the right to remove pages from Scripture, the center has already collapsed. The person becomes lord. The age becomes judge while the congregation becomes a crowd of spiritual orphans, left to make a home out of whatever scraps survive the cutting.

Paul faced a different form of corruption in 1 Timothy 4. Some in Ephesus were forbidding marriage and outlawing foods God had made. At first glance, it sounds smaller than the madness of calling for a third testament. Yet the root is the same.

False teachers always reach for authority that does not belong to them. They revise what God blessed and sneer at what God gave.

They train people to distrust His wisdom. Paul answers with words that feel like oak beams in a burning house: “For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving” (1 Timothy 4:4).

God’s gifts are good because God is good. God’s Word is pure because God is pure. The Christian life begins there, on the solid ground of received revelation.

Scripture does not wait for our improvements. Christ does not need to be separated from the Book that bears faithful witness to Him. We kneel before the speaking God with gratitude, because without His Word we would be left stumbling through darkness with nothing but our own frightened instincts.

“Refuse profane and old wives’ fables, and exercise thyself rather unto godliness” (1 Timothy 4:7). You can feel the grit of it. Holiness does not arrive like summer rain through an open window.

Godliness is forged. It grows through truth believed, sin mortified, appetites governed and knees bent before the Lord in secret. False religion loves spectacle.

Scripture calls the church to something steadier and far more costly. Give your life to it. “For bodily exercise profiteth little: but godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come” (1 Timothy 4:8).

Flunder’s statements are not simply offensive. They are spiritually murderous. If the Bible can be cut apart, then the sinner loses the only trustworthy witness to Christ. The guilty man loses the words that tell him why his conscience will not let him sleep and the grieving widow loses the promises that have held generations together at fresh graves.

Paul did not tell Timothy to answer error with innovation. He told him to anchor the church more deeply in the Word of God. “Till I come, give attendance to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine” (1 Timothy 4:13).

Read the Scriptures in public. Explain them. Press them on the conscience. That is the path. Churches do not become holy through clever revisions and souls do not ripen under theological vandalism.

The Word read, preached and applied is God’s appointed means. Through that Word He wounds pride, exposes lies, creates faith, feeds saints and keeps His people alive in a hostile world.

And here is the blazing mercy of it all. The very Bible Flunder would tear apart is the Bible that tells ruined people where to find life. These pages bring us to Jesus Christ, the eternal Son, born of woman, obedient under the law, bearing wrath for sinners, shedding His blood under the judgment of God, then rising in victory on the third day.

Scripture tells the truth about our sin with a surgeon’s steadiness, then opens before us the only fountain that can wash it away. Pull those pages out and you do not get a kinder faith. You get a bloodless religion that cannot save a single soul.

So hold your Bible with fresh gratitude today. Read it with reverence. Hear it with trembling joy.

And if you have spent your life resisting the Christ these Scriptures proclaim, come now while mercy still speaks. The Book she insults still offers pardon. The Savior she obscures still receives sinners.

His hands were pierced for rebels, and His blood is mighty enough to cleanse even those who have raised their own hands against His Word.

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