Like a diet promoter who gains fame by promising better results with fewer restrictions, Christian Smith has produced a stir in the evangelical publishing world by offering an understanding of scriptural authority that is supposedly both easier to maintain and more orthodox.
In his book, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture (Brazos Press, 2011), Smith argues that the “biblicism that pervades much of American evangelicalism is untenable and needs to be abandoned in favor of a better approach” (3). He introduces himself as a sociologist, saying that coming from outside theology he has some unique insights on the subject. His key argument against biblicism is that people who share belief in the authority of Scripture come to differing conclusions as to what it says, a practical conclusion that calls into question the theoretical claims made for the Bible as the only rule for faith and practice.
Smith is better equipped to make his practical case than his theoretical case. While we often minimize how much interpretations can differ, Smith marshals mountains of evidence that different people’s interpretations vary widely from one another. While at times most of us admit this, we can push that knowledge aside when our views of the Bible get challenged. Smith does a fine job at exposing this problem. He is at his best here.
As a sociologist, he puts as much focus on social and psychological “causes” of beliefs as on intellectual and philosophical “reasons” for beliefs. As C. S. Lewis once pointed out, however, the critic always imagines he has good reasons for his own beliefs, while his opponents’ beliefs have describable external causes (for a longer discussion, see Lewis’s essay “Bulverism” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics). Ironically, Smith tries to argue that his recent conversion to Roman Catholicism should not discount the intellectual case he makes in the book. But if we are to ignore causes and focus on reasons, then we must dismiss his arguments in The Bible Made Impossible because they fail to do the same.
When Smith defines biblicism, he offers a list of what could be termed “symptoms of biblicism” (4’5):
- Divine Writing
- Total Representation
- Complete Coverage
- Democratic Perspicuity
- Commonsense Hermeneutics
- Solo Scriptura (i.e., you alone with the Bible)
- Internal Harmony
- Universal Applicability
- Inductive Method
- Handbook Model
No one belief is considered as defining, and it almost appears he is describing a syndrome rather than a theory. If you hold several of these beliefs, you might be a biblicist. On a practical level, this might be a reasonable way of approaching the topic. If all he wished to argue was that this cluster of beliefs had failed to bring consensus to those who hold it, such a description of beliefs would be acceptable. This is no straw-man claim. I know that views such as he describes are held by some, and typically in the manner in which he describes them.
The Theoretical Case
The trouble comes in the fact that this syndrome approach carries over into the theoretical case. Smith wishes to show that biblicism is theoretically impossible’not just difficult or even wrong, but impossible on logical grounds. Yet at many points he seems to forget the nature of the theoretical argument. Take for example Smith’s interaction with giants of Reformed theology, A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield, two Princeton theologians who did more than practically anyone to articulate the evangelical view of biblical authority and inerrancy. But rather than deal with their best arguments, Smith nitpicks instead: “These quotes of Hodge and Warfield are among the weakest; elsewhere they do write with greater sophistication on these matters. But as their teachings later passed through the scorching flames of the modernist-fundamentalist battles of the early twentieth century, it was often their weaker, more simplistic ideas that shaped the thinking of subsequent generations of evangelicals” (57). Unfortunately, in apologetics we don’t find out how robust a theory is by testing its weakest statements. Therefore, simply on logical grounds when Smith’s thesis is that a position is impossible, he hasn’t made his case if all he’s done is show that some statements of the position are weak, especially after admitting that there are more cogent versions available.
Reconsidering Warfield on the Biblical Writers
If all Warfield gave us was a deductive case for inerrancy, then Smith’s proposal might work. But Warfield did not leave us there. In his classic work The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, Warfield includes a chapter titled “‘It says:’ ‘Scripture says:’ ‘God says.'” Here he collects statements showing how many authors in the Bible speak about God and the Bible interchangeably at times. The unavoidable conclusion is that the biblical writers themselves held to a view of Scripture that Smith would dismiss as “biblicistic.”
One dramatic example occurs in Romans 9:17, where Moses spoke to Pharaoh but St. Paul says that “Scripture” spoke to Pharaoh. This makes sense only by way of an involved thought process. What Moses spoke could be termed “Scripture” because what he spoke was the Word of God. This is called “Scripture” despite the fact that at this point we have no reason to think that what Moses spoke to Pharaoh had been written down yet. So the point is not that what Moses spoke was like Scripture by being written down; it was that what Scripture spoke was like what Moses spoke by being God’s very words. It was exactly what God wanted said, and not because Moses or some other writer pondered and meditated himself into some receptive state; Moses admitted he didn’t know what to say to Pharaoh (Exod. 4:12). I therefore challenge readers to consider St. Paul’s reading of Exodus when considering Smith’s views. The Bible Made Impossible suggests that we need to allow our ideas of what Scripture is to be formed by careful observation of how it actually works rather than what human theories say (153). Fair enough. But War-field does this, and his views are drawn from the way the biblical authors themselves speak about Scripture as a whole. Because Warfield did not concoct his theory from his own presuppositions, he felt bound (by Scripture) to defend Scripture.
So the syndrome approach suffers in that it does not describe beliefs as they are held by the most thoughtful. Then when we see the clash of interpretations that results, careful readers will be right to question if the problem is not biblicism per se but rather the bastardized forms of the doctrines it seems to represent. There is no denying the reality of solo scriptura-ism in evangelicalism today or the problems that come with it. But are the problems also found in the original doctrine of sola scriptura? It is important then to ask if it is just Smith’s description of common biblicism that is impossible, or Warfield’s doctrine of inerrancy. Unfortunately, we don’t get to find out.
Now, part of what Smith faces is a challenge of space. He clearly could not test every possible form of biblicism, yet it is only a specific form that can offer a robust answer. Were I to test the merits of biblicism, I would probably choose three of the most robust forms of biblicism and see how they fared. It would require finding only one workable form of the doctrine to defeat his thesis; and I suspect that certain biblicist systems of belief might turn out to be much more rigorous than Smith’s generalizations about biblicism as a whole.
Interpretation and Application
Assessments such as Smith’s require careful attention to definition. Unfortunately, specificity is precisely what is lacking when Smith discusses terms such as “meaning,” “interpretation,” and “application.” Smith can describe terms such as “multivalence” and “polysemous,” distinguishing “locutionary,” “illocutionary,” and “perlocutionary” acts, making it appear that he has a carefully shaded linguistic apparatus to guide him through the difficulties of discussing meaning. Yet when it comes to the term “meaning” itself, his language is actually quite slippery. For instance, he offers a list of possible sermons on the woman at the well as evidence of multiple meanings to the text. However, most of these sermons really amounted to what is often termed “application.” Are we to assume an application is a meaning? If someone says, “The text has one meaning,” and you answer, “But that can’t be right’the text has many applications,” there will be some confusion because of the problem in assuming that an application is a meaning.
This is a real problem when it comes to Smith’s interaction with opponents. Evangelical author David Wells speaks of how “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 intends for us to have” (53). Oddly, Smith rejects the claim that the text has one single meaning in the quotation that he himself provides, and insists the contrary instead’ that each conclusion someone reaches is a meaning, which is something Wells clearly denies.
Aside from the philosophical consideration of meaning and application, I think Wells is closer to the assumptions of the biblical text. Consider Jesus’ understanding of meaning in his telling of the parable of the sower. If Wells claimed that the parable had one meaning, would Jesus object? Presumably not, given that Jesus argued for one single meaning when he told the disciples what that meaning was. But if Smith claimed this parable as polysemous and multivalent, and further that this led to multiple understandings, would this mesh with Jesus saying that his hearers heard but did not understand (Mark 4:12)? In other words, misunderstandings of biblical messages are not to be considered multiple meanings of Scripture.
Realities of the Day
Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible is at its strongest when making its practical case. I would recommend people read the book, but with the caveat that they note carefully what kind of case Smith is trying to make. We live in a pragmatic age, and I fear that the typical reader won’t easily notice a slip from a theoretical back into a practical examination of evangelical biblicism. While I don’t think that the nineteenth-century inerrantists had the last word to say on the subject, or that modern literary theory has had nothing to add to our understanding of how Scripture works, I do not think Smith is the person best suited to help us move forward in evangelical debates. What he has done well, especially in his other books, is remind us that we have a sociological mess on our hands. Perhaps he can offer sociological answers as to how people of different views can better live with their differences. I just hope this won’t involve trying to persuade people that the problems of biblicism are somehow unique to evangelical Protestantism.
