The Bible Made Impossible by Christian Smith

Author:Christian Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL006080, Bible—Evidences (authority, etc.), Bible—Hermeneutics, Evangelicalism
ISBN: 9781441241511
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group

Living with Scriptural Ambiguities

Scripture is sometimes confusing, ambiguous, and incomplete—we have to admit and deal with that fact. Biblicism insists that the Bible as the word of God is clear, accessible, understandable, coherent, and complete as the revelation of God’s will and ways for humanity. But this is simply not true. Scripture can be very confusing. It can be indefinite. The Bible can lack information and answers that we want it to have. To say such things seems, from a biblicist perspective, to insult God, scripture’s divine author. But that is, again, because biblicism starts off with wrong presuppositions about how the Bible ought to work.

There is no reason whatsoever not to openly acknowledge the sometimes confusing, ambiguous, and seemingly incomplete nature of scripture. We do not need to be able to explain everything all the time. It is fine sometimes simply to say, “I have no idea” and “We really just don’t know.” Even the Bible itself on occasion acknowledges the difficulties in understanding scripture. In Acts 8, for example, Philip encounters an Ethiopian eunuch who was reading a passage from Isaiah (53:7–8) but who simply could not understand it. “How can I,” he reasonably asked, “unless someone explains it to me?” (Acts 8:31). (Note too that it was only by Christocentrically pointing this man to “the good news about Jesus” that the Isaiah passage came to make any sense to him.) Similarly, the author of 2 Peter admits about Paul’s writings that, “his letters contain some things that are hard to understand” (3:16).

Many theologians across church history (of the sort that American evangelicals respect) have also easily acknowledged the confusions, ambiguity, and “incompleteness” of scripture. Take Augustine and Luther, for example. Augustine wrote about the “problems and ambiguities of many kinds” in scripture that cause some readers to find “no meaning at all, even falsely, so thick is the fog created by some obscure phrases.” Regarding this, he said, “I have no doubt that this is all divinely predetermined, so that the pride may be subdued by hard work, and intellects which tend to despise things that are easily discovered may be rescued from boredom and reinvigorated. . . . It is a wonderful and beneficial thing that the Holy Spirit organized the holy scripture so as to . . . remove the boredom by means of its obscure [passages].”[236] Regarding Luther, the Christian ethicist Brian Brock points out that, while working on lectures on the psalms during the years 1513–15, Luther admitted “that he cannot possibly have fully understood Scripture. . . . Luther believes that the desire for comprehensiveness is futile. . . . Says Luther, ‘I openly admit that I do not know whether I have accurately interpreted the psalms or not,’ a posture he maintained for the rest of his career. Despite his becoming even more sure of his material, he claims only the certainty of familiarity, not comprehensiveness.”[237] Many assume that Luther’s doctrine of scriptural perspicuity entails a refusal to admit confusions, ambiguity, and unevenness in the Bible.

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