“Biblicist” is a fighting word. It’s what Catholics call “bibliolatrous” Protestants, what liberal Protestants used to call Fundamentalists, and what moderate Evangelicals like to call immoderate Evangelicals. It is a word more bandied than explained. One of the strengths of Christian Smith’s recent The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture (Brazos, 2011) is his precision in identifying the object of his attack. As one would expect from an estimable Notre Dame sociologist, Smith lays out ten assumptions that constitute the Biblicist view of the Bible, and then illustrates each assumption at length. According to Smith, Biblicists believe the Bible is God’s word and therefore has divine authority, that its plain sense is clear to every “reasonably intelligent” reader, that it covers everything Christians need to know, and covers everything in such a way that it is possible to construct a “handbook” on nearly any topic. 
I am sympathetic with much of what Smith has to say in response to this model. He is correct to stress the variety of the speech acts in Scripture, and to observe that the Evangelical term “inerrancy” privileges propositions over commands, promises, and praise. Scripture is frequently difficult, ambiguous, anything but straightforward, nearly always “multivocal, polysemic, and multivalent.” Smith is adept at sniffing out Biblicist inconsistency, such as when he scolds Biblicists for their failure to heed the New Testament’s repeated command to “greet one another with a holy kiss.” (He is so convincing, in fact, that if I ever meet Prof. Smith, I plan to give him a big, holy smack on the cheek.) Again and again, he directs attention away from theories about the text to the Bible itself.
It is on this last point, however, that Smith’s book is least consistent and satisfying, and this failure is evident especially in what he says about the universal scope of Scripture. He offers a lengthy list of evangelical titles (pp. 8-10) that claim to provide biblical perspectives on everything from business to cooking, marriage to medicine, racial reconciliation to stress management to politics to friendship. These books are perhaps very bad, perhaps even sub-Christian, but we can’t know from Smith’s book. Their mere existence is enlisted as evidence of a nearly idolatrous devotion to the Bible. We don’t know what is in these books because Smith doesn’t tell us much about them beyond their titles. A list suffices. Smith is respectful of Biblicists throughout, but many readers, I suspect, will read the list, smirk, and move on, eyes rolling at the barefoot yahoos who still stalk the land.
What exactly does Smith object to in these books? He 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.
These hermeneutical expectations are detachable in particular from the question of whether Scripture has “universal applicability.” Even on his own premises, it seems to me, Smith should admit the universal applicability of the Bible. The Bible is, as Smith insists, “Christocentric” and “Christotelic,” but the Christ on which the Bible centers and toward which it aims is the Creator, the one in whom all things hold together, alpha and omega. If the Bible everywhere speaks of this Christ, then it must, directly or indirectly, speak of everything else besides. To call the Bible “Christ-centered” is to make the most comprehensive possible claim about its contents.
Smith comes close to saying this. The gospel that is the center of the Bible “shakes loose from us every misguided and idolatrous preconception about everything, literally everything, that we thought we knew, and then begins to rebuild us in the light of the singularly radical fact of who God really is. . . . The good news of the gospel . . . has the power to reframe and transform everything else” (p. 94; my emphasis). Despite his opposition to Biblicists who write books about “biblical financial management,” Smith acknowledges that the Bible teaches at least one neglected principle of financial management—that we are called to give generously. He lists God’s Blueprint for Building Marital Intimacy as a Biblicist text, but in a long endnote he summarizes what the Bible ways about marriage. Prolific as Smith is, I’m confident he could dash off an evangelical Christocentric treatment of marriage in the next week or two. I’d read it.
At this point, Smith forgets his own counsel. His 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).
This sort of approach allows Westminster Seminary’s Vern Poythress to move “in the space of four contiguous sentences” from an affirmation that Scripture is essentially about Christ and the gospel to the claim that the Bible instructs Christians “in every area of life.” It is not, as Smith claims, because the “apparently Christ-centered vision . . . slips out of focus” (p. 110). It is because Poythress is eager to receive Scripture’s Christ-centeredness as God has chosen to confer it.
When we look to the text, we find that the Christ who is the center spends much of his time teaching his disciples, and he speaks “with authority on a nearly limitless range of topics” (p. 10; Smith is speaking of Biblicism). “Do to others as you would have them do to you” is about as universally applicable as it gets. Shouldn’t Christians learn to obey the Golden Rule in business, marriage, relations with friends and neighbors, book reviewing and academic research, politics, child-raising, and in a “limitless range” of other situations? “Love your enemies” is narrower, but most people have enemies enough to give this simple command a “nearly limitless range” of application. It would be an illuminating exercise to go through Smith’s list of Biblicist titles to see how many of these topics Jesus Himself addresses in the gospels, not to mention the rest of the Bible.
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.
Peter J. Leithart is pastor of Trinity Reformed Church in Moscow, Idaho, and Senior Fellow of Theology and Literature at New St. Andrews College. His most recent book is Athanasius (Baker Academic).
RESOURCES
Christian Smith, A Reply to Leithart on Biblicism
Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible
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Comments:
The more academic and detached your personal experience is from the two great commandments..........the more noise and bias you create.
Christianity would do much better with a big dose of Merton-like zen simplicity....and whole lot less of Pharasaical sophistry.
@ Jude - "To those who have been called, who are loved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ: Mercy, peace and love be yours in abundance. Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people...." (Epistle of Jude, verses 1-3, NIV)
if the specific content of "God's revelation" is itself one of the items in dispute among "doctrinal sets," it does no one any good to invoke "God's revelation" as a standard with which to compare "doctrinal sets." in other words, if there is disagreement over "the signal" itself, then questions of what is noise and what is bias fade to the background.
ergo, the hypothesis itself smells of biblicist bias.
E.g. Protestants and marital divorce as common throughout Western cultures and governments despite God saying He hated it in Malachi... and Catholics on the divine boost given to the slave trade by a series of Popes in the second half of the 15th century to Iberia (notably Pope Nicholas V in Dum Diversas and Romanus Pontifex (reconfirmed by 3 subsequent Popes)... despite the sporadic bulls against slavery by other Popes (see "A Church That Can and Cannot Change" John T. Noonan,Jr., Nortre Dame Press, 2005). Then on another day, the two groups can discuss disasters some of their leaders nurtured mutually like anti semitism
(Chrysostom and Luther) or the physical punishment of heretics for centuries.
Neither group is the clean slate that the early apostolic Community was. Paul could missionize the Gentiles without having to explain rampant Western divorce or the Inquisition or Puritans cutting off the ears of Quakers in M.A. Paul had a clean slate. Those were the days.
The Magisterium of the Catholic Church are also former apprentices. They've studied with their "masters," but they've also studied vicariously with history's masters and with Doctors of the Church. And of course they study The Word. The totality of the experience is designed to keep them firmly on the path of Peter.
I'd compare the evolving Deposit of Faith to the modern rise of computer graphics. The basic mathematics of graphical representation doesn't change. The tools have just gotten dramatically better. That's what happens over time. The tools get better, faster, and easier to use. But, same math.
Sri Lanka....80% Buddhist....about a 1.5% divorce rate. I don't want to evangelize the gospel of Love there because they may ask me what the divorce rate is in my Christian country that's had the gospel of love for centuries. I'll do it if like Pope Benedict, I can do it from a high up window with big tomato proof shutters ...if the going gets tough.
Be aware that the license in regard to slavery and despoilment of property (4th large paragraph middle...of Romanus Pontifex, 1455) that Pope Nicholas V gave Portugal had a caveat that allowed them to be tone deaf to Pope Paul III in his later anti slavery bull in 1537....which is why Portugal had three successive Popes reconfirm Romanus Pontifex. The caveat in the last section voided in advance any contradictions of Romanus Pontifex:
" And if anyone, by whatever authority, shall, wittingly or unwittingly, attempt anything inconsistent with these orders we decree that his act shall be null and void."
Arguably that paragraph 4 first mentioned above by Nicholas V started the inequality of rich and poor that perdures in Brazil and its permissions were repeated by the Borgia Pope for Spain. Hence the lopsided rich/poor divide throughout Latin America began with several Popes who erroneously also thought that Portugal and Spain as a whole would be assiduous in converting the natives. PS....Brazil til this day has the largest number of uncontacted tribes on earth....Spain's Peru is third.
All missionaries deserve praise but their countries were not assiduous in furthering the scope of who they could reach as Pope Nicholas V had perhaps fantasized. Spain was more busy removing the silver of Peru (see Niall Ferguson's "The Ascent of Money") rather than removing obstructions to the rain forest.
I got a huge kick reading your post, but must propose that you've veered a little bit off course.
I don't see this issue as noise vs bias in the sample space, I see it as two sets of choices. In one set, there is only one string of digits that corresponds to only one runway. In the second set, there are thousands of strings of digits, each string corresponding to its own runway.
In the second set, all choices must be held to be equally valid, since it is the "primacy of conscience" of the pilot that ultimately determines which runway his ILS will capture. The first set presents the pilot with an altogether different question.
In both sets, the plane will land somewhere, but I do believe that it matters where this "somewhere" is. Otherwise Christ would not pray that we be one.
Mark, thanks for your comments. Interesting. However, two points:
1. There is only one runway for all, as long as we are trying to obey God's word. The true mind* of God, which does not change and is utterly reliable, is the "signal" by which all Christians who read the Bible the will be judged. Some items, as Paul states in 1 Corinthians, are a matter of conscience, such as which day to worship. Paul states, "Let each one be firmly convinced in his own mind." Variances in primary doctrines (e.g., is water baptism necessary for salvation, is circumcision necessary for salvation, etc.) are the result of human error and/or sin. Noise and bias, bias and noise. Of course, all Christians and Christian organizations are subject to both.
2. Another runway would be, perhaps, additional texts such as the Book of Mormon, if they impose a subordinate status on the written word of God, or impose an alien hermeneutic (bias) on it. Frankly, here is where the illustration starts breaking down. But it is interesting to think about.
*I believe that this mind of God has been perfectly and sufficiently captured in the written word of God, when used by the indwelling Spirit of God, should and properly does serve as the rule of faith and practice. This does not provide unlimited latitude to human conscience, since we are to submit to our spiritual leaders and obey them, as scripture says, because they keep watch over our souls, not because they provide revelation on a par with scripture.
Here the noise is the variation in so-called Biblicist interpretations, apparent even to the casual observer simply by its obvious pattern of dispersion. In contrast, the bias is the distance of Catholic doctrine from the Magisterium from the truth of scripture, or more broadly the truth of God.
Were Christian Smith a statistician, he might say, "Biblicism can't be right--look at the huge cloud of noise in the sample data." And he would be half right, anyway. Not all those points can be correct, and maybe none of them.
He errs, I think, most greatly in observing the low-noise "sample" of Catholic teaching and saying, in effect, "Now look at this sample--all the points are very tightly clustered together. They must be right." He apparently disregards the possibility that systemic bias has affected whole sections of Magisterial teaching, and that while it agrees with itself, it is still wrong.
In aerospace applications, I would rather have noise than bias any day. You can see the noise and can filter a good deal of it out simply by studying it and comparing it. However, you can filter all day on a biased sample and won't remove one millimeter of error. Undetected biases, not noise, are what keep aircraft landing system designers up at night. Bringing a full 757 into an airport in the fog, thinking the runway is just below the aircraft when it is actually 100 feet to the left is, well, you get the idea. Designers know how to "bound" the maximum error to avoid such scenarios.
Back in the Biblical interpretation world, look at the central doctrines held by the vast majority of evangelical Protestants--the fallen condition of man, salvation by faith alone because of Jesus' sacrifice, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. I hypothesize that the cluster of these beliefs is closer to God's revelation than the corresponding doctrinal set from the Magisterium.
I therefore also hypothesize that bias exists in certain Catholic teachings (e.g., doctrines of Mary, priests, saints, papal infallibility, salvation by works etc.) that are undetectable to, or are ignored by, writers such as Christian Smith, but ought to be just as much a concern to him as telemetry data bias is to an aircraft landing system designer. He could be helpful by asking just how wrong the Magisterium could be. Scripture ensures us it is without error and beyond doubt. Scripture does not say the same about any human individual or human organization.