Bully's Blog

Here’s the amazon description of Christian Smith’s recent book, The Bible Made Impossible.

Biblicism, an approach to the Bible common among some American evangelicals, emphasizes together the Bible’s exclusive authority, infallibility, clarity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability. Acclaimed sociologist Christian Smith argues that this approach is misguided and unable to live up to its own claims. If evangelical biblicism worked as its proponents say it should, there would not be the vast variety of interpretive differences that biblicists themselves reach when they actually read and interpret the Bible.

Smith describes the assumptions, beliefs, and practices of evangelical biblicism and sets it in historical, sociological, and philosophical context. He explains why it is an impossible approach to the Bible as an authority and provides constructive alternative approaches to help evangelicals be more honest and faithful in reading the Bible. Far from challenging the inspiration and authority of Scripture, Smith critiques a particular rendering of it, encouraging evangelicals to seek a more responsible, coherent, and defensible approach to biblical authority.

I read a few of the amazon.com reviews of the book. To me it seemed that Smith had found a clever way of allowing moderns to subscribe to the Bible without actually subscribing to it. There are a lot of Christians who say they love Jesus but hate the Bible. Smith’s recipe seems to be that if we claim that the Bible is all about Jesus, we don’t have to actually deal with the texts that are pointy, make us uncomfortable, or get us ridiculed.

I hoped to read the book at some point, and asked the BH crowd for a response. Turns out Dr Leithart has already written one: A Cheer and a half for Biblicism. If I’ve got him right, he thinks Smith has thrown out the biblicist “baby” with the hermeneutical bathwater.

[Smith] complains about the “how-to” approach of handbook Biblicists. Fine. He thinks that Biblicists flatten Scripture, displace Christ from the center, ignore complexities, treat the Scriptures as a tidy technical manual for living. True. But those are hermeneutical objections, and the hermeneutical assumptions are detachable from other “Biblicist” claims…

He urges Biblicists to receive “God’s written word as God has chosen to confer it,” but that point cuts both ways. Scripture is Christ-centered, but how is it Christ-centered? If it is, as Smith argues, comprehensively Christ-centered, it is Christ-centered when it makes historical claims, when it provides the pattern for constructing a tabernacle in the wilderness and offering animal sacrifice, when it provides a songbook of Israel’s praise, when its prophets castigate Israel’s idolatry and injustice, when it gives commands and promises, when it speaks of marriage and money and power and violence (which it undoubtedly does)…

When we look at the Bible itself, rather than clinging to a Christocentric theory about the Bible, we find that the Christ who is the center of Scripture and history comes talking, and that Scripture is the record of both His coming and His talk. To be truly Christ-centered in the way the Bible is, we have to deal with the talkative Jesus, the final Word of the “chatty” God of Israel (Robert Jenson’s term). Without this specificity, Smith’s admirably Christocentric hermeneutics becomes another “flat” reading that smudges the paint and smooths away the ragged edges of the text.

Jesus is revealed in all of the difficult, embarrassing, politically incorrect, gory and bizarre bits of the Bible — from my experience, especially those bits. If our supposedly Christocentric hermeneutic is a way of avoiding the specifics of the revelation of Jesus, the Christ upon which we are centred is, partially at least, a Christ of our own making.

Smith replies to Dr Leithart here. Dr Leithart responds to Smith in the comments below the article. Here’s an excerpt:

On strange and indigestible passages: As Smith surely knows, he’s not the first to notice them. Should a man have sex with his wife during her monthly period? he asks, citing Leviticus 18:19. Biblicists would typically say No, and would give exegetical arguments for why this is part of the now-defunct ceremonial law of Israel. Again, he surely knows that this would be the biblicist answer, so why is Smith dissatisfied with this response? Is Smith saying it’s silly to even ask the question? Many Jews would disagree. Is Smith saying God would never bother Himself with this kind of thing? How would he know that? God apparently did bother with that kind of thing. Or, is Smith saying that it’s incompatible with biblicism to interpret Leviticus 18:19 in the light of Hebrews? But that takes us back to the hermeneutical paradigm that is the real gravamen of his critique. Like the list of books, it seems that Smith thinks his long list of problem passages can stand alone as evidence against biblicism. But it is evidence only against the hermeneutical claims of biblicism.

Smith, and many of those who gave his book positive reviews, need a good, gutsy dose of Biblical Horizons. Jordan and Leithart deal with the specifics.

________________________________________________

Dr Leithart has also responded to Smith’s most recent work here.