You’re probably aware by now of Sam Allberry’s resignation this past weekend after it was exposed he, a self-described “gay Christian,” had an “inappropriate relationship” with another man. Allberry has been a prominent advocate of what is called “Side B” Christianity—a movement that promotes acceptance of a homosexual identity while attempting to commit to a “celibate” life.

I’ve spent years watching what Spurgeon once called the “downgrade,” and I’m not talking about some abstract theological drift tucked away in seminaries. I mean the kind of real downgrade you can see and feel when you walk into a church and something’s off.

I’ve gone after it from every angle I could…megachurches turning worship into a sensory circus, prosperity nonsense slipping through back doors that were supposed to be guarded, pulpits handed over to lady-preachers, and a steady, casual softening on moral issues like homosexuality and abortion.

A lot of different flavors and packaging, but the same bad aftertaste.

And if you trace it back far enough, past the branding, past the personalities, past the polished explanations, you keep running into the same root problem—Scripture isn’t being treated as sufficient, settled, and fully true anymore. Not really. Not where it counts.

And this has been unraveling in slow-motion for a while now. It didn’t explode, didn’t scandalize all at once, didn’t trip alarms in the system because it all came wrapped in calm voices, book-lined backdrops, and carefully structured platitudes. It was clean, articulate, safe. And that’s exactly why it was so dangerous.

And then something happens that the “fringe” inerrantists, the fundamentalists, like me has been warning about all along. You abandon a high view of Scripture and allow feelings and emotions to dictate your church policy. Just like what happened with Sam Allberry over this past weekend.

The framework that was supposed to hold tension together, naming disordered desire while giving it a place to live, doesn’t just sit there in theory anymore. It collides with reality. And instead of asking whether the categories themselves were flawed from the beginning, the instinct is to contain the fallout, to keep the system intact, to move on as if nothing deeper is being exposed.

But it is.

Because right behind that kind of instability, you almost always find a something deeper already in motion. A quiet recalibration of how tightly we’re willing to hold to what Scripture actually says. And that’s where men like Gavin Ortlund, a co-pastor at Allberry’s church, step in, not to sound the alarm, but to reframe the conversation altogether.

It started by nudging inerrancy down the ladder. Not completely off the ladder, nobody’s that reckless in polite company. But just a rung or two.

“Important, yes…” Gavin says, “but let’s be careful. Let’s not overstate. Let’s not divide over vocabulary.” It sounds like humility. It sounds reasonable. It sounds like the kind of thing a thoughtful, charitable Christian would say.

But I’ve lived long enough in this space to know what happens next.

Once Scripture is no longer treated as perfectly true in all it affirms, and once that confidence gets even a hairline fracture, you don’t just get a softer doctrine of Scripture. You get a softer spine. You get hesitation where there used to be clarity. You get men who talk like they’re handling glass instead of wielding a sword.

And then, almost right on cue, orthopraxy starts slipping.

You can call it coincidence if you want. I don’t.

You’ve got Gavin Ortlund stepping up to explain, with that gentle and lowly familiar Ortlund tone, that inerrancy isn’t really a first-rank doctrine. Let’s slow down. Let’s be careful. Let’s not throw around labels. Let’s make room for “legitimate Christians” who think the Bible has errors. He even reaches back to Machen, of all people, as if to baptize the whole move in fundamentalist credibility.

It’s smooth talk, for sure. I’ll give him that. It’s the kind of sophisticated argument that doesn’t beat you over the head. It just attempts to disarm you.

And then you’ve got Sam Allberry, in the same church orbit, same ministry context, who built an entire platform on managing desire and identifying himself by it under the banner of “celibacy.” The whole framework rests on categories that Scripture never hands us. Carefully constructed lanes where a man can say,

“Yes, this desire is wrong… but this identity, this orientation, this internal posture… it can sit here, contained, named, even platformed.”

And eventually, it doesn’t stay contained.

It never does.

I’m not pretending to know every detail of what happened behind closed doors. I don’t need to and certainly don’t want to. The fruit tells you enough. A man resigns under the weight of something serious. Serious enough that even a church already inclined to nuance and careful framing says, “This can’t continue.”

You can stare at that and try to isolate it. You can chalk it up to personal failure, unique circumstances, whatever helps keep the system intact. Or you can step back and ask the harder question:

What kind of theological soil produces this?

Because I’m telling you, it’s not random.

When you loosen your grip on the absolute truthfulness of Scripture, you don’t immediately start denying the resurrection or rewriting the gospel. That’s not how this works. The drift is more subtle. It shows up in how you handle tension. It shows up in your instinct to qualify, to soften, to create space where Scripture speaks with unsettling clarity.

You start building categories that let people live in the gray.

And people, like Sam Allberry, will live there.

You tell them the Bible is “right at the center” but maybe not in every detail, and now they’ve got permission to decide which details matter. You tell them inerrancy is a secondary issue, and now the authority of Scripture feels negotiable, even if nobody says it out loud. You tell them there’s room for disagreement on how Scripture “functions,” and suddenly the plain meaning of the text starts to feel like one option among many.

That’s a very serious shift in posture toward the voice of God. And once that posture shifts, everything downstream starts to fall apart.

You don’t confront sin the same way. You don’t draw lines the same way. You don’t even think about holiness the same way. You manage sin and reframe categories. You walk people up to the edge of what Scripture says and then gently guide them around it with better words and softer lighting.

It feels compassionate, like you’re helping people breathe. But you’re not actually freeing them. You’re teaching them how to live with contradiction. And that contradiction eventually demands resolution.

Sometimes it resolves in quiet compromise. Sometimes it resolves in public collapse. Sometimes it just sits there, unresolved, while everyone pretends the tension isn’t tearing at the seams. But it never just disappears.

Christian orthodoxy is not some abstract checklist of doctrines you can shuffle around based on preference or tone. It’s the foundation that determines how you see everything. God, man, sin, salvation, the whole thing. And when that foundation moves, orthopraxy follows. It always follows.

I’ve seen this movie too many times to pretend otherwise.

You start by saying, “Let’s not make inerrancy a dividing line,” and you end up with a church culture that can’t draw dividing lines where Scripture draws them. You start by saying, “There’s room for disagreement here,” and you end up with leaders who don’t know how to call anything what it is without a paragraph of disclaimers.

And then people get hurt. Not in loud, obvious ways at first. But in slow, disorienting ways. They lose clarity… they lose confidence. They lose the sense that God has actually spoken in a way that binds the conscience.

Everything becomes negotiable, just a little. And that “just a little” is where the rot sets in.

So no, I’m not buying the idea that this is all disconnected. I’m not buying that you can downgrade inerrancy, build soft categories around Scripture, and somehow keep everything else tight and ordered. That’s not how truth works, and it’s not how error works either.

You don’t get to loosen the foundation and expect the structure to stand straight.

It won’t.