Adam Hamilton, a frontrunner in the Kansas’s Democrat primary race for Senate, is a Methodist pastor who believes that the Bible is full of errors.
Hamilton is a senior pastor at Resurrection, A United Methodist Church, who is running for Senate, hoping to take down Republican Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS). He wrote in a message to his congregation that he is running as an “’independent-minded’ candidate on the Democratic ticket for the United States Senate.”
He is largely running on an “affordability” agenda, leaving social issues out of the way at the kickstart. However, he already has a record of controversial views on record — particularly his view that the Bible is full of errors.
In one sermon titled, “Is The Bible True?” Hamilton appears to conclude that it is not — at least, not entirely.
“If I could prove just one mistake in the Bible, will I have won the debate? He said, ‘Absolutely.’ I said, ‘Ok,’” he said, detailing his conversation and noting that he could think of “hundreds” of mistakes in God’s Word.
“I can think of hundreds, but let me just give you one. I said, ‘Where did Jesus ascend to heaven from?’ And he stopped for a second. I said, ‘So you do remember, right? Let me just show you on the map here. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus ascends to heaven from the Mount of Olives by Jerusalem. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus ascends to heaven from the Galilee,’” he said.
“I said, ‘Look, there’s like 75, depending on the route, 75 to 90 miles difference between these two towns. Matthew says one, Luke says the other. They can’t both be right, so one of them is wrong,’” he said. “One of them is by the Sea of Galilee. One of them is in Jerusalem.”
“So I said, ‘It seems to me that I just showed you one mistake in Scripture, and I said I got a whole bunch more. I could do that with you, and I don’t want to do that in front of your congregation,” he said, before essentially mocking this individual for building their faith on God’s Word.
“So let me just ask, you know, does that really — is your whole faith built on this? Because here’s what happened for the fundamentalists. They said this because the Bible is inerrant. We believe all these things that the Bible teaches, and I said, seems to me like your whole faith has crumbled because I showed you one error. And I said that doesn’t seem like a strong faith to me,” he concluded.
However, Hamilton is wrong. Matthew actually does not provide a location for Jesus’s ascension to the Father. The gospel ends detailing Jesus giving the Great Commission on or near a mountain in Galilee, but there is no mention of the ascension. Mark also does not provide a specific location of the ascension, nor does John mention it. The Gospel of Luke, however, describes Jesus leading his followers out to Bethany, said to be on the slopes of the Mount of Olives. Acts also records Jesus’s disciples returning “from the mount called Olivet” after the ascension.
Despite Hamilton’s own error, he said this error — which is not an error — does not matter, because Christians should just focus on the fact that the ascension happened.
Hamilton also detailed other doubts individuals have from the Bible, including Noah’s ark and the story of Jonah, ultimately demonstrating his own lack of understanding of God’s word, the context, and the work of the Holy Spirit in followers of Christ to understand the things of God, essentially telling his congregation that they must focus on the overarching message of scripture and not the supposed “errors. ” He appears to teach his congregation that scripture is not inspired by God but more like a “biography,” attributing the errors to the Bible’s “humanity” and the Biblical authors squabbling. He also bizarrely attempted to assert that Jesus pushed back against scripture, failing to teach that Jesus was not debunking scripture but fulfilling it.
Jesus Himself said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (Matthew 5:17-18 English Standard Version).
He recommended that his congregation read the Bible through the lens of Jesus, contending that things that do not line up should be tossed away — a remarkable claim given that Christians believe that Jesus can be seen throughout all of scripture, the Old Testament points to Him, and that He is the “image of the invisible God.”
Hamilton ended his sermon holding a colander, using it as an analogy, calling Jesus a colander and urging believers to toss away everything in the Bible that is seemingly not consistent with Jesus’s words.
The United Methodist Church (UMC) is radically leftist, most notably demonstrated by the fact that most orthodox Methodists left to form their own denomination, the Global Methodist Church. In 2024, the UMC lost over one million members when the West African conference voted to leave the organization due to its acceptance of LGBT clergy and marriages.
In December a 51-year-old Methodist pastor in New York made waves after declaring himself transgender before his congregation.
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