The Skinny on the Bible—Pervasive Interpretive Pluralism

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.¹

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.²

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.³

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.

1. Imagine, critiquing evangelicalism for being too intellectually ambitious! You read it here first, folks. In all seriousness, evangelicalism is an intellectual tradition the same as any other, and its reputation as being anti-intellectual says more about the stances of 20th Century-style conservatives and liberals than it does about the content of those two competing movements. [↩]
2. If you think evangelicals agree with each other, you haven’t taken the time to notice their propensity for church splits cell division. [↩]
3. Of course, they only chose four, not eight or twelve, and they did choose. So we’re dealing with a limited pluralism here, not a no-hold-barred relativism. [↩]