The main thrust of my argument so far concerns the fatal implications of pervasive interpretive pluralism for evangelical biblicism. I have not engaged biblicism on the fronts of divine inspiration and inerrancy, and nothing in my case questions scriptural inspiration per se. I have little interest in systematically questioning the matter of inerrancy directly, a debate that seems largely fruitless.[130] Let us then for the sake of argument concede that divine inspiration and textual inerrancy need not be directly challenged. The central problem is that biblicism is discredited by pervasive interpretive pluralism. The undeniable fact of entrenched, ubiquitous disagreements among biblicists about what scripture teaches on most issues, large and small, represents a fatal blow to biblicism.
Most evangelical biblicists today somehow manage to continue to pretend that pervasive interpretive pluralism does them no harm, but that denial exacts heavy costs in undercutting intellectual honesty and theological credibility. Even if they realize that they have been self-defeated, evangelical biblicists often continue to defend the theory that they are committed to protecting. Yet if pervasive interpretive pluralism undermines biblicism, then the problematic front of evangelical biblicism has been breached and additional criticisms may reveal some of its other flaws, which include the following.
Blatantly Ignored Teachings
Biblicists believe that scripture as a whole provides a divine authority that Christians must obey, and all the more so when its teachings are didactic, direct, repeated, and unambiguous. But in actual practice this view is routinely flouted. There are myriad biblical passages that contain clear commands and teachings (which the logic of biblicism would compel readers to follow) but that most biblicists do not obey and have absolutely no intention of obeying. I will spare the reader a long list of examples and offer a mere four telling cases.
First, in five different instances in five New Testament Epistles, the Bible contains this directive instruction: “Greet one another with a holy kiss” (Rom. 16:16; 1 Cor. 16:20; 2 Cor. 13:12; 1 Thess. 5:26; 1 Pet. 5:14). There is no denying that these are clear, imperative teachings of scripture—much more overt, in fact, than scriptural teachings against, say, premarital sex and abortion. But scarce are the biblicists who have any intention of obeying by kissing one another in holy greeting—at least those who live north of the Rio Grande. It simply does not happen and is not going to happen. Yet it is hard to see based on biblicist standards how ignoring the instruction is not blatant disobedience to a clear biblical teaching. Holy-kiss greetings would not be hard to practice. But the biblical command simply goes in one ear and out the other, as if it had simply not been taught in scripture. On purely logical grounds, the fact that biblicists ignore clear biblical commands does nothing itself to impeach or condemn biblicist theory—it could simply be that biblicism as a theory is correct and yet that biblicists as people are selectively disobedient. But I do not think that is the case. The blatantly ignored teaching observed here reveals more than unevenness in Christian obedience. It reveals, rather, a flaw in biblicism itself.
To keep this section brief, I offer only three more examples without extensive commentary. First Corinthians 14:34 says, “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says” (also see 1 Tim. 2:12). Many biblicists appeal to this verse to make many claims about women, authority, marriage, and church life—most of which turn out to have little if anything to do with the actual content of the passage. But no biblicist actually obeys what this verse clearly says. I know of no church, biblicist or otherwise, in which women are actually not permitted to speak. If biblicism were correct, it is not clear why biblicists do not follow this teaching.
Next, in Matthew 5:39, Jesus teaches his disciples, “Do not resist an evil person.” The command is quite plain, spoken by Christ himself. But few if any are the biblicists (or anyone else other than the Amish, perhaps) who do or intend to obey it. It is simply read over and ignored or dramatically reinterpreted. Again, from a biblicist perspective it is not evident why that should be, but that it is so raises real questions about biblicism.
Finally, Jesus commanded his disciples, “Now that I, your Lord, have washed your feet, you should also wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you” (John 13:14–15). Once again, the members of some churches do wash one another’s feet. But most do not and never will, no matter what the Bible seems to clearly teach about it. Something is amiss in biblicists’ selective seriousness about scriptural teachings, evidenced by these and other similarly ignored passages.
Arbitrary Determinations of Cultural Relativism
One important and in many cases I think legitimate way that biblicists deal with the challenge of certain “difficult” Bible passages—including perhaps some of those just mentioned—is to claim that their relevance for contemporary believers is relativized by historical and cultural differences. What may have been important within the culture to whom a scriptural text was originally written may not apply in our culture today. Fair enough. But what is not fair, consistent, or honest is the fact that biblicists typically offer no coherent account explaining which Bible passages (1) are culturally relative, (2) remain in effect in principle but may be applied or expressed in very different ways depending on the particular culture, and (3) remain universally binding in their specifics for all believers at all times.
The relativizing of biblical teaching on grounds of historical and cultural differences therefore normally proceeds in an ad hoc, unsystematic, and often arbitrary manner. Various biblical commands are relaxed or tightened without a clear underlying rationale or justification, depending significantly, it seems, on the particular cultural and political interests and discomfort of those doing the relaxing and tightening. In other words, biblicists very often engage in what we might call “uneven and capriciously selective literalism.” Sometimes the Bible says what it says and must be obeyed. Other times the obvious meaning of the passage is relativized by historical and cultural considerations. And it is often not clear for any given interpreter or across different interpreters which is which, when, and why.[131]
The contemporary relevance or irrelevance of some biblical passages is clear. The author of 1 Corinthians’s specific teaching about eating meat sacrificed to pagan idols, for instance, clearly can be directly relevant only in cultures that make such sacrifices in pagan temples. Likewise, the pastoral command to Timothy to start drinking wine in addition to water (1 Tim. 5:23) pertains to a particular situation of his unclean-water-borne stomach illness, and is not, it would seem, a general command to all Christians to drink wine. However, it is next to impossible to argue successfully that biblical teachings to love and forgive neighbors and enemies without measure pertain only to certain times, situations, or cultures. So, those are the more obvious extremes.
But many other scriptural passages are less clear than this. Take, for instance, the passage quoted above about women being silent in church. Is that a direct command to Christians now? Or was that a case of a particular command directed toward a specific situation that is not relevant for women and churches today? Or does it reflect a biblical teaching that is true at a level of general principle (and, if so, which principle?) but that must be applied variously depending on the specific historical and cultural situation? Different Bible readers believe each of these views, whether or not they are consistent in working them out. But let us suppose that one of the latter two views is correct. How might we know that? By what standard or principle could that be determined? And then what are the other implications of that standard if it is applied consistently? Nobody seems to know, or at least to agree. Yet these questions often matter a great deal.
Consider the broad range of problems this difficulty creates. May God’s people never eat rabbit or pork (Lev. 11:6–7)? May a man never have sex with his wife during her monthly period (Lev. 18:19) or wear clothes woven of two kinds of materials (Lev. 19:19)? Should Christians never wear tattoos (Lev. 19:28)? Should those who blaspheme God’s name be stoned to death (Lev. 24:10–24)? Ought Christians to hate those who hate God (Ps. 139:21–22)? Ought believers to praise God with tambourines, cymbals, and dancing (Ps. 150:4–5)? Should Christians encourage the suffering and poor to drink beer and wine in order to forget their misery (Prov. 31:6–7)? Should parents punish their children with rods in order to save their souls from death (Prov. 23:13–14)? Does much wisdom really bring much sorrow and more knowledge more grief (Eccles. 1:18)? Will becoming highly righteous and wise destroy us (Eccles. 7:16)? Is everything really meaningless (Eccles. 12:8)? May Christians never swear oaths (Matt. 5:33–37)? Should we never call anyone on earth “father” (Matt. 23:9)? Should Christ’s followers wear sandals when they evangelize but bring no food or money or extra clothes (Mark 6:8–9)? Should Christians be exorcising demons, handling snakes, and drinking deadly poison (Mark 16:15–18)? Are people who divorce their spouses and remarry always committing adultery (Luke 16:18)? Ought Christians to share their material goods in common (Acts 2:44–45)? Ought church leaders to always meet in council to issue definitive decisions on matters in dispute (Acts 15:1–29)? Is homosexuality always a sin unworthy of the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6:9–10)? Should unmarried men not look for wives (1 Cor. 7:27) and married men live as if they had no wives (1 Cor. 7:29)? Is it wrong for men to cover their heads (1 Cor. 11:4) or a disgrace of nature for men to wear long hair (1 Cor. 11:14)? Should Christians save and collect money to send to believers in Jerusalem (1 Cor. 16:1–4)? Should Christians definitely sing psalms in church (Col. 3:16)? Must Christians always lead quiet lives in which they work with their hands (1 Thess. 4:11)? If a person will not work, should they not be allowed to eat (2 Thess. 3:10)? Ought all Christian slaves always simply submit to their masters (reminder: slavery still exists today) (1 Pet. 2:18–21)? Must Christian women not wear braided hair, gold jewelry, and fine clothes (1 Tim. 2:9; 1 Pet. 3:3)? Ought all Christian men to lift up their hands when they pray (1 Tim. 2:8)? Should churches not provide material help to widows who are younger than sixty years old (1 Tim. 5:9)? Will every believer who lives a godly life in Christ be persecuted (2 Tim. 3:12)? Should the church anoint the sick with oil for their healing (James 5:14–15)? The list of such questions could be extended.
Again, the question is: are these universal Christian moral teachings applicable literally in all times and places, or ideas relevant for only particular times and places, or universal teachings as general principles (again, which principles?) but to be applied in diverse ways as appropriate to particular contexts? Biblicists offer too few guidelines for the scriptural interpreter to know how to answer those particular questions with any degree of principled consistency.[132] And so the precise instructions and applications of authoritative biblical teachings are often left unclear.[133]
Strange Passages
The Bible contains a number of passages that are simply strange. It is hard to know what good use to make of them, particularly when working within a biblicist theory. One such passage, for instance, is Titus 1:12–13. Its context is this: the author of this Pastoral Epistle, thought by biblicists to be the apostle Paul (so I will proceed here on that basis), is writing to Titus, who had been sent to work in Crete to take care of church business there, including dealing with people who were disrupting the church. Paul is here citing the Cretan poet Epimenides, who penned something similarly derisive about his people around 600 BC—specifically, Κρῆτες ἀεί ψεύσται (Kretes aei pseustai), “Cretans, always liars,” as well, he wrote, as “evil beasts, idle bellies.”[134] In his instructions, Paul wrote this about the people to whom Titus was ministering: “Even one of their own prophets has said, ‘Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.’ This testimony is true.” Paul then instructed Titus to deal harshly with the natives, rebuking those who were spreading falsehoods and creating trouble. Okay, so what is the biblicist to make of this passage? In what sense is this part of God’s revealed and instructive truth? And what have Christians today to learn from it?
In forty-nine years of churchgoing, I have never heard a sermon preached on this passage. And for good reason. It reads almost like a tasteless, private email message that was mistakenly forwarded by the recipient to readers who were not meant to see it. Paul is here endorsing (“This testimony is true”) something like a racist stereotype—perhaps more accurately, an ethnic prejudice—an apparently common slur against the entire nation of Cretans generally. He is quoting a self-deprecating Cretan, admittedly, but then again one who wrote nearly two-thirds of a millennia before his day. Further, Paul himself is Jewish, not Cretan, so not really well positioned to make such critical statements legitimately. Let us begin by setting aside the strange fact that the making of such a proclamation violates many of Paul’s own moral teachings in other Epistles—for instance, about living so as to break down the walls dividing alienated peoples (Eph. 2:13–15; Gal. 3:28); about thinking about what is good, lovely, and noble (Phil. 4:8); about love bearing, believing, and hoping all things (1 Cor. 13:4–7). Paul was an apostle, but that does not mean he was perfect—perhaps he still needed sanctification from the sin of ethnic prejudice. Still, Paul here is writing what became scripture.
Yet, we might observe that it simply cannot be the case that literally all Cretans of the day were always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons, as the text says. There must have been at least some Cretans who spoke truth, who pursued the good, who worked hard, or who ate in moderation. If not, Cretan society would have by then disintegrated. Presumably at least one member of the Christian church in Crete did not fit Paul’s description. Perhaps the sentiment was actually true as a gross generalization painted in broad brush strokes, so maybe Paul was in fact speaking legitimately with poetic license or self-conscious hyperbole. What then? Well, Paul is still perpetuating here what certainly seems to be an insult against an entire nation’s populace, a derogatory slight against the very people among whom he was working through Titus to establish the Christian faith.
What then ought we to learn here, given biblicist principles? That Christian missionaries are entitled by virtue of apostolic precedent and biblical example to hold ethnic prejudices against the people among whom they are planting churches? That Christian leaders may resort to bigoted characterizations of natives to motivate their missionaries on the ground to deal with troublemakers? That it is morally legitimate for Christians to perpetuate derogatory stereotypes about entire nations of people different from their own? That Cretans are innately morally inferior to other gentiles? Members of “Christian Identity” and neo-Nazi groups might be comfortable with those “biblical” take-home messages, but I am certain that few evangelical biblicists would be. Yet, given the assumptions and beliefs of biblicist theory, it is hard to know how else to learn the divine truth that this passage has to teach. Biblicism, it would seem, proves inadequate for making Christian moral sense of this biblical text.
Other passages of scripture, strange in different ways—when considered from a strictly biblicist perspective—include the following. In Genesis 6:1–4 the “sons of God” married the “daughters of men” in the days when the “Nephilim” (hybrid offspring of fallen angels and human women? giants? or what?) walked the earth (cf. Num. 13:33). Judges 11:29–39 shows Jephthah voluntarily slaying his only daughter to fulfill a vow made to the Lord to kill in a burnt offering “whatever comes out of the door of my house to greet me when I return” (v. 31) in exchange for God’s help in his slaughtering the Ammonites. In 1 Samuel 16:23, an evil spirit from God came upon King Saul. Second Chronicles 18:22 says that “the Lord has put a lying spirit in the mouths of these prophets of yours.” Psalm 137:8–9 says of the women of Babylon, “Happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us—he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.”
In a less obvious though still relevant sense, it is unclear how biblicism—especially that which emphasizes anything like a “dictation theory” of divine inspiration—can make sense of passages in New Testament Epistles such as, “I have made a fool of myself” (2 Cor. 12:11), “I don’t remember if I baptized anyone else” (1 Cor. 1:16), and “When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus in Troas, and my scrolls, especially the parchments” (2 Tim. 4:13).[135] In what sense, we might wonder, are these inerrant words of God intended to instruct the contemporary (or even medieval) reader?
In yet a different way, William Webb points out the difficulties of this “grabbing the hot-looking women” passage of Deuteronomy 21:10–14:
When you go to war against your enemies and the Lord your God delivers them into your hands and you take captives, if you notice among the captives a beautiful woman and are attracted to her, you may take her as your wife. Bring her into your house and have her shave her head, trim her nails and put aside the clothes she was wearing when captured. After she has lived in your house . . . for a full month, then you may go to her and be her husband and she shall be your wife. If you are not pleased with her, let her go wherever she wishes.
What honest sense can strong biblicists make of these kinds of passages?[136]
Populist and “Expert” Practices Deviate from Biblicist Theory
Yet another problem with evangelical biblicism is that it is often not practiced by many people who believe in it, in the way its theory says it should be practiced. A number of recent empirical sociological and anthropological studies of scripture reading have focused specifically on how biblicist evangelicals—both popular book authors and ordinary church members—read and interpret scripture in real practice. Those studies make clear that, far from scripture functioning as an independent authority guiding the lives of believers, the Bible is often used by its readers in various ways to help legitimate and maintain the commitments and assumptions that they already hold before coming to the biblical text. In other cases, biblical texts often do not function as authorities driving discussions and applications of scriptural truths but are instead selectively engaged and made sense of primarily according to what happens to be personally, subjectively relevant to the reader at the time. In both instances, the authority of scripture conceived in biblicist terms is displaced by the prior functional weight of its interpreter’s interests and presuppositions.
For example, in a fascinating ethnographic study of actual Bible reading in an evangelical church, titled How the Bible Works: An Anthropological Study of Evangelical Biblicism, Brian Malley reveals that biblicist expectations are routinely overridden by a variety of practices that are problematic for biblicist theory.[137] In Malley’s study, evangelical readers focused much less on interpreting the actual meaning of the biblical texts than on simply establishing a “transitivity” between the texts and the readers’ already existent beliefs. In other words, the proper biblicist logic of scriptural authority that is often not employed is this: “The Bible teaches propositional content X; I should believe and obey what the Bible teaches; therefore, I believe and obey propositional content X.” Instead, the logic that is often actually employed is more like this: “I already believe, think, or feel Y; the Bible contains an idea that seems to relate to Y; therefore, my belief, thought, or feeling of Y is ‘biblically’ confirmed.” This routinely required no genuine theological connection to what texts actually said, but rather merely established that some connection or other could be made. General hermeneutical principles were never referenced to attempt to resolve disagreements about what scripture teaches. What often counted as the best interpretation of any biblical passage was not what the text itself teaches, but instead simply what felt “relevant” to the reader’s life. Bible readers elaborated a variety of possible meanings of the text, and brought in many considerations from beyond the text, until they hit on one meaning that struck them as most relevant for their personal experiences, at which point they stopped reading and effectively declared their interpretation complete. Authorial intent was often displaced in devotional readings, for instance, by various meanings that happen to “speak to” different readers, depending on their particular situations.
In group Bible studies, few ever spoke about the meaning of any passage in question but instead usually talked about what in the passage impressed them and what that might mean for their lives. At times, the church’s pastor even confessed to struggling with how to use inappropriate texts to make points that served his homiletic purposes of preaching relevant topical sermons without stretching the texts too far beyond what they actually say. That is, the pastor was often compelled to offer a reading of the text that he knew was different from what he believed was the right reading of the text. In Words upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Group Bible Study, author James Bielo reveals similar scriptural interpretive practices among biblicists that diverge significantly from those prescribed by biblicism.[138]
In a different, intriguing study of books about “biblical” family relationships written by evangelical “experts,” sociologist John Bartkowski examines the actual interpretive practices of the authors in making their larger arguments. Analyzing books on “biblical marriage relationships” by Larry Christenson and Ginger Gabriel, which arrive at very different conclusions, Bartkowski shows that “competing textual interpretations can be traced to the distinctive presuppositions readers bring to the texts. Specifically, contrasting interpretations . . . seem closely related to their particular ‘prejudices’ (in this case, assumptions about the essential nature of men and women) which evangelical readers import in the interpretive process.”[139]
Bartkowski similarly examines the biblical interpretive work found in sets of books on “Christian parenting” written by James Dobson and Ross Campbell. He finds that “each of these specialists use the broader biblical themes of love/forgiveness or of sin/punishment to legitimate their specific disciplinary prescriptions,” such that “while both of these prominent parenting specialists argue that their interpretations are ‘literal’ readings of biblical verses about the ‘rod’ of correction, they arrive at very different conclusions concerning the Bible’s prescriptions for child discipline.” Bartkowski sums up by stating, “the Bible as a text is capable of generating multiple readings—including multiple ‘literal’ readings—and can yield seemingly contradictory conclusions.”[140]
William Webb draws a similar conclusion about the “biblical” arguments for the parental spanking and corporal punishment of children advanced by teachers like James Dobson, Andreas Köstenberger, Albert Mohler, and Paul Wegner. Webb systematically shows just how little resemblance exists between what the Bible actually assumes and teaches about corporal punishment, and the methods and motives that these authors advocate. The Bible’s idea of corporal punishment, for instance, assumes and entails the broad and frequent employment of physical strikes applied by parents to the backs of children who may be as old as (what we now call) teenagers, with a graduated increase (as needed) up to forty lashes, which express parental love but also anger, and the resulting bruises, welts, and wounds of which are seen as entirely legitimate. Modern “biblical” teachers like Dobson, Köstenberger, Mohler, and Wegner, by contrast, advocate spanking and corporal punishment primarily for preschool-age children, involving no more than one or two smacks to the buttocks, administered infrequently, that never produce bruises or welts, and that express only parental love, never anger. Webb concludes:
In their defense of spanking today, [these authors] . . . make rhetorically explosive claims about their own unwavering faithfulness to Scripture. With a seriousness like that accorded to prophetic pronouncements, they contend that only their pro-spanking position upholds the authority of Scripture. They chide those who embrace noncorporeal methods for departing from what the Bible teaches. Of course, what they fail to share with their readers is exactly how they themselves have moved away from what Scripture teaches on the subject of corporeal punishment. They seemingly assume that what indeed honors biblical authority is only their own highly concretized and static approach to applying the biblical text. However, there appears to be a touch of irony in the fact that they themselves freely choose what they wish to ignore within the corporeal punishment texts.[141]
Finally, in a fascinating edited volume by James Bielo, a variety of social scientists reveal in their contributions the multiplicity of ways that different Christian biblicist groups in the United States and abroad go about actually using and interpreting the Bible, ways that often diverge from those prescribed by biblicist theory.[142] What is evident in all this is that Christian scripture has a “social life” of its own, which means that in actual practice it functions as an authority in many different ways, not all of which, even among avowed biblicists, actually toe the biblicist line in lived experience.
In short, because many readers are first driven in interpretation by their personal, cultural, and political contexts, the biblical texts actually often serve functionally even among biblicists as pretexts to legitimate predetermined beliefs and concerns, rather than as an independent authority as scriptural text. Its interpreting readers thus engage in as much or more eisegesis (reading the reader’s meaning into texts) or “overexegesis”[143] as authentic exegesis (reading authorial meanings out of texts). Once again, none of these empirical observations necessarily discredit biblicism. It could be that biblicist theory is correct and that actual, empirical biblicist practices and experiences are often compromised. Life sometimes works this way.
In this case, however, I believe that the actual inconsistent and divergent interpretive practices observed among various kinds of real biblicist scripture interpreters do point to significant problems inherent to biblicism itself. Namely, biblicism is impossible to practice in actual experience—because of, among other reasons, the multivocality and polysemy of the texts. So even those who theoretically endorse biblicist assumptions and affirm biblicist beliefs inevitably read and interpret the Bible in nonbiblicist ways. If so, then the only question is whether such inconsistent biblicists are prepared to honestly admit the actual impossibility of carrying out their theory and to make the necessary revisions to their theories and practices, or whether they will stick to their unworkable theoretical guns and simply live with the intellectual and practical duplicities that are imposed by their de facto inconsistencies with regard to scripture.
Lack of Biblicist Self-Attestation
Many evangelical biblicists ground the alleged truth of biblicism in the Bible’s supposed own self-attestation about its divine authority and other attributes assumed by biblicism. This is a circular move, but not viciously circular, and, within a presuppositionalist epistemology, perfectly legitimate. There is not necessarily a problem appealing to an authoritative Bible to validate the authority of the Bible.
But there is another problem with this approach. The problem is that what the Bible says about itself does not actually validate biblicism, as defined above. Or at least it does not do so explicitly and without the making of numerous dubious inferences and extensions of logic. Some biblicists are comfortable claiming that a teaching is biblical, even if it is not explicit in scripture, when it is obtained through a “good and necessary inference” from what is explicit in scripture.[144] The problem is, most of the received assumptions of biblicism as a theory are not necessarily good and necessary inferences of what the Bible explicitly says about itself. Let us briefly examine the relevant evidence.
First, when the apostles spoke and wrote of “scripture,” they meant the Law and the Prophets and some of the Writings of the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament. The New Testament as we now have it in its present form of course did not exist, at the time of its original writing, as a collected, recognized canon of scripture. So what the New Testament says about “scripture” may not be assumed to apply to the entire New Testament itself. (Note, however, evidence of the process of early inscripturation indicated in 2 Pet. 3:15–16, where the author of that Epistle speaks of the apostle Paul’s “letters” as comparable to “the other scriptures”—suggesting that by the time of that Epistle’s writing [likely between the late first century and the mid-second century] at least some of Paul’s letters were being viewed by at least some of the churches of that day as having a kind of scriptural status.)
Furthermore, nearly everything the New Testament says about the Old Testament scriptures refers to them foretelling the coming, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The scriptures were a preparation for and witness to the coming of Christ. In Christ, therefore, the scriptures were “fulfilled,” as many New Testament texts say. Beyond this, sometimes Old Testament passages are used by New Testament authors to justify particular practices in Christian churches, such as providing material support to preachers and teachers (1 Tim. 5:18). But little of this speaks directly to the matter of biblicism per se.
Five texts about “scripture” matter most for biblicists. The first is John 10:35, in which Jesus says that “scripture cannot be broken.” The second is Romans 15:4, which states that “everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” Third, 1 Timothy 4:13 says that, until Paul arrives to meet Timothy, Paul’s instruction to Timothy was to “devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture.” Fourth, 2 Timothy 3:15–17 observes of Timothy that “from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” Finally, 2 Peter 1:20–21 states, “No prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
What then is the Bible’s own view of scripture, when read in biblicist terms? First, all scripture is “God-breathed,” divinely inspired. Second, prophecies of scripture were never purely human products but rather spoken “from God” by men “carried along by the Holy Spirit.” God is thus clearly the causal agent producing scripture both in its existence and (at least some if not all of its) content. Third, scripture cannot be “broken.” Fourth, scripture is able to prepare believers for salvation through Christ. Scripture also has the purpose for believers of being useful for the teaching, discipline, and training in righteousness. And the goal of scripture’s use is to encourage believers to have hope and to fully equip believers to produce good works. Finally, in at least one setting, a church pastor was to devote himself to scripture’s public reading.
All of that says a lot, but what it says does not add up to the theory of biblicism as described above and practiced by many American evangelicals. What is clearly correct in biblicism, according to the Bible’s self-attestation, is scripture’s divine inspiration. Nothing in this book has questioned that belief. But none of these biblical passages themselves obviously or necessarily teaches divine writing, total representation, complete coverage, democratic perspicuity, commonsense hermeneutics, solo scriptura, internal harmony, universal applicability, inductive method, or the handbook model (as I described them above). To get from the apparently relevant scriptural texts to any of these ten biblicist beliefs requires supplementary argumentative work that relies on inferences and employs additional scriptural texts. Biblicists believe that this extra argumentative work succeeds, but I am persuaded that they are wrong.
For example, biblicists argue the following: “The Bible is inspired by God; God does not and cannot lie (Titus 1:2; Heb. 6:18); therefore everything in the Bible is true; therefore the Bible is inerrant.” But this line of thought involves multiple instances of slippage and leaping.[145] The first unwarranted leap is from (rightly) believing that scripture is “God-breathed” to (erroneously) assuming that that necessarily endorses the belief of some biblicists in “divine writing,” that the Bible, down to the details of its words, consists of and is identical with God’s very own words written in human language. Those are not necessarily the same thing.[146] The second leap is to apply New Testament statements about God’s inability to lie, which were meant in context to concern the questions of hope of eternal life and God’s oath of promise to Abraham, to a more general and abstract issue about the ontological nature of the Bible. Nobody is interested in claiming that God does or can lie. But, lacking a well-established set of other connections concerning scripture, that itself does not necessitate an inerrancy doctrine of scripture.
In short, lacking a prior, independent belief in the biblicist “divine writing” assumption, it simply does not necessarily follow from the idea that God cannot lie to the idea that everything in the Bible is inerrant—unless one subscribes to a “dictation theory” of inspiration, which most thoughtful evangelicals do not.[147] There is a lot of room between lying and total inerrancy in revelatory communication.
Third, the logic here relies on simplistic notions of what “true” means, given the diverse literary nature of the Bible and many textual forms of conveying truths. Only the more unsophisticated of biblicists do not know that they must back away from these simplistic notions. For instance, the “Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy” offers this qualification: “When total precision of a particular kind was not expected nor aimed at, it is no error not to have achieved it. Scripture is inerrant, not in the sense of being absolutely precise by modern standards, but in the sense of making good its claims and achieving that measure of focused truth at which its authors aimed.”[148] It is thus also an unwarranted leap from “true” to biblicist versions of inerrancy.
In sum, the Bible itself does not lay out the full biblicist program or anything like it. The Bible contains passages showing, for example, a reader of scripture unable to understand what it teaches unless someone guides him (Acts 8:30–31). The theory of biblicism cannot itself be generated and justified by its own biblicist principles. What is specifically true in biblicism is belief in divine inspiration. Beyond that, there are many other nonbiblicist approaches to the Bible that recognize and fully honor what scripture attests about itself. Biblicism is only one of the possibilities—and one dependent on tenuous connections to the actual statements of scripture about itself. Again, this per se does not invalidate biblicism. It merely nullifies the assumption that evangelical biblicism rests on obvious biblical teachings. If biblicists see biblicism working on biblical grounds, it is because they very much want it to work and so make it work—I am tempted even to say force it to work—not because it naturally and clearly works of its own accord.
A significant gap exists between what the Bible has to say about scripture and what biblicism says. In order to bridge that gap, to get from actual biblical texts to biblicist theory, it is necessary to employ decidedly nonbiblicist methods, including eisegesis and the making of multiple inferences that the relevant texts hardly necessitate.[149] That the theory of biblicism cannot itself be generated and justified by its own biblicist principles suggests sociologically that biblicism is actually not driven by its purported, manifest interest, but by other latent concerns, motives, and interests that are at least somewhat auxiliary to the biblicist program.
The Genuine Need for Extrabiblical Theological Concepts
Biblicism suggests that all of the pieces of the Christian doctrine and morality puzzle are right there in the Bible as propositions to be pulled out and put together in their logical ordering. Such a view is fed by evangelical Bible-only-ism and the handbook model of scripture. Yet a bit of reflection on orthodox Christian theology makes clear that numerous absolutely crucial doctrinal terms are not themselves found in the Bible but were invented or appropriated by the church during the patristic era. These doctrinal developments give conceptual expression to what was and is believed (by most) to be the best reading of scripture. I give three brief examples here.
The term “Trinity” is nowhere found in scripture, yet it is utterly central to orthodox Christian belief. The Bible does, of course, speak of God by many names, including the Father, Jesus Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But to best render theologically what scripture seems to teach about divine ontology, the church was forced to move beyond the Bible to the extrascriptural concept of “Trinity.” The adoption of the concept of Trinity itself does nothing to undermine the biblicist outlook—except perhaps that of a strictly anticreedal Baptist variety. But it does remind us that orthodox Christian theological reflection requires moving beyond the Bible to employ extrabiblical terms and concepts that are, strictly speaking, progressive doctrinal developments authorized by the church on scriptural grounds. That is a significant move.
The same is true of the Greek term homoousion, the use of which was required by the bishops and other leaders in the Council of Nicaea (AD 325) in order to most accurately represent the Catholic Church’s orthodox Christology against the (also biblically supported) arguments of Arianism. About this, David Bentley Hart rightly notes:
The ultimate defeat of Arius’ position was . . . not because he stood on scriptural grounds weaker than those of his opponents. The Arians could adduce any number of passages from the Bible to support their case. . . . Each side could produce fairly cogent [biblical] arguments for why the other’s interpretations of the verses in question were flawed. Here neither side enjoyed the advantage. Ultimately, though, the Arian position was untenable simply because it reduced to incoherence the Christian story of redemption as it had been understood, proclaimed, prayed, and lived for generations.[150]
It is worth noting that some opponents of that day and even today object to the term homoousion because it is strictly “unbiblical,” in that the term itself is not found in the Bible. Theological orthodoxy says that this is true but irrelevant, since it is necessary to work theologically beyond the Bible in order to make best sense of the Bible. In the words of David Yeago, “The ancient theologians were right to hold that Nicene homoousion is neither imposed on the New Testament texts, nor distantly deduced from the text, but, rather, describes a pattern of judgments present in the texts, in the texture of scriptural discourse concerning Jesus and the God of Israel.”[151] The crucial theological idea of homoousion is thus not strictly “biblical” in a biblicist sense but certainly is biblical in the theological sense. And that kind of realization, I suggest, opens doors to understandings that begin to erode the biblicist outlook.
Finally, an even more problematic theological concept for biblicism is the doctrine of divine creation ex nihilo, “out of nothing.” Not only is the term “ex nihilo” not “biblical” in the strict sense noted above (unless one counts the “deuterocanonical” book of 2 Maccabees scriptural, in which the writer declares [7:28] that “God made [heaven and earth] out of what did not exist, and . . . mankind comes into being in the same way”—the first time the concept of ex nihilo is expressed explicitly in Jewish writings). The idea “out of nothing” also does not actually seem to fit the relevant biblical text of Genesis itself, which appears to suggest that God’s creative activity began working on a preexistent “formless and empty” earth involving “darkness,” “the deep,” and “the waters” (Gen. 1:2). Clearly this passage does not force some kind of dualistic “doctrine of the eternity of raw matter.” But the naive reader of Genesis 1:1–2 could well conclude that idea on purely “biblical” grounds.
What is required, once more, to come to an orthodox theology of creation is to work with a broader array of scriptural materials and extrabiblical theological reasoning—in order to avoid both Greek monism and dualism. This approach produced a key concept, ex nihilo, that is not only not found in the Bible itself but is also hermeneutically controlling of what the most relevant Bible passage says. That is what second-century Christian theologians did.[152] Again, my point is that, while most reasonable Christians find these theological moves to be obviously legitimate, it is not clear that they could flow naturally from a consistently practiced biblicist paradigm, which tends, if anything, to authorize evangelical tendencies toward naive primitivism.
The Dubious Genealogy of the Bible-Only Tradition
One of the ironies of evangelicalism’s practice of solo scriptura in America as a means to arrive at pure doctrine and practice is that the populist pursuit of Bible-only-ism started off as an ideological project not of conservatives but of heterodox liberal Protestants driven by Enlightenment ideals. Eighteenth-century American evangelicals did not particularly believe that the Bible could be read entirely alone, apart from theologically informed church teachings. Those early American evangelicals usually believed in the necessity of learning from the creeds and doctrines of the church, mediated by a well-educated minister, as a means to read the Bible properly.
By contrast, as historian Nathan Hatch observes, “the first Americans to underscore the right of private judgment in handling Scripture were, oddly enough, ministers who opposed the evangelical tenets of the First Great Awakening. As New Lights in New England worked to make people more theologically self-conscious . . . theological liberals became increasingly restive with strict creedal definitions of Christianity.”[153] The liberals’ motive was usually to overthrow what they viewed as the thick and oppressive dogmatic systems of orthodox Calvinism. To do so, these liberal Protestant leaders of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries hammered away against doctrinally concerned evangelicals with the slogan of returning to “the Bible only” as a means to purify theology in order to arrive at the simplicity of biblical beliefs. Where they usually arrived, however, was unorthodox beliefs.
“In the late-colonial period . . . professions to follow just the Scriptures had been a staple of heterodox exegesis practiced by liberals.”[154] The Boston liberal Protestant Charles Chauncey (1705–87), for example, insisted that his belief in universalism of salvation resulted from “studying the scriptures in [a] free, impartial, and diligent manner.”[155] In 1813, the Congregationalist minister Thomas Worcester published a book titled Divine Testimony Received without Any Addition or Diminution, which claimed to be based solely on the Bible as the single and ultimate doctrinal authority. Williams observes that “many of his arguments in defense of biblical authority can easily be found among evangelical writers today. Worcester declared that the church had abandoned the simplicity of the gospel since the times of the apostles and had lain in darkness, error, and degeneracy.”[156] Worcester’s Bible-only theological method, however, led him to espouse the doctrine of Unitarianism.[157]
In 1850, Charles Beecher published The Bible, a Sufficient Creed, which rejected received orthodoxy, denounced “creed-power,” and advocated “the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible.”[158] So liberal was Beecher that he was relieved of his preaching position as a New England Congregational minister. Hatch, Noll, and other historians provide numerous other corroborating examples. Yet it was precisely the Bible-only method of scripture reading of these heterodox liberal Protestants that conservative evangelicals in the nineteenth century adopted and turned to their own evangelical ends. Driving the rush into Bible-only-ism was not a well-considered theological rationale but rather the populist, individualistic, democratizing tendencies of the ideology of the Revolutionary and early Republic eras.
Reflecting more broadly on this odd linkage of liberal and conservative, Roger Lundin notes the connection between the “unlikely allies” of former liberal Protestant Bible readers and contemporary American evangelicals when it comes to reading scripture apart from historical tradition: “Schleiermacher and the evangelicals come together on key questions of interpretation through their common disregard of the constructive hermeneutical significance of history. . . . History can only be hindrance and not a help. . . . [With] no less than Schleiermacher, conservative biblical scholars have sought to read the Bible as though it had never been read before.” This tendency Lundin situates within the long Cartesian inclination in Western (Protestant) modernity to continually, as “orphans” in a “parentless” (i.e., godless) world, try to “start history over again” in recurring moments of “self-fathering.”[159]
Often lacking an appreciation of the importance of history, contemporary American evangelical biblicists typically fail to grasp the dubious heritage and problematic genealogy of their own Bible-only tradition. And that makes them all the more vulnerable to the potential misreadings and conflicts resulting from that tradition’s antitraditionalism.
Lack of a Biblicist Social Ethic
Many if not most evangelicals—in the spirit of Carl F. H. Henry’s 1947 classic, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism[160]—would say they believe that “Jesus is the answer” not only for people’s personal needs but also for society’s political, economic, and social problems. The difficulty is that biblicism is unable to deliver one coherent, much less comprehensive, social ethic to guide a compelling “biblical” response to contemporary social problems.
The reasons are many—including that the very idea of the possibility of Christian political influence or social action is alien to the New Testament—yet beyond the scope of this book to examine. The Bible offers some very general “principles,” such as humans being created in God’s image and the state being established by God to execute justice, along with some extremely specific (and perhaps culturally extraneous) instructions, such as the New Testament “household codes” (Col. 3:18–4:1; Eph. 5:21–6:9; Titus 2:1–10; 1 Pet. 2:18–3:7). This lack of biblical material with which to build a coherent social doctrine helps to explain why social ethics have been one of the weakest—and at times simply nonexistent—dimensions of American evangelicalism as a whole.
It also helps to explain why so many evangelicals are so highly vulnerable to being swayed by new and different winds of political change—for example, entertaining quite progressive social ideas during the 1970s, only then to be swept into a close identification with and support for the neoconservative Republican Party of the 1980s and 1990s. Evangelical scholars also clearly have difficulty identifying the Bible’s social ethics. When theorists who take a basically biblicist approach try to derive a systematic Christian social ethic from scripture, they end up offering an incredibly wide range of proposals. These may include everything from Jim Wallis’s left-of-center Agenda for Biblical People and Stephen Mott’s progressive Biblical Ethics and Social Change, to James Skillen’s more moderate Kuyperian “structural pluralism” in his Political Order and the Plural Structure of Society, all the way over to the neo-Calvinist, postmillennialist “theonomy” or “dominion theology” of the so-called Christian reconstructionists, such as R. J. Rushdoony, Gary North, Greg Bahnsen, David Chilton, and Gary DeMar.[161] (Not all these authors are biblicists themselves, necessarily, but their views are not infrequently appropriated by evangelical biblicists on biblicist grounds.) There are also a variety of other alternative scripture-based social ethics to be found in that mix, all claiming to be “biblical.”
The problem here is one of pervasive interpretive pluralism again, but greatly complicated too by the sheer dearth of internally consistent scriptural substantive content with which one might construct a robust biblical social doctrine or ethic. In the end, biblicism seems to make the task of full-bodied constructive Christian social ethics undoable. And that is a very serious problem.
Setting Up Youth for Unnecessary Crises of Faith
Finally, though hardly the least of concerns to me, biblicism also has the pastorally problematic tendency to set up some young, committed believers for unnecessary crises of personal faith, when some of them come to realize (rightly, yet without warning) that biblicism is untenable. Having been taught as youth to stake their faith fully on one (faulty) theory of the Bible, their faith can later founder and sometimes collapse when antagonistic nonbiblicists point out and press home real problems with biblicist theory.
Biblicism is in fact objectively vulnerable to certain critiques that range in their effects from being troubling to devastating—including, perhaps, some of those that I have elaborated above. Therefore, the faith “eggs” of those believers who place them all in the biblicist “basket” can be very easily smashed when they—for example, by going away to college—leave the “plausibility structures” of the sheltered, biblicist faith communities of their youth and are confronted with those real critiques.
My personal observation of this happening has been of many “Bible believing” evangelical and fundamentalist (mostly Baptist and Methodist) students from around the state of North Carolina who have their biblicist faith thrown into crisis and sometimes shattered, often as a result of taking certain religious studies courses at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, particularly courses in New Testament with Dr. Bart Ehrman—a compelling professor who was himself once evangelical but is now agnostic, in part because of (he has told me personally) naive, biblicism-confronting, textual difficulties (as a graduate student at Princeton Seminary; grappling with the problem of evil and other issues also contributed to Ehrman’s loss of faith). Carlos Bovell has also written forcefully about this and related problems.[162]
John Goldingay, focusing specifically on inerrancy, summarizes the concern this way: “A stress on [biblical] inerrancy cannot safeguard people from a slippery slope that carries them from abandoning inerrancy to an eventual reneging on all other Christian doctrines. Indeed, it more likely impels them toward such a slope. The claim that scripture is factually inerrant sets up misleading expectations regarding the precision of narratives and then requires such far-fetched defenses . . . that it presses people toward rejecting it.”[163] I think the same dynamic applies not only to inerrancy specifically but to biblicism more generally.
In such cases, the difficulty is not necessarily the fact of the antibiblicist critiques per se. The real problem is the particular biblicist theory about the Bible; it not only makes young believers vulnerable to being disabused of their naive acceptance of that theory but it also often has the additional consequence of putting their faith commitments at risk. Biblicism often paints smart, committed youth into a corner that is for real reasons impossible to occupy for many of those who actually confront its problems. When some of those youth give up on biblicism and simply walk away across the wet paint, it is flawed biblicism that is partly responsible for those losses of faith.
Insofar as these biblicism-caused outcomes are undesirable and unnecessary, we have another good reason to seek better alternatives to biblicism. In this Peter Enns is correct: “We do not honor the Lord nor do we uphold the gospel by playing make-believe.”[164]
Conclusion
The main focus of my critique of biblicism is the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism, examined in the previous chapters. Once we face that difficulty, we can also then begin to acknowledge other serious problems with biblicism, such as those mentioned in this chapter. When we confront biblicism’s many problems, we come to see that it is untenable. Biblicism simply cannot be practiced with intellectual and practical honesty on its own terms. It is in this sense literally impossible. Biblicism’s fatal problems are not the sort of things with which faithful Christians ought to be comfortable. Biblicism is not the way forward for evangelicalism. There must be a better way to understand and read the Bible. What might that be?