The realities of the past year and a half have been polarizing for many Christians. While there have been differences and divisions among Christians as to the practical outworking of morality for as long as the church has existed (see Paul and Barnabas’ disagreement in Acts 15), in the Western world, those disagreements fade into the background when we are generally all free to pursue our lives without hinderance as we best see fit. What 2020 and 2021 have brought into sharp focus though is that our culture’s general permissiveness and freedom of conscience without consequence has dulled our collective ability to make wise decisions when our choices are personally costly, greatly impact the lives of others, and are on matters in which the scriptures are either unclear, highly contested, or functionally silent. How does a Christian respond to matters of prejudice and racism? How should a Christian respond to matters of government control and restrictions of freedoms? At what point is civil disobedience the appropriate response? How should a Christian respond to matters of bioethics and new medical treatments that could not have even been conceived by the apostles when the New Testament was being penned? These are just a few of the many issues that have come to the fore in the past year and a half.
And yet, while we don’t have all the answers to these questions, and we perhaps won’t have them until Jesus returns and they cease to be relevant questions to ask, I do believe that we have been given the tools to make wise decisions on these matters (and more) with what we have received.
Fundamentally, I think it comes down to three main things:
1. Confusion about what constitutes revelation, and where authority lies.
2. The anti-intellectual bent of much of evangelical Christianity.
3. A massive problem with confirmation bias over truth seeking.
Over the course of the summer, I’m going to be looking at these matters in closer detail with the intention of helping us all (author included) identify our blind spots and develop healthy habits of discernment and evaluation that will lead us to not only wise convictions, but more importantly to wise actions based on those convictions. In the first three posts though I want to break down that first issue and tackle the prickly subject of revelation and authority.
Revelation (not the book of the same title that we’ve been studying this spring, but the act of divine disclosure and unveiling) and authority are two issues that the church has struggled to handle well since the earliest days of the church. Christians often operate with a truncated definition of where revelation comes from, and as such ascribe authority not to the things that God is saying, but what they wish (in their own fallen perspectives) he would say instead. There are three main ways in which this happens, and I’m calling them biblicism, spiritualism, and collectivism. Let’s begin by looking at biblicism.
Biblicism is a fallacy that says that the only truth we can know is what the Bible teaches—and in doing so we ignore the fact that countless believers over the years have come to the same texts with the same earnest pursuit of truth only to come away with diverging and incompatible applications. Sociologist Christian Smith (no relation) calls this phenomenon pervasive interpretive pluralism. It’s the idea that we bring experience and worldview to our interpretation of the text and because of that we fundamentally cannot justify any contested reading of the Bible based on our reading alone (Pastor Jenn wrote an excellent paper on this topic for her ordination, and if you’re interested in learning more, I’m sure she would be happy to send you a copy). Nor can we simply villainize those who read the scriptures differently than we do as being unserious about study, or careless about the authority of scripture. Often it is their zealous commitment to the authority of the Bible that has led them into a contrasting position to yours! This alone should give any thoughtful Christian pause, clearly the Bible alone isn’t enough.
But it’s not the ways in which biblicism gets things wrong that cause us problems, it’s the way in which it gets things right—but not quite right enough that cause us the biggest issues.
Because the Bible is a source of truth. And its words and precepts are trustworthy. But it is also ancient enough, and ambiguous enough in places to be twisted to purport many ideas that are antithetical to its overall message and the God it is supposed to reveal. God does speak through the scriptures, and he can use the scriptures both in the plain sense of the text, as a sprawling narrative projecting a future ethic that is absent from the narratives themselves, and as read (in the Spirit) in novel and creative ways that would never have been conceived of by the original human authors. The Church has a long history of hearing from God in all these ways through the Bible. But the Church also has a long history of getting it wrong. And that is because the authority of the Bible is not rooted in what I believe about it, but it is rooted in the God that the scriptures testify to. And so, when we locate authority in our interpretation of scripture in isolation, rather than in the revelation of God through the scriptures which is a ministry of the Holy Spirit, we open ourselves up to error and falsehood, even as we ground our decisions in the text of the Bible.
The scriptures are holy. The scriptures are true. The scriptures also contain a quality of inerrancy and infallibility (to what measure is also a hotly contested topic for another day altogether)—but our interpretation and application of the scriptures are only holy and true so far as they are guided by the Holy Spirit and agreed upon by the Church. And our interpretations are never infallible or inerrant because we are still sinful people who lack perfect knowledge and goodness. And so we can say then, that seeking wisdom for making decisions in the Bible is a good practice in these uncertain times—but only if you are reading the Bible with humility, with prayer (in the Spirit), and alongside the community of faith. Anything less than this is to court biblicism. And biblicism is not wise.
In our next post we will look at the fallacy of spiritualism and why “because Jesus told me so” is not a good basis for wise decisions either.