Guest Post by Dane Ortlund
Kevin DeYoung reviews Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture, identifying several problems:
1. Straw men
2. Ignorance of mainstream evangelical theology
3. False dichotomies
4. Backtracking (denigrating a conviction, then replacing it with his own which is different in form but not in substance)
5. Selective application of his arguments (what Kevin deems “the Achilles heel of Smith’s argument”)
6. An unbalanced focus on American evangelicalism
7. A defective view of biblical authority
8. Psychological explaining away of “biblicism” that sees it rooted in emotional and mental insecurity
An excerpt from Kevin’s conclusion:
In the end, I wonder what pastors are left with after they lose their “biblicism.” I am all for gaining a Christocentric hermeneutic and keeping the main thing the main thing. But in Smith’s mind the big problem with “expository preaching” today is that it “proceeds on the assumption that a minister can select virtually any passage of scripture and adduce from the text an authoritative, relevant, ‘applicable’ teaching to be believed and applied” by the congregation (12). I’m not sure what the alternative is—proceeding on the assumption that most passages of Scripture yield interesting stories that are more or less irrelevant to what we believe and do? I agree that evangelicals sometimes make Scripture speak definitively on matters it doesn’t mean to address. But Smith’s radical ambiguity about most doctrinal matters doesn’t work in the real world. It is, to borrow a phrase, “the Bible made impossible.”
An outstanding review, well worth a careful reading for those who have read Smith’s book.
