The Bible Made Impossible - Chapter 7(a)

Chapter 7 - "Rethinking Human Knowledge, Authority, and Understanding (part a)

This is the final chapter of the book, "The Bible Made Impossible." In it Christian Smith proposes that part of the way we read the Scripture in a truly evangelical way is by reconsidering how we think 1) about human knowledge, 2) about the authority of the texts, and 3) about what it means as humans to understand anything. So in large part, it's a brief study of humans and how we hear and learn.

Breaking from Modern Epistomology
Smith begins the chapter with a challenge to American evangelicals, saying that the "motive to use biblicism to domesticate and control scripture and the gospel, rather than to open ourselves to be shaken and altered by its message, comes directly from a modern outlook, from modernity and the Enlightenment." 

He contends that although we evangelicals claim a modernity-resisting identity, we have unwittingly bought into Enlightenment thinking lock, stock and barrel, especially related to how we understand the way humans learn and know. This is called "epistomological foundationalism" and Smith defines it as "a conviction that rational humans can and must identify a common foundation of knowledge directly up from and upon which every reasonable thinker can and ought to build a body of completely reliable knowledge and understanding." In other words, we assume that the way to gain reliable knowledge is easy and certain if we build on a common foundation.

The evangelicals' argument has been that this foundation of sure knowledge to build upon is the Bible text and nothing else. "Without realizing it, evangelicals embraced a view of scripture that was more driven by Cartesian and generally modern preoccupations with epistemic certainty than by scripture itself and a long tradition of scriptural interpretation..." He is proposing that our modern obsession with the "certainty of knowledge" (more than gospel concerns) has been the driving factor in our approach to scripture.

The author is quick to warn that the answer to this is NOT to go the way of radical postmodern relativism. However, the legitimate fear of postmodern relativism shouldn't keep us stalled out in Enlightenment "foundationalism." He says there are alternatives and briefly touches on one: "critical realism". He goes on to explain this approach to learning as one which takes into account the variables there are in the way humans know - while insisting on objective reality so that the learners pursue truth as it is and not as they wish it to be. "Critical realism brings to the table a number of crucial meta theoretical understandings about reality and knowledge that tend to foster openness and humility in inquiry...", as opposed to taking polarizing positions that make it difficult for genuine learning and growing together in truth. (See more on this in the book.)

Not Starting with a Theory of Inspiration
In this section Smith touches on the issue of the authority of the Bible, pointing out that it wasn't until after the Reformation that Christians even tried to elaborate on a "deductive theory" of inspiration..."The doctrine of inspiration came to play an especially important role in conservative American Protestantism in the 19th century, in response to the same threats to religious authority (higher criticism, modernism, etc.) that prompted Catholicism to promulgate the doctrine of papal infallibility."

After listing four points in the doctrine of inspiration, the author says that his point isn't that the doctrine of inspiration is necessarily wrong but that it isn't a helpful place to start the discussion of biblical authority since scripture itself doesn't start there. (He goes on to deal with the one passage in 2 Timothy 3:16,17 that uses the word "inspiration" related to scripture.)

Smith suggests four alternatives for approaching the topic of authority, and I'll list his suggestion without explaining them:

1. Begin with the content of the texts themselves, being as unprejudiced as possible by a preconceived theory of inspiration.
2. Learn about how the texts that make up the NT canon came to be there in the first place. (He points out that the early church was without the Bible as we know it for almost 400 years.)
3. Begin by paying close attention to ways that the church has interpreted scripture for the last 2,000 years.
4. Start to pay much greater attention than we have to how Christian believers read and interpret scripture in other parts of the world.

"...listening to and learning from the interpretive approaches to scripture of other (but not necessarily only) evangelical Christians from very different parts of the world can help to reveal blind spots, challenge parochial views, offer insightful perspectives on the same texts, and suggest helpful ways to resolve differences of understanding within the American evangelical world..."

I'll complete this chapter in a day or so...