The Bible Made Impossible - Chapter 3(a)

In the first 2 chapers Christian Smith defined "biblicism" and made the case for why the countless ways of interpreting Scripture that pervades evangelicalism makes biblicism impossible. He goes to great lengths to back this up in a convincing way (to me), so again I encourage you to get the book if you want to dig deeper into this.

Chapter 3 was exciting for me personally because parts of it affirmed something that I've taught over the years related to Scripture - and that is that if my knowing God is based primarily on figuring out with my mind what the written Word says, that will not be trustworthy because of the inability of any fallen human to interpret it in a purely objective way - there are many forces at work with each of us that shape the grid through which we read and interpret the Bible. Smith deals briefly with this reality in this chapter by looking at the impact of history, sociology, and psychology on our way of receiving information.

Chapter 3: "Some Relevant History, Sociology, and Psychology"

Philosophical Assumptions Underwriting American Biblicism

The author starts by presenting the historical roots to the philosophical assumptions that undergird American biblicism:
"Most crucial among them...are certain teachings of Charles Hodge (1797-1878) and Benjamin Warfield (1851-1921)...both highly influential professors at Princeton Theological Seminary. (Their) teachings were set within and governed by the then-reigning philosophy of Scottish commonsense realism and the Baconian inductive-empirical philosophy of science." Based on this assumption that the mind is capable of knowing words directly and that these words correctly represent the object being studied, Hodge "defined theology as a science whose method is to 'begin with collecting well-established facts, and from them to infer the general laws which determine their occurrence.'"

And so, according to Hodge, theology consists of "collecting the relevant facts from the Bible and inductively piecing them together...", guaranteeing that the biblical facts would be clear. The idea was to remove human subjectivity and let the facts speak for themselves. This represents a very optimistic view of human knowledge. One reason this approach was attractive to Hodge was that it was a way to have clear arguments against the attacks on the Bible in a time when German idealism and theological liberalism was growing. Warfield carried this on into the 20th century. Smith says of them, "...as their teachings later passed through the scorching flames of the modernist-fundamentalist battles of the early 20th century, it was often their weaker, more simplistic ideas that shaped the thinking of subsequent generations of evangelicals. The problematic influence of Hodge and Warfield on evangelical biblicism is evident today."

Smith then shows that this problem goes even further back to two centuries earlier with the Westminster Confession of Faith. (Smith recommends a book by Carlos Bovell, "By Good and Necessary Consequences", which is a genealogical study of biblicist foundationalism. In it Bovell points out that the clause entitled "by good and necessary consequences" in the Westminster Confession of Faith contributes an important plank that supports today's evangelical biblicism, and that this clause was not inherited from the early church fathers...but was devised by the creators of the confession of faith in response to wide-spread 17th century philosophical skepticism. It was this context that drove the Protestant theologians of that day to get their theological knowlege from scriptural propositions and logical deductions - it is this approach that we have inherited in modern evangelical biblicism.

In other words, the philosophical underpinnings of biblicism are largely based on the reaction of the Church to attacks on the Bible, starting in the 17th century but coming into full bloom in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

The author is quick to warn that this doesn't mean that the solution is to resort to "Kantian idealism, arbitrary subjectivism, or theological liberalism." Later in the book Smith proposes a better alternative that he contends is a truly evangelical way of approaching Scripture.

I'll finish this chapter in a day or two - we'll look at what Smith believes are reasons why biblicists aren't troubled by pervasive pluralistic interpretations of the Bible...