Before we are ready to move on to more constructive responses, we must press the matter of pervasive interpretive pluralism harder. Is it really as extensive as I claim? And, if so, of what is it the result? And are there any good ways within the biblicist framework to reply to it?
Facing the Extent of Pluralism
The many four-views and three-views books noted in the previous chapter address only some of the myriad issues, topics, doctrines, and questions about which Christians—including biblicists—disagree on biblical grounds.[67] Divergent views based on different readings of the Bible also involve many other significant topics—including the role of “good works” in salvation, proper worship protocols, the value of reason and rationality in faith, supersessionism (whether God’s “old covenant” promises to the Jews have been replaced by the “new covenant”), marital submission and equality, the legitimacy of creeds and confessions, the nature of life after death, the possible legitimacy and nature of ordained ministry, the morality of slavery, the theological significance of Mary, the ethics of wealth, views of private property, creation and evolution, the nature of depravity and original sin, salvation of the Jews, use of statues and images in devotion and worship, the status of Old Testament laws, the importance of a “conversion experience,” the perseverance of the saints, church discipline, birth control, tithing, dealing with the “weaker brother,” the meaning of material prosperity, abortion, corporal punishment, capital punishment, asceticism, economic ethics, the wearing of jewelry and makeup, celibacy, drinking alcohol, homosexuality, the “anti-Christ,” divinely chosen nationhood, swearing oaths, the ontology of church, believers’ relations to culture, church-state relations, and—last but not least—the nature and purpose of the Bible itself.
What I have written so far should suffice for informed readers to grasp my meaning. However, because biblicists seem so ready to try to defend their theory of the Bible by sidestepping or minimizing the nature and extent of interpretive and theological differences among sincere and informed Bible readers, I will press the point home by developing a handful of specific and significant cases of interpretive pluralism. This may risk beating the proverbial dead horse. But I prefer to err on the side of presenting too much rather than too little evidence, because many biblicists seem accustomed to easily ignoring or dismissing the “biblical” convictions of others who read the Bible differently than they happen to, or to minimizing those disparities by suggesting that they are only slight variations on what are commonly shared Bible-based interpretations and convictions. Yet the differences cannot be ignored, dismissed, or minimized. They are real and concern important matters. The following examples indicate only some of those differences.
Church Polity: Does the Bible teach a free-church congregational system, a Presbyterian church government, an Episcopal church polity, or something else? The answer, it seems, is yes, yes, yes, and yes. Where two or three are gathered there is Christ with them (Matt. 18:20). Appoint elders in every town (Titus 1:5). If anyone sets his heart on being a bishop, that is a noble thing (1 Tim. 3:1). Not to mention: Jesus made Peter (or was it Peter’s confession?) the rock upon which he built his church (Matt. 16:18). The Christian church today exists in the fragmented form of literally untold thousands of denominations, dioceses, conventions, and individual congregations. Baptists alone are comprised of hundreds of denominations and groupings. There are extrabiblical, sociological reasons explaining the continuation of the variety of church polities, each with their own canon laws, constitutions, and manuals of order. But usually beneath these reasons stand genuine differences concerning scriptural teaching about what a “biblical” church looks like. If that was not so, then Christianity would have far fewer divisions, “reformations,” and schisms, and the church would enjoy much greater unity.
Free Will and Predestination: Christians, especially Protestants, with any awareness of church history and theology know about the apparently irresolvable debate between believers over human free will versus the bondage of the will. The Bible-based argument has been running for centuries. Can people make a choice to embrace God? Or must God alone irresistibly call them out of their spiritual slavery and darkness? Are believers sovereignly predestined to salvation? Or is salvation an offer and decision made to and by every person? Christians disagree, sometimes vehemently. They disagree among other reasons because the Bible contains plenty of evidence to support both sides and more. Arminius lined up a lot of scripture to back up his case; that cannot be denied. But so did the Calvinists who opposed him. Thus, the debate has been interminable. Each side is certain that its view is biblical, yet holds its position at the expense of having to exert mighty efforts to reinterpret away the rather plain meaning of the Bible passages that seem to support the other side.[68] Other Christians, tired of the argument, simply decide either to ignore the matter or to split the difference by asserting that somehow all the contradictions are true in a divine mystery beyond human understanding. That may be, but as a final position it hardly ends up offering us clear biblical instruction on a matter of no small theological importance. Again, the promise of biblicism is unfulfilled.
The Fourth[69] Commandment: “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.” All Christians agree that this is one of the Ten Commandments. What does the command mean? What practically does it require? And, for that matter, which day of the week actually is this day to be kept holy? Does it remain Sabbath in Jewish terms? Or has it become “The Lord’s Day” in the new covenant? Biblicists have quite different answers. Sabbatarians, for instance, make a case for a first-day observance of the Sabbath, but many other Christians disagree. Groups like Seventh-Day Adventists, Seventh-Day Baptists, the United Church of God, the Living Church of God, and the True Jesus Church, advocate a seventh, not first, day observance of the Sabbath. Yet others say the old covenant command has been abolished altogether—the Sabbath was “a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ” (Col. 2:17; also see Gal. 4:10–11). Okay, well, whatever day should be observed, what does it mean to “keep it holy”? Does it literally mean using the day exclusively to worship, pray, read scripture, and physically rest? How about eating out at a restaurant? Watching sports on television? Holding a job that sometimes entails work on this day? Enjoying a pleasurable trip to the shopping mall? Bible-reading Christians, including biblicist Christians, are all over the map on this. Again, scripture can apparently be interpreted in many ways.
The Morality of Slavery: The bloodiest and one of the most tragic episodes in all of American history was a civil war fought by myriad Bible-believing Christians on both sides, many of whom were equally convinced that the scriptures taught the rightness of slavery, on the one hand, and the imperative of abolition, on the other.[70] Previous decades of heated debate by biblical scholars and ministers who trusted the Bible as God’s authoritative word simply could not resolve the conflict by an appeal to the divine texts. If anything, the more strictly biblicist approach supported the proslavery position.[71] On a basic, important moral question addressed in the Bible, the scriptures proved impotent in providing a definitive teaching that sincere believers might have agreed on and thus perhaps avoided war.
The civil war was in its deepest meaning a “theological crisis.”[72] It required raw, gory, military might—and took the lives of 620,000 soldiers, not counting incalculable other casualties—to “settle” the matter. As to the adversaries, “both,” observed President Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address in 1865, “read the same Bible and pray to the same God.”[73] Furthermore, it was precisely in the decades after the civil war that “biblical” Christianity was discarded by a majority of American intellectuals as doubtful, and it was displaced by pragmatism, positivism, and materialism.[74] If ever there had been a time when the Bible needed to teach a clear word on an urgent moral issue, the 1850s and early 1860s was it. But no clear word was forthcoming. Mortal enemies instead found clear biblical support for their opposing and irreconcilable convictions.
Gender Difference and Equality: The marketplace contains no lack of books explaining “the” biblical view of manhood and womanhood, conceived within the biblicist framework.[75] The only problem is that different contemporary books reading the same biblical texts come to very different, often contradictory conclusions. One set of scholars finds that the Bible teaches a traditional view of gender difference in which men should have authority over women in marriage and church. Another finds that the Bible teaches feminist gender equality and the full participation of women in ministry. One book purports in its title to present the biblical foundation of manhood and womanhood. Another’s title invites the reader to discover the truth of biblical equality. The next offers itself by title as a response to evangelical feminism. Then yet another promises to tell us what Paul really said about women.
All these books appeal to the Bible as the authority backing their views. And many make what are reasonable cases for their divergent positions. Given this pluralism of arguments, we might ask: in what sense does or can the Bible actually function as an instructive, issue-clarifying authority for the open-minded Bible believer who simply wants to know what the scriptures teach about gender roles, marriage relations, and the place of women in church ministry? In actual practice, it does not and apparently cannot serve as such an authority.
The Bible seems to say many things that can be reasonably read and theologized in various ways. In studying the various sides of this heated debate, one gets the distinct feeling that it is actually the divergent prebiblical interests of the many interpreters—both traditionalist and feminist—that drive their scriptural readings, as much as the texts themselves. That too presents problems for biblicism. But the more pertinent point here is this: apparently smart, well-intentioned scripture scholars in fact do read the same set of texts and come away making arguably compelling cases for opposing if not incompatible beliefs on a matter of significance for Christian personal and church practice.
Wealth, Prosperity, Poverty, and Blessing: When I was a freshman at Wheaton College in 1979, I took a wonderful course with Professor Bob Webber on “Christ and Culture.” One of the assigned readings was Ronald Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger,[76] a bombshell of a book that demonstrated, if nothing else, that the Bible is jam-packed full of scripture verses making it very clear that God cares very much about poverty and hunger. To save money I bought a used copy of the book from another student who had been assigned to read it the semester before. Taking possession of the book, I discovered that page after page had angry notes scrawled in the margins “yelling” at Sider about how dumb and wrong he was—including scrawled in the “biblical passages” chapters. Many pages had actually been torn out (and then shoved back in) in apparent fury over the book’s argument. I was surprised and amused. Why would an evangelical student become so incensed about a book that made such a clear biblical case about poverty and hunger? Despite the book’s scriptural-evidence overkill, we know that more than a few “Bible believers” at the time of its 1977 publication scorned and attacked the book. One author even wrote a Bible-based counterargument titled, Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators: A Biblical Response to Ronald Sider.[77]
Yet these are only two among a host of other books about biblical teachings on money, poverty, wealth, prosperity, blessing, and generosity. Some agree in their teachings, but many do not. Some say the Bible teaches material prosperity and financial riches as blessings from God for faithfulness, which believers ought to aspire to win. Others report that the Bible teaches the need for voluntary simplicity or poverty, a kind of new lay monasticism. Yet others claim that the Bible effectively teaches a prudent responsibility and balance concerning money, which fits a middle-class American lifestyle and sensibilities quite well. All appeal to multiple passages of scripture to make their cases, however in tension or at variance with one another their cases turn out to be.
War, Peace, and Nonviolence: Across church history, Christians have found in the Bible support for the mutually exclusive positions of nonresistant pacifism, crusades, and just wars, to name the major alternatives. And many American Christians today find clear biblical justification for serving in the US military—which, by virtue of not evaluating possible wars on a case-by-case basis, doesn’t neatly fit any of those three historic models. Violence, war, and peace are massively important human moral concerns, and different ethical Christian positions taken on them inevitably make an imprint on the theological character of the gospel preached. Thus, the good news of the evangelical Mennonite is very, very different from the good news of the conservative Republican evangelical.
What is clear in all this, however, again, is that, upon a careful study of the biblical bases of the various alternative positions, it is entirely possible for well-meaning and informed students of scripture to justify very different “biblical” views on the matter—it actually happens, and has so for centuries of church history. And, given biblicist assumptions, fully embracing any one “biblical” position on war also necessitates ignoring, discounting, or dramatically reinterpreting those scriptural passages that inconveniently contradict the position embraced. Biblicism is thus again skewered on at least one of the many horns of the beast of pervasive interpretive pluralism.
Charismatic Gifts: Should Christians be exercising charismatic gifts of the Spirit today? That is, ought Christians to expect that at least some believers today should and will “speak in tongues,” prophesy, be “slain in the spirit,” be overcome with “holy laughter,” and perform miraculous healings and other “signs and wonders”? Or were charismatic gifts of the Spirit provided only to the first Christians during the time of the apostles in order to help establish a solid foundation of the early church, but then ceased with the closing of the apostolic era? Believers in the latter view argue that supernatural signs and wonders were not meant by God for all times. In contrast, entire evangelical denominations—pentecostal and charismatic—are founded on the conviction that charismatic gifts of the Spirit do and must continue to be exercised by Christians today who want to live the full gospel. Other evangelical denominations explicitly teach as a matter of polity that supernatural signs and wonders have ceased and that to exercise them is to be misled into unbiblical error. Each side marshals lots of Bible verses to argue its case, and each ends up, in my view, making a fairly convincing case.[78] It is hard to see how both can be correct, though. And what one believes makes a big difference in what church and Christian life should look like. So then which one is right? Scripture itself does not seem capable of adjudicating the matter.
Atonement and Justification: At the heart of Christian faith stands the cross on which Christ died for the salvation of the world—or at least some humans in the world. But what exactly did the cross—presumably along with the incarnation and resurrection—accomplish? Christians have appealed to scripture and disagreed about this for nearly two thousand years.[79] Biblicists and others who claim to take the Bible seriously still disagree today. Many biblicists have championed the so-called penal satisfaction theory of the atonement as the truly biblical view, arguing that the blood and death of Christ satisfied the holy wrath of God, paying to the Father as judge the legal penalty (death) for human sin. Some, however, especially of a more Anabaptist leaning, claim that the cross is centrally about the nonviolent movement of God and his kingdom in history. Still others emphasize the healing and cleansing nature and effect of the cross. Yet others simply find in scripture a vast mélange of images and metaphors for the meaning of the cross, none of which, they claim, holds theological primacy. For them, the Bible simply presents a “kaleidoscopic” or “mosaic” set of views about the atonement. Then again, recently a theological storm has broken over the so-called new perspective on Paul concerning the doctrine of justification—both (or more) sides of which appeal to many scriptural texts for support.[80] And none of this is to mention other views less appealing to most biblicists, including the so-called classical or Christus Victor view, seeing the cross as a quasi-military victory over Satan and the kingdom of darkness; or the so-called subjective view of atonement, understanding the cross as setting a moral example of God’s boundless love for the lost, which transforms those who believe. These views also draw on a variety of apparently supportive biblical texts.
The cross, atonement, and justification are clearly not “secondary” theological issues. Yet, it is a historical, empirical, undeniable fact that biblicist and other Christians have been unable to come to anything like a common mind about what the Bible actually teaches on those central matters. Instead, scripture has given rise to a multiplicity of divergent beliefs and commitments.
God-Honoring Worship: How does God want or how might he allow his people to worship him? Bible-reading Christians disagree. May clergy wear vestment robes and burn incense? Must all pictures and images be removed from sanctuaries? May worship include musical instruments? What does the Bible teach? Different things, it seems. The various answers cluster around three general principles, all claiming to honor scripture.
One is the so-called regulative principle, which argues that only those things that are instituted by command, teaching, or example in the Bible or are derived by “good and necessary consequence” from the Bible are permitted in worship. In short, God institutes in the Bible everything required for church worship and prohibits all other possibilities. This is the view of many Presbyterian, Reformed, Anabaptist, Restorationist, and some Baptist churches. Lutherans, Anglicans, Methodists, and many other sorts of evangelical churches disagree, holding instead to the so-called normative principle of worship, which says that worshipers may use elements of worship that are not prohibited by the Bible, whether or not they are positively commanded by scripture.[81]
Then again, some Christians argue for the so-called informed principle of worship, which says that what the Bible commands of worship is required, what it forbids is prohibited, and what is not forbidden is allowable if deduced by an application of the good-and-necessary-consequence principle. But regulative-principle advocates argue that this is merely a more complicated restatement of their view. Many Christians today may not be aware that these are even issues of debate. But they do cause controversies and have consequences.
The regulative principle helps to explain why churches that subscribe to it can feel stripped down and bare to those not used to it. And the normative principle explains why churches that follow it embrace more ornate and liturgical elements of worship, such as clergy vestments, stained glass, sacred images, processional crosses, incense, and so on. These principles sometimes lurk behind controversies over “contemporary praise-song” versus traditional styles of worship services. Differing biblical beliefs about proper worship have also generated controversies about the propriety in worship services of hymnbooks, corporate confessions of sin, liturgical dance, doxologies, benedictions, the recitation of creeds, and other issues. Some Calvinists have even argued that the Bible prohibits the use of any musical instrument in church.[82] Others claim that in biblical worship services only the psalms may be sung.
Many American evangelicals may not care about these disputes, but that essentially says that they unwittingly subscribe to the normative principle. Particularly interesting to note about these disagreements is that they revolve both around the right interpretation of specific Bible verses (e.g., Exod. 20:4–6; Lev. 10:1–3; Deut. 4:2; 12:29–32; 17:3; Josh. 1:7; 23:6–8; 1 Kings 18; 2 Kings 16:10–18; Matt. 4:9–10; 15:3, 8–13; John 4:23–24; Acts 17:23–25; Col. 2:18–23) and also around larger hermeneutical principles concerning the use of scripture as a whole, which no verses per se seem able to determine (although regulative-principle adherents disagree with that view). The debates, in other words, are both biblical and (I think) metabiblical—which helps to explain why they are also interminable.
General Christian Relation to Culture: What about a less specific theological issue? Perhaps the Bible gives rise to greater consensus at a broader level, on, say, a biblical view of the general relation of Christianity to its surrounding culture and society. In such broad terms, does biblicism fare better? Well, no. As with most other issues, Christians have been and are all over the map—and all with well-read Bibles in hand. I will not elaborate in depth, as readers no doubt understand the facts here. H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic Christ and Culture made the point clear enough, along with other Bible-based books that have also attempted to address the matter.[83] Does the Bible teach that Christians should be against, of, above, or transforming culture, or is it all a paradox? Again, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. Or at least plenty of biblical texts exist that can, within a biblicist framework, build quite strong cases for each perspective. Once again, the Bible itself does not settle the matter in an authoritative way. If anything, it gives rise to a multiplicity of plausible “biblical” positions that have biblicists lining up on all sides of the debate.
Evangelical biblicists are highly divergent from one another on many scriptural and theological issues and in their consequential cultural and institutional manifestations. For this reason, many scholars of American evangelicalism find it difficult to identify anything much that evangelicals share in common. Mark Noll, for instance, observes that “the groups and individuals making up the postwar evangelical movement unite on little except profession of a high view of scripture and the need for divine assistance in salvation.”[84] Nathan Hatch has likewise emphasized American evangelicalism’s “populist and decentralized structure,” “its penchant for splitting, forming, and reforming,” its “pluralism and decentralization,” its “few church structures to which many of its adherents or leaders are subject,” and its “instability that I [Hatch] think is problematic for theological integrity.” He observes, “In truth, there is no such thing as evangelicalism. [It is made up of] extremely diverse coalitions dominated by scores of self-appointed and independent-minded religious leaders.”[85] Other scholars similarly struggle to find in the “essentially contested concept” of “evangelicalism” anything more than a “family resemblance” or “mosaic” of pieces that together form a group by that name.[86]
A great deal of the work of the neo-evangelical movement in the United States since the 1940s has been trying to forge enough common ground on which to unite “for the sake of its gospel.” But the Bible itself—and not simply a shared theory about the Bible—has proven to be a problematic basis for defining that common ground.
Even in a book dedicated entirely to solidifying a consensus of shared evangelical theological beliefs—J. I. Packer and Thomas Oden’s One Faith: The Evangelical Consensus—already by the second page of the introduction the authors admit to having to ignore the many areas of evangelical dissensus: “We have . . . attempted not to select passages [of key evangelical declarations and documents] on which evangelical consent is still under intense debate. . . . We decline to discuss secondary matters on which disagreements surface, such as variations on polity, modes and subjects of baptism, glossolalia, millennialism, theological epistemology, and specifics of exegesis.”[87] Doing so is certainly necessary to sustain a case about evangelical consensus, but it does not make the disagreements go away.
American evangelicalism, I maintain, lacks a positive, shared, biblically grounded belief system and identity. The view of evangelicals in Britain, apparently, does not look much better.[88] Therefore evangelicalism has often, unfortunately, held itself together as a movement by reliance on the negative forces and mechanisms involved in fighting against alien groups and movements that seem threatening, such as liberal Protestantism and “secular humanism” (and, although to a lesser extent lately, Roman Catholicism).[89] Yet that dynamic does not reflect well the original vision of neo-evangelicalism’s founders, such as C. F. H. Henry, Harold Ockenga, and Edwin Carnell. Something is wrong with this picture.
Considering Possible Biblicist Replies
Biblicists or any other interested parties might respond to these problems with six possible replies. The first three are the kinds of responses that biblicists most likely would assume or say in response to the above. The last three are more speculative possibilities that might be proposed in order to salvage biblicism from the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism—I know of no specific biblicists who do, but as theoretical possibilities they are still worth considering.
Some, to begin, might say in response to pervasive interpretive pluralism that truly sincere and informed students of scripture can come to understand the single, harmonious truth that the Bible teaches—and some do—but that most Christians who study the Bible actually do so with problematic motives, interests, or skills that prevent them from seeing the coherent truth. Less charitably stated: “We are right and the rest, unfortunately, are wrong.” Let us call this the blame-the-deficient-readers answer. This view is often assumed, more or less consciously, by those who believe that their theological and moral views are truly biblical and others are misguided and in error.[90]
Second, biblicists might reply by claiming that none of these interpretive problems would apply to the “original autographs” of the original biblical manuscripts written by the hands of their first authors, but that something about the copying and translating of the original documents makes it more difficult for subsequent readers to grasp their true, single, coherent teaching. We might call this the lost-original-autographs explanation.
Third, some biblicists might reply that the Bible really does contain and teach one coherent truth, but that humans have suffered such profoundly damaging “noetic”[91] effects of sin—that is, the corruption of their capacities for inner thought and knowledge—that they simply cannot see the single truth in scripture clearly enough to understand and agree upon it. Let us call this the noetically-damaged-reader reply.
A fourth, more speculative, possible response to salvage biblicism from the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism might be that God desires only some of those who call themselves by the name of Christ to understand biblical truth and so withholds the illumination of the Holy Spirit from many, but not all Christians, so that some cannot understand scripture rightly. Evangelicals who believe in double predestination might be prone in theory to believing this. A possible variant on that explanation, which might perhaps be favored by certain groups of Pentecostals, could be that Satan has gained such a powerful hold in the lives of so many Christians that he enjoys diabolical powers to cause them to misread the Bible and so believe in errors. We could call either of these the supernatural-confusion explanation.
Fifth, some might reply that the single, coherent divine word of truth in the Bible is so complex and multidimensional that it actually encompasses and is reflected in all the divergent and seemingly incompatible views of the truth that different Christians read in the Bible. The divergent scriptural interpretations that different biblicist readers hold thus represent something like the different parts of the proverbial elephant touched and reported on by the ten Indian blind men—each is right in his or her own way, but to get the full truth they need to put all their knowledge together. This we might call the inclusive-higher-synthesis response.[92]
Finally, someone might conceivably suggest that God has intentionally provided an ambiguous scripture that would purposively cause disagreement and division in order to achieve some greater good, such as perhaps forcing believers to continually struggle and work through doctrinal conflicts in order to learn humility, openness, and continual reliance on divine grace. This we might label the purposefully-ambiguous-revelation thesis.
Some of these reasons may be correct. I may actually be open, if not sympathetic, to the gist of more than one of them. But none rescues biblicism from pervasive interpretive pluralism, and that is the question at issue here. Each of these six replies is or should be unacceptable, given biblicist assumptions, and so, if adopted, forces significant revisions to biblicist beliefs. Take blaming-the-deficient-reader, for instance: it is no doubt true that in some cases some Christians do approach the Bible with certain faulty motives, interests, or skills, which distort their reading of scripture and lead them to draw erroneous and truly unbiblical conclusions.[93] Sometimes, for example, people look for “biblical” approval or permission for something problematic that they have already decided they want before opening up scripture. But that itself can hardly explain the divergent interpretations to which the Bible has recurrently given rise among well-meaning believers throughout church history and today.
Why and how, we might ask, would the Bible be so easily misread by so many believers if, as biblicism believes, it is divine, inerrant, internally harmonious, perspicuous, and intent on revealing infallible truth to humankind? The doctrine of scriptural perspicuity is particularly problematic here. If the truth of the Bible is really sufficiently understandable to the ordinary reader, then why do so many of them—and countless biblically and theologically trained scholars besides—find it impossible to agree on what that truth is?[94] This response places a huge burden of explanation on the bad intentions, biased interests, or poor scholarly skills of Christian Bible readers across two millennia—a burden the evidence cannot sustain.
What about the lost-original-autographs explanation? Unlike some of the following responses, which are somewhat far-fetched, this approach is not much off from the explanatory strategies of some biblicists. Usually an appeal to the “original autographs” is employed to rescue inerrancy in the face of certain quite apparent discrepancies in the text.[95] Take, for example, the 1978 “Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy,” Article X, which says:
We affirm that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original. We deny that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs. We further deny that this absence renders the assertion of Biblical inerrancy invalid or irrelevant.
This strategy could perhaps also be used to address the challenge of interpretive pluralism.
However, this move simply does not work. Suppose that any and every well-equipped theoretical reader of the original autographs of the original documents of sacred scripture would indeed find there a clear, unified, consistent system of doctrine and morality about which all readers could agree. What good does that do the actual Christian believers who do not possess the original documents—that is, nearly all Christians in church history—who want and need to understand Christian truth? Nothing. All that actually does is formally build a logically protective, unfalsifiable wall around a theory. But that proves completely unhelpful for the more pressing task of actually knowing what is true, real, wise, and good. People standing on a sinking ship in the middle of the ocean are not helped one bit by the in-fact-totally-correct observation that if they were on another ship they would not be sinking. Neither are Christians reading the actual Bible that they possess helped in any way by the idea that they would have greater clarity of understanding if they could only read the original autographs of the original manuscripts of the first scriptural writings. The lost-original-autographs explanation is not necessarily false. It is simply useless and irrelevant. It does not address and explain the present problem in any satisfying or constructive way.
Does the noetically-damaged-reader response prove any better at rescuing biblicism from pervasive interpretive pluralism? No. This explanation shipwrecks on the rocks of implying that God’s chosen method of revealing truth and the power of God’s Spirit to illuminate that truth are inadequate to the task. Perhaps God tried his best with biblical revelation, but unfortunately underestimated the damage of sin to humans’ epistemic capacities? A biblicist cannot accept that. Certainly, some people lack the perceptual and mental capacities to make proper sense of the Bible. But those, we must believe, are abnormal exceptions. If biblicism is correct, then most ordinary people, and not simply an elite of scholarly specialists or the most brilliant readers, should be readily able to understand scriptural truth. Humans may be noetically damaged by sin. But the point of divine revelation and God’s word is precisely to break through the limits of that damage from outside of the confines of those limits in order to convey truth to fallen humanity. The noetically-damaged-reader reply forces us to say that God’s plan of revelation has worked rather poorly, which hardly provides a robust vindication of biblicism or the Bible.
The fourth possible response, the supernatural-confusion explanation, is theoretically possible on its own terms but proves unacceptable to biblicism in the end. Nothing in the biblicist outlook, which emphasizes the effectiveness of biblical infallibility, clarity, consistency, and truth disclosure, gives us reason to entertain it. Biblicists simply cannot believe on their own terms that God has an interest in purposely hiding doctrinal and moral truth from his people. Neither does scripture itself nor Christian tradition broadly give us reason to believe that diabolical forces have the capacity, against the illuminating power of the Holy Spirit, to prevent masses of Christians from properly reading and understanding divine truth. This reply just doesn’t work, at least within biblicist terms.
Similarly, the inclusive-higher-synthesis response is theoretically possible when considered on its own terms, and some evangelicals may be inclined to believe it. God’s ways and thoughts are indeed higher and different than those of humans. But this account may also run up against seemingly fatal problems. It seems to suggest, again, that God’s method of revealing truth was less than adequate for the task involved, since in the end, despite having scriptural revelation, Christians do not know very definitely what the truth is. They see only small bits and pieces of it. This explanation tends to cut the legs out from under any reliable notion of doctrinal and moral coherence grasped and embraced at the human level, since the synthetic harmony that pertains at the level of divine understanding—assumed by this view—does not very well reach down to make sense within the best categories, logics, and understandings of human beings. The truth may be clear and coherent at a higher level, but by the time it reaches real people through the Bible it becomes ambiguous and fragmented. If this explanation is the answer to the problems noted above, then biblicism needs to back away from some of its defining claims.
Finally, what about the purposefully-ambiguous-revelation thesis? Again, in theory it could be true. It has some precedents in at least Luther and Augustine.[96] But most American biblicists would say that God is not a God of confusion, but of truth, order, and faithful care. Sin has already created plenty of darkness and confusion in the world. Why would God need or want to build more ambiguity and misunderstanding into the divine revelation given to those whom he is trying to speak to, enlighten, and save? If this explanation is needed to salvage biblicism from the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism, then biblicism starts to defeat itself in the very act of trying to rescue itself.
In the end, these six possible biblicist responses fail to answer the question of why it is that, if everything biblicists say about the Bible is true, well-intentioned Christians to whom scripture has been given cannot read it and come to agreement about what it teaches. The hard question remains. It apparently cannot be answered from within biblicist parameters. Biblicism as a theory contains flaws that it cannot explain away, and such flaws seem to make it impossible for its believers to put it into practice with integrity and coherence. The problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism calls into question at least some of the beliefs of biblicism because it reveals how biblicism sets up expectations that simply are not met in practice.
The Reality of Multivocality
To come to terms with pervasive interpretive pluralism, we should pay closer attention to the actual nature of human readings of scripture that produce contrary interpretations. What appear to be the common causes of the routinely divergent readings of the Bible? What actually happens, especially among biblicists, when well-intentioned believers sit down with the scriptural texts and make sense of them in ways that differ from the sense other believers make of the same texts? What is essentially at work—not in contending abstract theories about the Bible, but in the actual practice of Bible reading and interpretation itself—that gives rise to the pluralism of understandings of biblical truth at which Christians arrive and on which they insist?
What seems to happen, stated oversimply, is something like this. Christians, including most biblicists, sit down with the biblical text to try to grasp what it teaches and find that, lo and behold, it contains and reflects a vast and confusing array of terms, concepts, images, genres, styles, contexts, narratives, purposes, statements, and arguments.[97] They often do their finest to identify some overarching theme, consistent thread, or interpretive framework that will bring order and coherence to the texts. Let us call these interpretive “paradigms.”[98] Sometimes these are identified in the attempt to provide a comprehensive grasp of the Bible as a whole. For some the overarching paradigm turns out to be salvation history. For others it is the covenant and election. For yet others the organizing frame is the idea of historical dispensations. Some say the paradigm is the idea of the kingdom of God. Some claim it is divine liberation from all forms of oppression. For some readers, it is the contrast between law and grace. Still for others the thread is simple, unconditional divine love and acceptance of humanity. Then again, others think that the best organizing paradigm revolves around the ideas of divine command, obedience, disobedience, judgment, punishment, and reward.
Sometimes, by contrast, Bible readers identify paradigms operating at an “intermediate” level of interpretation that are designed to make sense of a particular doctrinal or ethical issue. Some, for instance, believe scripture teaches peace and nonviolence. Others adopt the paradigm of a “consistent ethic of life.” Yet others hear the scriptures revolving around the issue of the need for people to experience a public conversion, to invite Christ into their heart, to make a public profession of faith, in order to “go to heaven.” Some believe the Bible centrally teaches the inexorable degeneration of human society and the singular call of believers to work to “win the lost” and “save souls.” Still others read the Bible as calling for determined social and political reform that will help usher Christ’s kingdom into history through an ever-expanding movement of justice and righteousness.
Most of these paradigms can seem to work, more or less. None of them decisively disqualifies or eliminates the others, at least as far as the adherents of other paradigms are concerned. In any case, no matter which metainterpretive paradigm Christians adopt, a great deal of scriptural text can be organized to make sense within it—some texts quite easily so and others only with some force and twisting. But, in all instances—and crucial for present purposes—there is always a significant set of texts that do not make sense, do not seem relevant, and do not harmonize or fit with the given larger thematic paradigm. Let us call those anomalous passages of scripture the “leftover” texts. The paradigms simply cannot integrate or make good sense of them. The leftover texts are outliers; they are incongruous and glitchy. For that reason, they are uncomfortable for the believers of the paradigms for which they are anomalous.
Another crucial fact about such leftover texts is this: those that are anomalous for one paradigm often turn out to be core texts in a different paradigm. What is leftover to one framework is fundamental to another. This is not surprising, since the paradigms were originally formed in part by the recognition that certain biblical themes suggest frameworks that best account for them. But no paradigm accounts for all the texts. And since the paradigms are alternative to each other and at least partially text-referencing, as described above, it makes sense that different constellations of texts fit certain paradigms well, yet remain anomalous leftovers for others.
The goal of any given legitimacy- and coherence-seeking paradigm vis-à-vis its leftover texts is to prevent them from discrediting itself as an adopted paradigm. This is generally accomplished in one of two ways. The first and easiest is simply to ignore the leftover texts, to learn to act as if they do not exist. Probably every biblical paradigm does this, though often—especially when most successful—without realizing it. The second means to avoid the discrediting effect of leftover texts is to formulate explicit, ad hoc explanations about why those texts actually do not say what they appear to say, to explain how what they “really” mean does not actually contradict the paradigm in question. Examples of both of these paradigm-protecting practices are myriad.
In the end, as a result, different groups of Christians end up invested in different interpretive paradigms, learn to ignore certain potentially threatening leftover texts, and are persuaded that the remainder of leftover texts can be explained away on an ad hoc basis when they are “rightly understood,” read in proper context, or otherwise “correctly” interpreted. When all is said and done, the adherents of all of the paradigms are persuaded that their approach to biblical interpretation produces a comprehensive and consistent reading and understanding of the entire body of scripture. And since few of the paradigms appear susceptible to synthetic integration and many of the paradigm-protecting maneuvers required to take care of leftover texts entail denials of claims made by other paradigms, divergence, division, and fragmentation remain.
Consider an alternative image illustrating how biblical reading and interpretation seem to happen in real practice. This image switches away from organizing texts into intelligible meaning systems, as with above, to instead fitting pieces of an apparent whole into a recognizable visual picture. In this analogy, the Bible functions something like—to be clear, only something like, not exactly as—a particular, enormous jigsaw puzzle with a huge number of pieces that is sold in many stores. The job of the Bible interpreter in this analogy is to figure out how the scads of pieces dumped from the box and spread out all over a table fit together to make the finished puzzle picture.[99] The only difficulty is that this is a very unusual puzzle. For, as far as anyone working on it can figure out, different puzzle pieces can be fit together in different ways to make distinctly different pictures. Nearly all of them are portraits of people. One is of a scowling old man, another of a sweet young girl, yet another a pregnant woman, and still a fourth is a tired-looking police officer. Rumor has it that yet other portraits can be made. (Occasionally some put the pieces together into other kinds of pictures—of seascapes, pets playing, or flower arrangements—but most puzzle enthusiasts discount those pictures as silly, because they just don’t look right and end up using only half the pieces in the box.)
So, in this way, the puzzlers discover that many of the pieces that make one portrait can be rearranged differently, with some pieces removed and others added, to make other portraits. Not only that, but in any given picture, enough of the pieces fit together to fill in most of the image, but not all of it. Every picture, no matter how well it is put together, still has some missing puzzle pieces. The sweet girl is missing part of an ear and a tooth. The pregnant woman is missing part of her foot and elbow. Furthermore, no matter how the pieces are fit together to make a nearly finished picture, there are always some pieces remaining that do not fit. In no picture do all the pieces correctly fit together. Some people try, but they end up bending and mangling those pieces. It just doesn’t work.
Nevertheless, despite, or perhaps precisely because of, the unusual nature of this complicated puzzle, it is very popular. Untold numbers of people are keen to buy it, spread the pieces out, and work to put them together. Most hope to use up all of the pieces to make one grand, recognizable portrait. But nobody ever succeeds. What happens instead is that different puzzlers in time see that they can make different pictures and end up choosing to make the one that personally most appeals to them for whatever reasons. Often—either because they come to really like their preferred picture, or simply because they become tired of sorting out and working on the alternative portraits that they can and might fit together—different puzzlers become partisans of one or another of the possible portraits. Some are proud of being “scowling-man puzzlers,” claiming that his is the real portrait that the puzzle makes when rightly put together. Others feel and say the same thing about the particular portraits they prefer.
Partiality to different puzzle portraits tends to run in families, as parents pass on the making of their own favorite pictures to their children. In most cases, however, puzzlers like to sweep the unused pieces that do not fit their portraits into Ziploc bags and put them into their closets.[100] Sometimes groups of puzzlers who all prefer to make the same portrait suggest that the leftover, unused pieces from those who make different pictures are actually not genuine, original pieces, but rather belong to other puzzles and were probably accidentally mixed into this puzzle box as a kind of contamination by careless hands. If other people who like to make different portraits knew the real portrait that this puzzle made, it is said, then they would realize the other glitchy puzzle pieces really don’t belong and perhaps should be discarded to reduce confusion.[101] The only problem is, some people who like other portraits say the very same thing about the disagreeing people who make all the other puzzle pictures. In the end, nobody is convinced by the others. So the puzzlers continue to squabble.
If these descriptive accounts and analogies about how the Bible is actually read and made sense of by real Christians are essentially correct and revealing, then that tells us something very important. It tells us that the Bible is multivocal in its plausible interpretive possibilities: it can and does speak to different listeners in different voices that appear to say different things. Whatever biblicist theories say ought to be true about the Bible, in their actual, extensive experience using the Bible in practice, Christians recurrently discover that the Bible consists of irreducibly multivocal, polysemic, and multivalent texts (polysemy means “multiple meanings” and multivalence means “many appeals or values”).[102] This means that the Bible often confronts the reader with “semantic indeterminacy.”[103]
Specific words in the Bible are sometimes polysemic, as biblical scholars well know. For instance, the word “head” (kephalē) in Ephesians 5:23 (“the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church”) can plausibly be interpreted to mean either “authority” (as traditionalists interpret it) or “source,” as in the “head” of a river (as egalitarians interpret it). The latter interpretation has the sense of husbands being a kind of source of life for wives by laying down their lives for them as Christ did for the church (cf. vv. 25–28).
Furthermore, very many passages in the Bible are polysemic. For example, to take a much-debated case relevant well beyond the circles of biblicists, the meaning of Matthew 16:18 (“And I tell you that you are Peter (petros), and on this rock (petra) I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it”), has long been contested by those (Roman Catholics) who believe that the church is to be built upon Peter as a particular apostle, versus those (generally Protestants) who believe the church is to be built upon the confession of Peter (in v. 16, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”)—among other argued positions. This is a debate the verse itself cannot, even in its larger context, resolve. This general fact of the polysemy of scriptural passages explains why ten different preachers can deliver ten quite different, more or less credible sermons on the exact same biblical passage.
Moreover, numerous passages addressing the same issue when considered together are often multivocal. Consider, for example, that the Gospels say quite different things about the role of signs and miracles in Jesus’s ministry. The first three Gospels teach that no miraculous sign “will be given to [this generation] except the sign of the prophet Jonah” (Matt. 12:39; see also Luke 11:29; Mark 8:12). The Gospel of John, however, shows Jesus publicly providing many wondrous miracles, so that the people “followed him because they saw the miraculous signs he had performed” (John 6:2). More broadly, the evangelical biblical scholar Peter Enns does an excellent job of showing just how much multivocality—what he calls “theological diversity”—there is in the Old Testament as a whole.[104]
Therefore, when all of the multivocality of words, passages, and thematic groups of passages are added together, the Bible as a whole is exponentially more multivocal, polysemic, and multivalent. As a result, church history is replete with multiple credible understandings, interpretations, and conclusions about the Bible’s teachings.[105] This makes scripture somewhat “semantically indeterminate,” in that the exact meanings of its texts are underdetermined by the words of the texts themselves. Those who fail to see this multivocality and polysemy of scripture—who instead insist on the combination of perspicuity and internal consistency—can do so only by forgetting that they interpret the Bible from within a well-developed community of interpretation relying on particular (though, to them, invisible) hermeneutical tools and paradigms that many other biblicists do not share.
For a more extended example of the multivocal, polysemic, and multivalent nature of scriptural texts, we might consider the familiar story of Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman at the well, recorded in the Gospel of John 4:1–42. The story itself is not terribly complex as far as narratives go, and its author certainly had specific intentions in mind by putting it in writing. But the text’s multivocality and polysemy are evident in the fact that it can and does give rise to a variety of different and sometimes discordant readings. Among those various readings—many of which I personally have over the years heard from diverse pulpits and read in various articles and books—are the following:
Anyone familiar with preaching and writing in the American Christian church will know that none of these readings is particularly far-fetched. Different expositors—biblicist or otherwise—can and do read exactly these kinds of lessons from this single biblical text. Many of them are plausible, although some seem mutually exclusive. Different people will of course find some of them palatable and others ridiculous. My larger point, however, is that, with enough homiletic or writing skill, each reading is feasible, if not entirely credible. There are, indeed, major swaths of different kinds of Christians out there who would and do find any one of these readings compelling and edifying. Such different readings of scripture indeed are possible because the texts themselves are multivocal, polysemic, and multivalent in character.
What I have said thus far is, of course, not an original observation. Scholars of textual hermeneutics like Paul Ricoeur and Hans G. Gadamer have been telling us about the polysemy of texts for decades.[106] These scholars help us to see that most texts, unlike many scientific formulas and computer codes, involve “surpluses of meaning” that give rise to multiple understandings. Most texts are also at least somewhat “semantically independent” of their sources and so cannot be entirely controlled in their interpretation by their original authors.[107] Short of a divine miracle, the Bible therefore cannot function as an authority today, whether or not the Holy Spirit is involved, until it is interpreted and made sense of by readers. Every scriptural teaching is mediated through human reading and active interpretation, which involve choosing one among a larger number of possible readings. Thus every scriptural teaching is subject to the complexities and different outcomes of the interpretive process.
Donald Bloesch rightly notes, “Faith itself gives rise to criticism, for faith is discriminating. It distinguishes between the kernel and the husk, what is central and what is peripheral in the Bible. The truth of the Word of God is not self-evident even in the Bible, . . . it must be dug out through diligent searching that is at the same time faithful and critical.”[108] John Goldingay notes, “An element of polyvalence or irreducible ambiguity characterizes parts of scripture—and all texts, to some degree.”[109] As a result, while any given text clearly cannot be well interpreted as saying just any old thing at all, like a “wax nose,” most texts can still be reasonably read to be saying more than one thing, conveying more than one meaning.[110] And in fact they usually are. This helps to explain the pervasive interpretive pluralism evident among Christians, perhaps especially biblicists, today.
Another way to express the point about multivocality somewhat differently is to say that theological and ethical interpretations and conclusions drawn from the Bible are sometimes, if not often, “underdetermined” by the text. For something to be underdetermined means there is not enough evidence to “nail it” convincingly and so settle debate. Such a lack of clear, validating evidence in any situation means that reasonable, qualified observers are unable to converge upon and together adopt one definite theoretical conclusion or interpretation about it; rather, the evidence seems able to reasonably but not definitively support more than one conclusion or interpretation.
Thus, in the natural and social sciences we sometimes say that a theory or interpretation is underdetermined (or sometimes “overdetermined”) by the evidence. For example, the very best data that we might gather on the subject of, say, the causes of poverty in the United States may lead different smart scholars to draw divergent theoretical explanations of poverty. In which case, we say that “the evidence underdetermines the theory.” The usual result in such cases is that we end up with multiple theories, and the available evidence seems unable to adjudicate in a way that leads different interpreters to converge in agreement on one theory. (When, by contrast, a theory, interpretation, or conclusion is “overdetermined” by the evidence, that means that reasonable, qualified observers have more than enough good evidence to draw the same conclusion or adopt the same theory—one could lose some of the available evidence and still be entirely justified in adopting the same conclusion or theory. An example of that might be the conclusion that a Marxist communist political economy is not a viable long-term project in the world today.)
When it comes to the Bible, the idea that a personal and loving God has created and redeemed the world, for example, is a theological conclusion that is overdetermined by the evidence of scripture. But a lot of other possible theological and ethical conclusions are not. They are, rather, often underdetermined by the biblical evidence. What exactly “the end times” will look like and how and when that will happen, for instance, is underdetermined by the available biblical evidence. That is why there are so many different views of the matter, each of which lacks the evidential support to “get the better” of its rivals. Numerous other Christian theological and moral beliefs—including most of those named above, about which Bible readers are unable to agree—also appear to be similarly underdetermined.
It is not that no biblical evidence can be garnered to support any one belief or conclusion. Each approach has at least some supporting evidence, which is what keeps it alive. But the textual evidence taken as a whole does not seem to be enough to clearly validate one “best” interpretation and so settle the debate, leading most or all reasonable Bible readers to converge on that view. As a result, different interpreters hunker down with their preferred interpretations, drawing attention to whatever evidence does seem to support it, yet often not admitting that their own interpretation, as well as everyone else’s, is obviously underdetermined by the evidence overall. The result, again, is a multiplicity of interpretations on a host of issues, each enjoying enough evidential support to be plausible to at least some people but not enough to settle the matters and engender a reasonable consensus. In short, the result is pervasive interpretive pluralism.
The ideas of biblical multivocality, polysemy, and evidential underdetermination may not fit the biblicist theory about scripture. Biblicists instead tend to assume the single, univocal meaning of biblical texts. Notice, for example, how David Wells emphasizes the singularity of biblical meaning (not meanings), when he writes that his position on the Bible “assumes that words and meaning in scripture coincide and what secures this is [divine] inspiration. Meaning is not to be found above the text, behind it, beyond it, or in the interpreter. Meaning is to be found in the text. It is the language of the text which determines what meaning God intended for us to have.”[111] My point here is not that Wells is wrong about words and meanings per se. My point is that he wrongly seems to assume that biblical texts give rise to only one single meaning that “God intended for us to have.” That is an unsatisfactory view—in fact false—and assuming or asserting it simply does not make biblical multivocality and polysemy go away.
What we have instead is something like what evangelical biblical scholar Kenton Sparks describes: “At face value, Scripture does not seem to furnish us with one divine theology; it gives us numerous theologies. . . . The Bible does not offer a single, well-integrated univocal theology; it offers instead numerous overlapping but nonetheless distinctive theologies!” Sparks says that “the literary, historical, ethical, and theological diversity in Scripture . . . scholars have documented a thousand times over.”[112] The evangelical Old Testament biblical scholar Christopher Wright states the matter even more strongly: “We are listening, not to a single voice, not even to a single choir in harmony, but to several choirs singing different songs with some protest groups jamming in the wings.”[113]
The multivocality and polysemy of the Bible, and the diversity and division to which they give rise, are undeniable, historical, empirical, phenomenological facts. It is not that multiple possible meanings are necessarily read into scripture by readers’ subjectivities (although sometimes they are) but rather that, even when read as good believers should read the texts, the words of scripture themselves can and usually do give rise to more than one possible, arguably legitimate interpretation. This very biblical multivocality and polysemy is exactly what explains a great deal of why Protestantism in particular—the tradition that, as the historical champion of sola scriptura and biblical perspicuity, has primarily fostered biblicism—is itself extremely fragmented doctrinally, ecclesiologically, and culturally. (The biblical multivocality and polysemy are also partly what explain in longer terms why global Christendom is divided between the Oriental Orthodox Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church, Protestantism, and Anabaptism—not to mention the many heterodox and heretical movements that have claimed scriptural authority for their teachings.) To deny the multivocality of scripture is to live in a self-constructed world of unreality. Yet scriptural multivocality is a fact that profoundly challenges evangelical biblicism. It must be overcome or transcended, or biblicism is at least partly mistaken and needs revising.