Biblicism is impossible. It literally does not work as it claims that it does and should. Biblicism does not live up to its own promises to produce an authoritative biblical teaching by which Christians can believe and live. Instead, biblicism produces myriad “biblical” teachings on a host of peripheral and crucial theological issues. Together, those teachings lack coherence and are not infrequently contradictory. Biblicism does not add up. In this simple sense, it is self-defeating. The theoretical ideals of American evangelical biblicism collapse under the weight of the pervasive interpretive pluralism that biblicism itself generates.[282]
At the heart of biblicism’s problem of impossibility and incoherence, I have suggested, is its failure to come to terms with the multivocality and polysemy of scripture that make pervasive interpretive pluralism possible and actual. Biblicism presupposes a text whose words and passages have single, specific, and readily identifiable meanings, implications, and instructions. Such an approach is based on a theory of language and meaning that is not only outdated but also flat wrong. Biblicism also presumes that the Bible speaks with one, clear, discernible voice on matters of relevance and interest in doctrine, practice, and morality. But this assumption is erroneous. If it was correct, we would not have anything like the disagreement, conflict, and division that we in fact do have in Christianity today—especially among evangelical biblicists.
Biblicism is thus not so much directly “proved wrong” as a theory, as it is simply never achieved in real life. It is therefore self-defeated in relevance.
Unfortunately, most practicing biblicists to date seem prepared to ignore these facts, to evangelicalism’s discredit. Evangelicals should believe that pursuing truth and intellectual honesty under the governing authority of Jesus Christ is more important than protecting a particular, flawed, historically bound theory about the Bible. When lived experience shows the latter to be fatally flawed, evangelicals should be prepared to face the facts and find a better, more faithful way to read scripture. Instead, many simply equate biblicism as a theory with Christian faithfulness per se, and so end up having to defend a view that is impossible and dishonest.
Biblicists propose a theory about the Bible that claims that scripture alone can and must serve as a “final court of appeals” when it comes to matters of Christian doctrine, practice, and morals—and often also science, history, politics, education, health, and so on. But the obvious question is: how can the Bible function as a final court of appeals when the “judges” on that Scriptural Supreme Court end up rendering quite different judgments on most cases that come before it, at least as far as most of the plaintiffs and defendants are able to hear and understand? When their day in court is over, the various “litigants” involved in the different cases leave the courtroom having heard quite divergent judgments rendered. Each party is often sure that what it heard is the accurate and definitive judgment of the court. But the various final judgments that different litigants hear are conflicting and often incompatible.
In such a situation, it does little good for the bailiff or any other party involved to insist firmly and loudly that this court really is supreme and final, that its verdicts are truly just and binding, and that everyone must abide by its decisions. That is irrelevant, for few of the groups of people entering the court to take up and resolve a given case in question come away with a shared understanding of the decision rendered by the judges. Instead, what are rendered, as far as anyone involved can figure out, are a multiplicity of verdicts and decisions about the same cases.
If scripture is as authoritative and clear on essentials as biblicists say it is, then why can’t the Christian church—or even only biblicist churches—get it together and stay together, theologically and ecclesiologically? Why are there thousands of Protestant denominations, conventions, associations, and splinter groups—often each claiming their own right to existence in virtue of their possessing the “biblical” truth? And if the Holy Spirit leads believers into revealed truth, then why is the Christian church fraught with such disagreements and divisions about that truth?
Biblicism discredits church proclamation by creating conditions that encourage massive disunity and fragmentation. Christian churches today—particularly biblicist churches—speak not about one Lord, one faith, one baptism. They speak rather with a cacophony of voices about many versions of faith, involving various approaches to baptism and concerning a God who by various accounts can end up sounding like quite different Lords.
Just before his arrest, Jesus prayed to the Father, “May [all who believe] be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:23). Much of the world does not know or believe that the Father loves them and has sent his Son. Is anyone surprised?
Something is seriously wrong with the biblicist picture. And what is wrong is fatal, in the sense that it makes biblicism ultimately impossible. Biblicism thus proves to be both intellectually and practically bankrupt.
The actual multivocality and polysemy of scripture simply cannot be disavowed without living in serious denial. To continue to insist on biblicism therefore is an act of intellectual dishonesty and practical incongruity. And all of that deeply violates the spirit that animates evangelicalism and biblicism in the first place. But God does not need his people to live in denial in order to protect a particular theory of scripture, of fairly recent invention, from reality. Presumably, God’s written revelation, in the nature and mode that it has actually taken, are perfectly adequate to achieve God’s purposes.
Rather than insisting that God must have provided a revealed word of a sort that our preconceptions and historical social situations tell us had to be—and then bending over backward to defend that insistence in the face of good evidence to the contrary—we would do well to take the actual revelation that God has given us on its own terms and learn how to read and understand it well. If anything, biblicists should be shamed for refusing simply to accept—on what turn out to be faulty and outmoded philosophical grounds—the actual inspired scriptural writings that God has provided his people.
To be clear, yet again, what is problematic about biblicism as I have defined it is not its belief in inspiration. I have not in this essay questioned the doctrine of the divine inspiration of scripture. Nor have I directly and systematically taken on the questions of biblical inerrancy and infallibility. I do not recommend that evangelicals collapse into a typically liberal view of the Bible—please no. Nor am I arguing that the Bible should not be a central and trustworthy authority in Christian faith and practice—assuming that some of the problems noted above can be addressed by other means.
What is most problematic about biblicism are its assumptions about and beliefs in democratic perspicuity, internal harmony, commonsense hermeneutics, solo scriptura, inductive method, and the handbook model—as I have defined them in chapter 1. Along the way, my argument also calls into question the biblicist belief in universal applicability, if nothing else than by raising the problem of arbitrary determinations of cultural relativism. In short, if my case in this essay is sound, then much, though not every piece, of evangelical biblicism is in trouble.
One key to evangelicals moving into a postbiblicist world is to realize that nothing at all of the gospel of Jesus Christ needs to be lost in the rejection of biblicism. Quite the contrary, an appreciation for and reliance on that gospel will only be enhanced by rejecting biblicism. Stated differently, evangelicals can overcome the impossibility of biblicism not by losing the Christian evangel but by becoming even more evangelical when it comes to the Bible.
Evangelicals need to realize that the Bible is not a “how to” book. It is a “HERE IS WHO!” book. First and foremost it tells everyone: Here is who Jesus Christ is and therefore here is who you are and need to become in relation to him. The world is awash with “how to” books on every topic. The Bible is not simply another one of them that happens to be special because it is divinely inspired. Biblicism too often gets this matter confused.
The desire for this kind of “how to” book is a modern invention. It is related to the Kantian view of ethics as obeying imperatives, doing our rational duty. “Give me a rule to follow,” it demands. But this view is alien to evangelical (in the best senses of the word) Christianity and ought to become alien to the subculture of American evangelical Christianity. It needs to be replaced with an approach that begins by asking: Who is God and what is God’s relation to us, to the world, to me? And that immediately moves us to ask: Who is Jesus Christ and who am I in relation to him? That tells us the most important things we need to know to answer the questions: How do I stand in the world and the cosmos? What is my place? What is therefore good and right and true and worthy?
It is only first by getting answers to those questions—answers announced to us by the good news of the gospel—that we can begin to more specifically figure out what it means for our lives, our purpose, our relationships, our communities. The “how to” concerns the details that follow the much more central facts about “who is” and what that means for us.
Stated differently yet again: the indicative must precede and define the imperative.[283] What we need to do (the imperative) can only ever make sense in terms of the truth about reality (the indicative). The imperative must always be grounded on and operating from within the indicative. The indicative is the risen, living, and reigning Lord, Jesus Christ. Everything else, including imperatives, follows from there. Rather than looking to the Bible for answers to every human-interest imperative question we have, we should set them aside and focus on more seriously grasping the central truths about the indicative facts. Only then will any imperatives cohere and make sense.
Moving in a direction more promising than biblicism will require wielding a stronger hermeneutical lens and ecclesial teaching office than biblicism has ever provided, by which to sort out the best interpretations and understandings amid scripture’s rich multivocality and polysemy.[284] I have tried in the second part of this book to offer some suggestions that I think move us in the right direction. I do not claim that they fit together into a neat package that definitely and sufficiently leads biblicists out of the quagmire of pervasive interpretive pluralism in which they are now stuck. The suggestions in the last three chapters are only possible partial contributions to what will have to be a larger reworking of biblicist evangelicals’ approach to scripture. I will be the first to admit that perhaps I am wrong in some of the suggestions offered in those chapters. Any constructive argument for significant change of any sort risks the possibility of sometimes being wrong. If so, I will be glad to see and admit that.
Nevertheless, let it be clear that, even if some of the ideas elaborated above are off base, that does nothing to validate the biblicism described and critiqued in previous chapters. Biblicism is impossible. It cannot get “off the hook” simply by criticizing alternative proposals. Whatever may be the constructive merits of chapters 5–7, biblicism is in any case a major problem that evangelicals must learn to leave behind. In the process of figuring out how to do that well, participants in the discussion may express or encounter some ideas that also prove to be problematic. While that is nearly inevitable, it should never have the effect of legitimating biblicism. Whatever else may or may not be possible and worthwhile, biblicism as I have described it clearly is not.
Some of the needed changes in learned ways of reading the Bible may not be natural or comfortable, and may not come easy for American evangelical biblicists. My hope, however, is that, by becoming more genuinely evangelical with regard to the Bible, evangelicals might in time together find themselves living in a postbiblicist, Christ-centered, theologically orthodox world—a good and necessary thing all the way around.