by Chance Hunter on December 31, 2011
Recognition is an intersubjective state of mind by which one human being acknowledges the worth or status of another human being.
—Francis Fukuyama
What would you say if you learned that your minister was making the majority of his personal income not from the church but from ownership of a payday loan establishments next to the church? Or what if you found out she makes a good living writing erotica under a pen name?
Most of you would probably be appalled. That’s not what ministers do.
Let’s soften the example though. What if your minister made the majority of his income not from his church salary from selling life insurance to church members?
You probably have a negative reaction to that too. Click here to read the rest→
by Chance Hunter on November 27, 2011
Tony Jones turned me on to a book by Christian Smith called The Bible Made Impossible that tries to take down the typical evangelical view of the bible, which Smith calls biblicism and which I’m more inclined to call bible-olatry.
I’ve only had time to read the rather thorough introduction—it’s a quick read for free on Amazon—but that’s not going to keep me from jumping right in! If you’re not intimately familiar with real life evangelicals—as opposed to media about them—Smith helpfully defines biblicism as “a theory about the Bible that emphasizes together its
- exclusive authority
- infallibility
- perspicuity
- self-sufficiency
- internal consistency
- self-evident meaning, and
- universal applicability.” (Bullets added.)
And, yes, that is a whole lot to hold in your head at once, which is of course part of the problem.
His main argument looks to be this: the plain fact of pervasive interpretive pluralism, especially by biblicists themselves looking at the same Bible, makes biblicism bunk. In other words, if what biblicists said about the Bible was true, they’d agree with each other.
I’m going to take pervasive interpretive pluralism a step further than it looks like Smith will. The root reason biblicists are wrong isn’t that they head in a thousand different directions from the same text—that’s actually more a consequence of their being wrong than a reason for it. The root reason they’re wrong is that they misunderstand that the Bible itself is built on an assumption of pervasive interpretative pluralism.
Think about it—four Gospels! The canonizers could have chosen just one, an option proposed by Marcion. Or they could have tried to hammer out the different perspectives and even outright contradictions into a new, unified Gospel, an option available in the Diatesseron.
We have still more pluralism:
- Two creation stories in Genesis, and some minor ones elsewhere
- Two flood stories, barely cobbled together into one
- Two accounts of the history of Israel, one in Chronicles, the other in Joshua-Kings
- Two or three Isaiahs bound together into the same book
- Multiple epistle authors with different perspectives on just about any topic important to the early Church
The Bible isn’t even interested in agreeing with itself. So why should we try to make it agree with us? Which is what biblicists are ultimately interested in, after all.
