7/31/2019 Review of Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible

1/4

Journal for Scripture & eology , .. scripturetheology.cajst

Christian Smith, e Bible Made Impossible: WhyBiblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture

Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press, 2011. Pp. xiv + 220.Hardcover. $22.99.

WESLEY A. HILL*

Submied: 30 July 2011 Accepted: 25 October 2011 Published online: 26 October 2011.Copyright 2011 JST and the author, released under a - 3.0 license.

Christian Smith, professor of sociology and director of the Center for the Studyof Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame, best known perhapsfor his award-winning book, co-authored with Michael O. Emerson, Divided byFaith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (Oxford UniversityPress, 2001), has turned his aention to evangelical use of Scripture in his mostrecent study. e title discloses the two halves of the books argument. Evangel-ical biblicism (to be defined below) has made the Bible impossible, has ren-dered it unable to achieve the work it was designed to do. But an evangelicalreading of the Bible, one that is oriented at all times to the evangel, the Christ-event, avoids the problems of biblicism and allows Scripture to function rightlyin the life of the church.

Smith, a recent convert to Catholicism, writes as a former evangelical con-cerned that evangelicals be able to accept his argument on their own terms,

without having recourse to Catholic understandings of Scripture vis--vis theMagisterium. Accordingly, his project targets evangelical examples of bibli-cism, by which he refers to a particular theory about and style of using theBible that is defined by a constellation of related assumptions and beliefs aboutthe Bibles nature, purpose, and function (p. 4). at theory and style is com-prised of ten interlocking features: (1) the Bible is divine writing such that itswords are Gods words; (2) it is a total representation of Gods communication,(3) including complete coverage of the divine will; (4) it is perspicuous and thusopen to democratic interpretation, (5) which proceeds by way of common-sense hermeneutics, (6) leading to a doctrine of solo scriptura (Scripture de-nuded, unclothed by creeds and confessions); and (7) because the Bible pos-sesses internal harmony (8) and universal applicability, (9) therefore, an induc-tive methodis bestsuited tounearthing theBibles meaning, (10) whichsuggestsa handbook model whereby the Bible is mined for its positions on everythingfrom dating to gardening.

*Durham University, UK Email: w.a.hill@durham.ac.uk

mailto:w.a.hill@durham.ac.ukhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/http://scripturetheology.ca/jst/1-1/501

7/31/2019 Review of Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible

2/4

502 Wesley A. Hill

By adopting this biblicist account of the Bible and its function in Christianthought and life, evangelicals must necessarily also be commied to the no-tion that the Bible gives clear and certain purchase on divine revelation. But,

Smith notes, the opposite proves to be true in practice. While appealing to thesame Bible, different evangelical readers arrive at wildly divergent construalsnot only of peripheral maerssuch as gender roles in the church or the rightmode of baptismbut also of major, centralteachings on christology andsoteri-ology, to name only two contested arenas. Knowledge of biblical teachings, inshort, is characterized by pervasive interpretive pluralism (p. 17, emphasis origi-nal).

For Smith, pervasive interpretive pluralism should force evangelicals to re-consider what they think about the nature of the Bible itself. [O]n importantmaers the Bible apparently is not clear, consistent, and univocal enough toenable the best-intentioned, most highly skilled, believing readers to come toagreement as to what it teaches (p. 25). erefore, rather than being the prod-uct of interpreters misunderstandings, willful or otherwise, of a clear reve-

lation, the interpretive pluralism Smith documents exists because the textsthemselves are multivocal, polysemic, and multivalent in character (p. 50; cf.p. 142). Seeing the diversity of opinions on almost every major issue of doctrineand practice should lead evangelicals to recognize the messy, pluriform charac-ter of the Bible.

What is needed, then, is a beer theological account of what kind of textScriptureis andtherefore what wecan expectfrom it.HereSmith enlists Barthshelp (pp. 1216) to argue that the Bible is a collection of differing voices that maybe heard in concert insofar as they are heard to be witnesses of Gods singularand saving act in Jesus Christ. is means that we always read Scripture Chris-tocentrically, christologically, and christotelically, as those who really believewhattheNiceneandChalcedoniancreedssay(p.98,emphasisoriginal).Adopt-ing this evangelical (in the root sense ofevangel) rule would enable evangelicals

to eschew the handbook approach, wherein Scripture is mined for advice onvarious and sundry concerns, and to concentrate instead on understanding theBible as testimony to the saving significance of Jesus. Addressing the concernsevangelicals (rightly) wish to address must involve examining those concernsin light of Gods saving deed in Christ rather than in light of individual textscollected from the pages of the Bible and treated as timeless truths (p. 111).

Readersmaywellwonderwhatisnewinthisproposalorforthatmaerinthe critique that comprises the books first half. Part of the originality of Smithsargument may be that popular evangelical instances of biblicism (e.g., the T-shirt slogan BIBLEBasic Instruction Before Leaving Earth or books with ti-tles like e World According to God: A Biblical View of Culture, Work, Science, Sex,and Everything Else; see pp. 612) are traced back to institutional, confessional,and scholarlycontexts that allegedlygive rise to, or at least do nothing to check,

them. So, immediately aer noting the problems of appealing to Bible texts toyield, say, a coherent Christian account of business ethics, Smith critiques theWestminster Confession of Faith and the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical In-errancy, among other statements of belief adopted by institutions like Wheaton

j.st ..

7/31/2019 Review of Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible

3/4

Review of Christian Smith, e Bible Made Impossible 503

College and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, as examples of biblicism (p. 14).His point seems to be that these confessions and statements are organically re-lated to the more popular forms of biblicism he cites.

Smith does acknowledge, on the basis of a survey of required textbooks ata range of evangelical seminaries and colleges, that biblicism as he defines itis not taught directly by most faculty and evangelical seminaries and divinityschools (p. 185 n. 36). He also qualifies his argument by acknowledging his def-inition of biblicism as a synthetic, summary one, and not all targets of critiquewould hold to each of its ten points. But despite the caveats, readers may stillfind themselves unsure about how far Smiths critique is meant to extend. Hedoes notengageextensivelywith those whohave labored to affirm some aspectsof what he terms biblicism in confessionally and historically rooted ways. ework of Timothy Ward on the sufficiency of Scripture (see his Word and Sup-plement: Speech Acts, Biblical Texts, and the Sufficiency of Scripture), for instance,doesnt appear in Smiths bibliography, nor is Kevin Vanhoozers recent reha-bilitation of an evangelical Scripture principle (in, e.g., e Drama of Doctrine)

a prominent conversation partner in the book. One is le wondering whetherSmith deems these proposals for an identity between the (variegated) words ofScripture and Gods own speech to have failedand how his argument mighthave been complicated or enriched had he chosen to engage them.

At a deeper level, however, it is simply not true that the pervasive interpre-tive pluralism Smith takes to be the deadly fruit of a biblicist model is only aproblemfor evangelicals and therefore directly related to evangelical biblicism.e doctrinal differences among evangelicals that Smith highlights (churchpolity, free will and predestination, the fourth commandment, atonementand justification, charismatic gis, etc.; see pp. 2836) are debated in Christianchurches that would not identify as Protestant, let alone evangelical. Such dis-agreement seems endemic to Christian thinking and living,and not just biblicistthinking. By the same token, Smiths own church, the Roman Catholic Church,

affirms both thedivine inspiration andinerrancy ofScripture(see theCatechismof the Catholic Church, Article 3.2.108) and Scriptures Christocentric character(Article 3.2.108)and also adopts highly specific positions on womens ordina-tion, clerical celibacy, the morality of contraceptives, to name only a few issuesabout which many evangelicals would disagree. Certainly the Catholic churchwishes to affirm these positions by a train of theological reasoning that pre-cludesappealto Scripturealone. However, thepoint standsthat takingon boarda Christocentric hermeneutic does not by itself pressure the church to abandona position on issues about which there is,arguably, diversity, multivocality, andpolysemy in the biblical texts. In that light, can Smiths constructive proposalachieve all that he wishes for it to achieve? Apparently not, at least not withoutenteringintopreciselythequestionthatthoughtfulevangelicalsregularlypose:How do we know what a christological, evangelical (i.e., gospel-centric) ap-

proach to, say, womens ordination looks like without engaging in the inher-ently problematic, complicated task of hearing Scriptures own voice on that is-sue from the perspective of the Christ-event? In other words, it does not seemthat asking about Scriptures viewpoint(s) on a given issue x really is so neatly

j.st ..

7/31/2019 Review of Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible

4/4

504 Wesley A. Hill

separable from asking what it means to think about that issue christologically,as Smiths argument implies.

In short, Smiths book raises questions any serious Christian reader of the

Bible will have to face. Yet due to its vague starting point (how extensive, ex-actly, is thetribe of thebiblicists?)and its equally vague constructive proposal(how does reading theBible christologically solvetheproblem of pervasive in-terpretive pluralism, if virtually every thoughtful Christian, including many ofthe biblicists he critiques, already agrees with that aim?), the book is unlikelyto achieve what is laudable in its goals or to reach those who most need to giveup some of the practices Smith decries.

j.st ..