The Bible Made Impossible - Author's Introduction

If you have followed some of my posts recently, you know that the topic of the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is one that I have written about. As I was reading "The Bible Made Impossible", it occurred to me that, without necessarily using this language, the author is essentially proposing that we can either use the Scriptures primarily as a source of knowledge (a manual) or as a source of discovering the tree of life (Jesus). He contends that we western evangelicals have turned it into a manual rather than seeing it primarily as God's revelation of His Son Jesus.

This week I'll go through his introduction and give a general overview of the content of the book. He begins by saying, "The goal of this book is not to detract from the plausibility, reliability, or authority of the Christian faith or from scripture. The goal is to persuade readers that one particular theory of Christian plausibility, reliability, and authority - what I call biblicism - is inadequate to the task...
By 'biblicism' I mean a theory about the Bible that emphasizes together its exclusive authority, infallibility, perspicuity (clarity), self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability...all together (these points) form a constellation of assumptions and beliefs that define a particular theory and practice..."

Christian Smith goes on to defend himself from any idea that he is promoting theological liberalism, going so far as to state that he believes that such liberalism is not part of true Christianity. Having said that, Smith contends that "biblicism" is not the way to handle such liberalism, as most evangelicals believe.

The book is divided into 2 major sections: 
1) "The Impossibility of Biblicism"
In the first section Smith deals with what he calls the problem of "pervasive interpretive pluralism"; in other words, the reality that "even among presumably well-intentioned readers - including many evangelical biblicists - the Bible, after their very best efforts to understand it, says and teaches very different things about most significant topics..." So he deals with the relevance of biblicist theory as it relates to claims of scriptural authority and infallibility.

He then deals with the defensibility of biblicism in general, focusing on "the fact that the Bible contains a variety of texts that are problematic in different ways and that biblicist (among other) readers rarely know how to handle." But in order to defend their theory, biblicists respond in 3 ways: a) ignore the problematic texts; b) "interpret" the problematic texts as if they say things that they don't say; c) develop elaborate contortions of scenarios and explanations in an attempt to make it all fit the biblicist's theory.

2) "Toward a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture"
The final 3 chapters of the book are the author's proposals for overcoming American evangelical biblicism. "Contrary to the fears of some biblicists, leaving biblicism behind need not mean losing the best of evangelicalism but, instead, can mean strengthening an evangelical hermeneutic of Scripture." In this section he turns towards Jesus as the primary interpretive key to understanding Scripture (http://nitasbookclub.blogspot.com/2011/11/jesus-purpose-center-and-interpretive.html) and helps the reader toward the acceptance of ambiguity and towards rethinking how we humans know and understand.

Christian Smith is a sociologist and brings this perspective into his study. I find this valuable because he deals with the reality of how our thinking has been and is shaped by history, sociology and psychology.

God bless you this week and may the Word of God lead us to Jesus, the Source of all life!