Amazon Review...

So, you're saying that everything in the Emerald City of Oz is green because of these glasses?

A review of Christian Smith's The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture.

This is the second volume in my personal search to get some purchase on the idea of "private interpretation." After a surprising experience on an internet Christian apologist forum where I was roundly condemned for asserting that reading St. Augustine's "On the Trinity" might be useful for thinking about Christian doctrines - because, after all, as my modern interlocutors explained, they had more information than was available to St. Augustine and had at least as much access to the Holy Spirit - I decided to look at this idea of "private interpretation" in order to learn and understand what led these people with an obvious commitment to the intellect to ridicule the idea that they might be wrong and St. Augustine might be right with respect to the interpretation of the Bible.

I started with Alister McGrath's Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution--A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First. McGrath promised that his thesis would be that "private interpretation" was the dangerous idea behind Christianity. I was therefore expecting a discussion of private interpretation and some analysis about how it worked in practice. While I read a lot of heart-warming slogans about the "right of every Christian to read scripture for himself," I also so a lot of instances where various Protestant denominations did everything they could to channel their adherents' reading of scripture into what the denomination considered proper and orthodox. What was strange to me was that McGrath did not discuss, or even seem to notice, the disconnect between his slogans and the actual practice demonstrated in history.

Christian Smith's The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture offers an explanation for that disconnect, and, it seems, the explanation is sociological and not intellectual, which is why McGrath and others don't seem to see disconnect. They get up close to the point where theory starts to transition into practice, and, then, the explanation slides off to more theory.

Smith's target is limited to what he calls "biblicism." "Biblicism" is defined by Smith as "biblicism" I mean a theory about the Bible that emphasizes together its exclusive authority, infallibility, perspicuity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability." This is the view that informs most, or much, of modern American evangelicalism, and explains how Christian bookstores like Bereans can have stacks of books promising the "Biblical approach" to weight-loss, dating, business management, raising children, etc. It is also the reason that many Evangelicals talk about connecting a verse of the Bible to a problem they are facing as if the Bible were a guidebook to modern life written in language accessible to everyone.

Smith points out that this approach misconstrues the Bible. The bible was never intended to be a guidebook to living life. Rather it is a collection of books about God, and for Christians, about Christ. Treating the Bible as a guidebook to life deforms the Bible, according to Smith, by shifting the perspective of readers who employ that approach away from Christ to work-a-day trivia of life. Likewise, treating the Bible as if it were always written in plain and accessible language causes further deformations in that the Bible is not always written in plain and accessible language, which results in "biblicists" having to delude themselves through a variety of tools, approaches and tropes into denying something that is plainly true. Smith writes:

"In order not to let these problematic texts endanger their formal theory of the Bible, biblicists tend to respond in three ways. The first is simply to ignore the problematic texts, essentially pretending that they do not exist. The second is to "interpret" the problematic texts as if they say things that they do not in fact say. The third is to develop elaborate contortions of highly unlikely scenarios and explanations--of the sort to which nobody would ever resort in any other part of life--which seem to rescue the texts from the problems."

A result of this approach is a kind of cognitive dissonance where "biblicists" on one level know that there is a problem with what Smith calls "pervasive interpretive pluralism" as part of which "biblicists" know that there are divisions on major issues in practice, but deny that such divisions exist in theory, except, of course, when they don't, as suggested by the recent ejection of Michael Licona from the North American Mission Board because of his "private interpretation" that the apparent resurrection of the dead mentioned in Matthew 27 was a symbolic "illocution" or "perlocution."

Smith offers a solid analysis of the flaws in the "biblicist" project. Smith argues that the Bible was not intended to speak to our mundane lives. Rather it points to the transcendent God. By ignoring that the Bible is about Christ, Evangelicals have moved away from their christocentric commitment. Further, by insisting that the Bible is clear, plain guidebook, Evangelicals have minimized the reality that God is mysterious.

Smith's solution is tentatively sketched, at best. His solution constitutes a call for Evangelicals to return to their christocentric commitment, and to read the Bible as if it were about Christ, rather than about finding the best way to play the stock market or find happiness or have a good dating relationship. In doing this, Evangelicals will have to re-learn how to live with uncertainty. We may not know, now, soon or ever, whether the saints of Matthew 27 really were raised from the dead, or if that event was meant as a symbolic prefiguring of Christ's role as the "first fruit" before the general resurrection. Or in the case of my experience with the Christian apologists, we may not learn definitely whether the epiphanies described in Genesis were Christophanies, or, as St. Augustine tentatively suggested in "On the Trinity," they were, in fact, angelic visitations.

Smith also advocates a willingness on the part of Evangelicals to distinguish between dogma, doctrine and opinions. One effect of the "biblicist" project, according to Smith has been a tendency to make all theological issues carry the same weight. In my interney discussion on the Augustine's opinion that the theophanies of Genesis were actually "opinions," I soon discovered that no one seemed to understand the concept that I was presenting Augustine's opinion as an opinion, notwithstanding the fact that I made that point repeatedly. I see now from Smith's book that this is simply a feature of the "biblicist" mindset.

As a non-evangelical, the most important thing I picked up from Smith seems to be that I shouldn't expect discusions with most Evangelicals with a "biblicist" state of mind about "private interpretation," or whether a given opinion might be held but may be wrong, to bear much fruit. It seems that what separates Evangelicals (with a "biblicist" state of mind) from non-Evangelicals is not intellectual. That which separates us is more an act of the will by which the two groups adhere to what they see as "the good." It also explains why my quest for an explanation of how the theory of private interpretation works in practice may never bear fruit. There is quite simply "no there there."