The Bible Made Impossible - Chapter 7(b)

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

This is my final post for covering this book; next week I plan to share personal thoughts about why I believe the ideas presented in "The Bible Made Impossible" are important and how I have been affected by this book. I will also recommend some other books along similar lines for those of you that may want to investigate further.

Understanding Different Ways of Doing by Saying
In this section Christian Smith points out some principles of communication that affect how we humans understand. He distinguishes between "locutionary" acts, "illocutionary" acts, and "perlocutionary" acts. For the sake of brevity, I'll simply quote a couple of summary statements about what this means.

"In short, locutionary acts utter or inscribe words, illocutionary acts use uttered or inscribed words to perform communications concerning the purpose or disposition of the speaker or writer, and perlocutionary acts rely on uttered or inscribed words to accomplish a particular effect in the hearer or speaker...The point of distinguishing these three speech acts is to help us to recognize that the use of speech to communicate is not a simple matter of speakers intending to make clear propositional statements that, when properly interpreted, reproduce the original propositional meaning in the minds of those receiving the statements. It is more complicated than that..."

This section is enlightening in terms of helping us understand how easily we can misinterpret the Bible because of this reality of "speech acts". (See the book for more explanation on this...) Suffice it to say that not all speech communications in scriptures are straightforward. Smith goes on to say, "Given the richness of the variety of kinds of speech acts that appear to be at work in the Bible, it seems quite inadequate to try to describe or defend scripture's truthfulness, reliability, authority, and whatever else we might say on its behalf with single, technical terms like 'inerrancy.'" The word inerrancy, which is a favorite of evangelicals, is too flat and limited and weak to represent all the virtues of the Bible in terms of what God is intending to communicate through it.

Using the Genesis 1-2 creation account, Smith gives an example of a possible misinterpreting of what God intended the scripture to do in the reader: "...the intended perlocutionary force of the Genesis 1-2 creation accounts could well be to banish rival pagan accounts of the world's origins and place the reader in awe and gratitude for the good world that Yahweh created, whereas the actual perlocutionary force on modern biblicist readers could mistakenly be to motivate them to mobilize a political movement to oppose the teaching of evolution in schools." 

He concludes this section by saying that the point of this isn't to drive us to "exegetical despair" over reading scripture but to complicate it enough so that we move away from simplistic and overly confident readings of scripture. Being aware and more careful in our approach to scripture reading addresses the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism by helping us be more cautious related to our fallibility in understanding the Bible and God's intended "speech acts" and helps open us up to alternative readings of scripture. This more open and humble approach to reading the Bible "puts us back into the position of being acted upon by God through the words of scripture."

A Historically Growing Grasp of the Meaning of the Gospel
In this section Smith goes on the assumption that the canon of scripture, for all practical purposes is closed (though he has an interesting footnote on this). But even with this assumption, the church has recognized historically that the progressive understanding and working out of the full meaning and implications of the gospel has never been and is still not complete. "The authors of the New Testament did not understand and work out all the long-term implications of the gospel for theological knowledge, human life, and society. They just didn't, and there is no need for us to have to say that they did." 

What the New Testament authors did do was to give us all that we need to know as a theological starting point and also modeled "the substantial beginnings of believers working out what the gospel means in a particular sociohistorical context." Smith says that this is absolutely crucial for us and is not the same thing as what biblicism says, which is that the NT authors did understand and work out all of the long-term implications of the gospel for theological knowledge, human life, and society.

In other words, the author is saying that we cannot go to the New Testament and expect to find fully-developed and precisely articulated doctrines about God and Jesus. Generations of believers throughout church history and up until now have been doing this; he gives as examples issues such as slavery, mutual personal love in marriage, full humanity and dignity of women, etc. "The apostles understood and preached the truth of salvation in Jesus Christ. But they did not know and teach the fullness of the many implications of that truth for doctrine, relationships, and society. That was a task given to subsequent generations of believers across history..."

Smith understands scriptures such as Jesus' talking about the development and growth of the kingdom (Mt. 13:24-33; Lk. 13:18-21), His promise of the Holy Spirit's coming and guiding into all truth (Jn. 16:13); His telling His disciples that He had much more to tell them but they couldn't understand it all then (Jn. 16:12), etc., are suggestions in scripture that it would take time and learning for God's people to grasp the fullness of His truth.

This understanding helps deal with the problem of biblicism and pervasive interpretive pluralism because, unlike biblicism's limited belief about revelation and static view of knowledge that insists that all of the gospel's implications can only be found in the Bible, this view understands the Bible's presentation of the gospel to be "a dynamic, living, active force of truth in human life and history...the change in the frame of mind that this view involves entails a deemphasizing of Bible passages as collections of complete and final teachings on every subject imaginable."

Approaching the Bible in this way could help those taking different stands on issues to back away from "tightly wound arguments about the 'biblical' authority of their incompatible views. The debate could then be set within a larger, better theologically and historically informed, and hopefully more constructive framework of discussion."

Conclusion
Christian Smith acknowledges that his proposals in this book are not the complete answer to this need in evangelicalism, but he challenges American evangelicals to be willing to do the hard work together of coming up with a truly evangelical way of approaching scripture that is honest and edifying and unifying. I'll end this with one last quote from the book:

"Evangelicals need to realize that the Bible is not a 'how to' book. It is a 'HERE IS WHO' book. First and foremost it tells everyone: Here is who Jesus Christ is and therefore here is who you are and need to become in relation to him...the indicative must precede and define the imperative. What we need to do (the imperative) can only ever make sense in terms of the truth about reality (the indicative). The imperative must always be grounded on and operating from within the indicative. The indicative is the risen, living, and reigning Lord, Jesus Christ. Everything else, including imperatives, follows from there..."