The Bible Made Impossible - Chapter 2

Chapter 2 - "The Extent and Source of Pervasive Interpretive Pluralism"

This chapter takes what the author said in chapter one to another level; his purpose is to convince the reader of how far-reaching the problem of multiple and different interpretations of the same Bible is and why the biblicist claims (see chapter one for biblicism assumptions) don't hold up in light of this. Because it's more or less an amplifying of part of chapter one, I will give a greatly reduced summary of the chapter and would encourage you to read it for yourself if you want to understand his argument more fully. It's well worth the read.

"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...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." Some of his examples of these differences:

1. Church polity (how should a local congregation be governed?).  "The Christian church today exists in the fragmented form of literally untold thousands of denominations, dioceses, conventions, and individual congregations..."
2. Free will and predestination. "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."
3. The morality of slavery.  "Previous decades (before the Civil War) 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." Abraham Lincoln observed that people on both sides of the conflict "read the same Bible and pray to the same God."
4. Gender difference and equality. "...different contemporary books reading the same biblical texts come to very different, often contradictory conclusions."
5. Wealth, prosperity, poverty, blessing.  "Some say the Bible teaches material prosperity...as blessings from God for faithfulness...Others that the Bible teaches the need for voluntary simplicity or poverty...Yet others that the Bible teaches a prudent responsibility and balance concerning money..."
6. War, peace, and non-violence. "...the good news of the evangelical Mennonite is very, very different from the good news of the conservative Republican evangelical."
7. Charismatic gifts. "Each side marshals lots of Bible verses to argue its case, and each ends up, in my view, making a fairly convincing case."
8. Atonement and justification. "At the heart of Christian faith stands the cross on which Christ died for the salvation of 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 2,000 years..."
9. Etc., etc.

Smith continues by proposing six likely responses to this problem of the pervasiveness of multiple interpretations of biblical texts:

1. Some would argue that most Christians study the Bible with "problematic motives, interests, or skills that prevent them from seeing the coherent truth"; or, said more bluntly, "We are right and the rest, unfortunately, are wrong." Smith labels this the "blame-the-deficient-readers answer."
2. Some might say that none of this would apply to the "original autographs" of the original manuscripts written by the hands of their first authors...Smith calls this the "lost-original-autographs explanation."
3. Others could say that sin has so damaged humans' capacity for inner thought and knowledge that we cannot see the single truth in the Bible clearly enough...Smith calls this the "noetically-damaged-reader reply."
4. Another speculative possible response could be that God only gives understanding of biblical truth to some, not all; or the negative side of this - that Satan has such a hold in some Christians' lives that they can't properly read the Bible. Smith calls this the "supernatural-confusion explanation."
5. Still another reply might be that the different interpretations "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 own way, but to get the full truth they need to put all their knowledge together." Smith labels this the "inclusive-higher-synthesis response."
6. Finally, some could suggest that God has purposely made Scripture ambiguous in order to cause disagreement so that we would have to learn humility and openness...Smith labels this the "purposefully-ambiguous-revelation thesis."

The author agrees that some of these responses may be correct. But his point is that given the biblicist assumptions, these biblicist responses should be unacceptable to the biblicist.

He goes ahead to explain this in detail and concludes at the end of this chapter that the Bible "consists of irreducibly multivocal (i.e., it can and does speak to different listeners in different voices that appear to say different things), polysemic (multiple meanings), and multivalent (many appeals or values) texts...To deny the multivocality of scripture is to live in a self-constructed world of unreality."

On to chapter three next week: "Some Relevant History, Sociology, and Psychology." God bless you this week!