By Rev. Henry Sun

In 1976, what I consider the defining book on an evangelical doctrine was published.  Written by Harold Lindsell, at that time the editor of Christianity Today, “The Battle For the Bible” made the case that the foundational doctrine for Christianity was its doctrine about the Bible, and the most faithful, historic way to express that was through the doctrine of inerrancy.
The context for Lindsell’s piece was the crumbling around the edges of what Lindsell and many others thought a high view of Scripture entailed.  For example, in 1968 a Fuller Seminary professor made the case that since, as a point of fact, the mustard seed is not the smallest of all seeds (contra Mark 4:30-32), the inerrant truthfulness of Scripture cannot apply to scientific matters, and thus it should be limited to matters of faith and practice.  Lindsell (and those who agreed with him) saw in this a fatal weakening of the doctrine of Scripture’s truthfulness, under the argument “If you can’t trust the Bible where it can be tested, how can you trust the Bible where it can’t?”
In 2012, Christian Smith published “The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture.” I consider “The Bible Made Impossible” to document the logical dead-end of “The Battle for the Bible.”
Smith’s basic point is this:  If the Bible speaks authoritatively from God and inerrantly on all matters (theology and science, faith and history) on which it speaks, and if the Bible can be plainly read and plainly interpreted by faithful Christians, then why can’t Christians agree on the specifics of what the Bible teaches?
Smith call this “pervasive interpretive pluralism,” and its most basic manifestation is in what Smith calls “The Four Biblical Views of…” approach to Christian publishing.  For Smith, the very existence of multiple views of Scripture’s teachings demonstrates that on these topics, Scripture does not speak with one clear and unambiguous voice.
The first, and in my view somewhat tedious, portion of the book is Smith’s exposition of this pervasive interpretive pluralism.  (Indeed, in the afterword, Smith recounts that his editor thought this section could have been shortened.)  While it is well worth reading and while in my view Smith’s description and diagnosis of the problem is spot-on, the last three chapters, where he lays out his vision for an approach to Scripture that is not biblicist, were of greater interest to me.
It was of greater interest because in chapters 5 to 7, Smith lays out his general approach to reading Scripture faithfully without being an old-school fundamentalist.
So he advocates for a reading of Scripture in which all of Scripture points in one way or another to Jesus Christ, basing this in part on Karl Barth’s distinction between Jesus Christ as the Word of God revealed and Scripture as the Word of God written.
He argues that the unfolding of what it means to be a faithful follower of Jesus is something that developed over time, reminding us that the very definition of Christian orthodoxy was not set in place until the fourth and fifth centuries (the Council of Nicea [325 CE] through the Council of Chalcedon [451 CE]).
He has pointed comments on how a biblicistic reading of the NT aided and abetted the prolongation of slavery as an acceptable institution (as opposed to a categorical moral failure) and the prohibition of women’s ministry leadership, and suggests that our understanding of what it means to be a faithful follower of Jesus continues to grow and evolve through time and in different cultural contexts.
In chapters 6 and 7, Smith lays out some specific suggestions about what a truly faithful reading of Scripture might entail.  His section headings, for example, include:
Embracing the Bible for what it obviously is (p 218) – to which I would add, accepting the ancient texts for what they obviously say.
Living with Scriptural ambiguities (p 222) – to which I would add, accepting that Scripture does not always speak with one voice on the same topic.
Dropping the compulsion to harmonize (p 227) – which when taken to an extreme leads to Lindsell’s suggestion in “The Battle for the Bible” that Peter didn’t actually deny Jesus 3 times in the garden of Gethsemane, but 6 times, an historical reconstruction that has been rightly (and unanimously) rejected by NT scholarship.
Smith also makes the same point I have tried to make in this column, that we should be “[cautious] about our own fallibility in understanding the Bible… [open] to alternative readings of Scripture… [and] foster spaces for discussions in which opposing views might find more common ground” (page 278).
How are these two approaches to reading Scripture different?
2 Samuel 24:1 says, “Again, the anger of the LORD burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, ‘Go and take a census of Israel and Judah,’” while the parallel text in 1 Chronicles 21:1 says, “Satan rose up against Israel and cited David to take a census of Israel” (NIV).
Interpreters have been vexed by this obvious difference in who caused David to take a census (note that Moses took a census in Numbers and it wasn’t labelled a sin, but that’s a different problem).  Walter Kaiser, in “Hard Sayings of the Bible, ” writes, “The thought that God instigates or impels sinners to do evil is incorrect.  In no sense could God author what he disapproves of and makes his whole kingdom stand against.  How then shall we understand 2 Samuel 24:1…? (page 241).
It could not be clearer that Kaiser’s interpretation is not motivated by the plain reading of 2 Samuel 24, which clearly affirms that the LORD incited David, but by a desire to subordinate 2 Samuel 24 into his larger theological view that God cannot do such things.
Kaiser continues, “It is also true, according to Hebrew thinking, that whatever God permits he commits” (ibid).     Notice the clarifying “according to Hebrew thinking” which suggests that the idea that “whatever God permits he commits” is no longer normative for the modern church – what I have elsewhere called a cultural artifact from antiquity.
Had Kaiser been clearer about that – had he affirmed that the Hebrews had this idea that whatever God permits he commits, which is the plain and clear reading of 2 Samuel 24, but as God’s self-revelation has become clearer over time, we realize now that this is an overly-simplistic view of how God relates to creation – there would have been no need to subordinate this plain reading of the text to a more systematic doctrine of God and no need to harmonize 2 Samuel 24 with 1 Chronicles 21 (“Having shown that David did indeed sin and that Satan, not God, was to blame” [ibid]).
An approach similar to Kaiser’s, accessible online, can be found at http://www.increasinglearning.com/blog/bible-contradiction-ii-samuel-24-vs-i-chronicles-21.
Smith writes that a non-biblicist reading of Scripture that starts from reading the text itself, and not from some prior theological construct into which texts must sometimes be forced to fit “positions readers before God through Scripture as those who not only need to but also may and can – before and from God – know grace, understand mercy, receive love, embrace forgiveness, repent from sin, hear truth, renounce evil, receive the Spirit, and much more – all as driven and ordered by the fact that God in Jesus Christ has reconciled and is reconciling the world to himself” (page 278).
What more could someone longing for a vibrant faith want?

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