The Problem with Biblicism

If you’ve never heard the word biblicism, you would never know how prevalent it is in Evangelical Christianity, as in practically ubiquitous. Before I define it in detail and explain why it’s a problem, briefly it means in order to justify doing something or not, there must be a chapter and verse justification for it. If the Bible says it, that settles it. This mentality is the well-intended fruit of the Reformation proclamation of Sola Scriptura, or Scripture alone. The Westminster Confession of Faith lays out the canonical listing of the books of the Bible, and then affirms:

All which are given by inspiration of God, to be the rule of faith and life.

Christians will tend to read this as the only rule, and anything else that purports to provide guidance and direction for life is illegitimate. The famous passage of Paul about the inspiration of Scripture might seem to justify that take:

 ¹⁶ All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, ¹⁷ that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

One might think this, and the Westminster affirmation, means Scripture is exhaustive and that is what makes it profitable, but Scripture itself is clearly not exhaustive. The Bible does not address every single thing we do or that confronts us in our daily lives, or that human beings do to make life possible. Thank God for that, or the Bible would be a very different and less compelling book (or compendium of books).

I was born again into a faith that taught a kind of biblicism. My relationship with God was mediated through the Bible alone. When I embraced Reformed theology I came across an image that describes how I saw my relationship with God through the Bible. I imagined a wire coming down from heaven, and as I read Scripture when God wanted to communicate something to me he’d buzz the wire and I would have instant insight directly from Him about the meaning for me. It was always about me, and meaning that was given to me by God himself, or so I thought. That is not the most stable epistemology (how we know) or hermeneutics (the science of interpreting a text which I’ll address below). In fact, it’s a recipe for distortion, and one example of biblicism.

Another example of how this works out in practice for some people is seeking guidance for life decisions, where to live, who to marry, taking a job, etc. How do we “know” something is God’s will? Well, God has to zap the wire and show us through some text in the Bible, then we’ll “know”! Most Christians know intuitively the Bible isn’t that kind of book. As my dad always used to tell me when I did something stupid, God gave us a brain, and we’re meant to use it. The key point in this regard and to biblicism in general, is that God’s nature is not totalitarian. In other words, he’s not a “control freak,” who wants to dictate everything we do. He’s far too secure for that, and His creatures were not created to function with that kind of control. Many non-Christians, especially in our secular age, see God as some kind of dictator who is set on determining everything we do, but that’s not how this world, or us in it, works.

God gave us agency, meaning we are beings who can alter the stuff, the raw material of existence; we can change things. This freedom is not an illusion, but very real, and it means there are consequences to the choices we make. That’s thrilling on the upside, and terrifying on the downside, but we’re not in this alone because God is somehow sovereign and in control over all of it, without destroying the reality of our agency. Only a being, God, who created everything out of nothing and sustains it moment by moment could pull that off. It makes my brain hurt whenever I think about it too much. It’s easier to trust the Bible’s declaration and our lived experience of it as true. Let’s take a further look at how biblicism plays out in practice, and then what I believe the role the Bible plays in our lives.

The Basic Assumptions of Biblicism
The Reformation gave the Christian world the five Solas, of which Sola Scripture is foundational because out of it flow all the others by which we live out our faith: Christus, Fide, Gratia, Deo Gloria, or Christ alone, faith alone, grace alone, to the glory of God alone. What “Scripture alone” has come to mean in the Protestant tradition is embracing God’s inspired Word as the inerrant, sufficient, and final authority for the church and the Christian’s life. None of the early Reformers, however, believed or taught this meant the Bible is sufficient all by itself for the church or the Christian’s life. This becomes abundantly clear when we see how they wrote copiously about what they believed God’s word meant, many times disagreeing with one another over the same text or passage, often vehemently. Out of this developed the various traditions of Protestantism, and the confessions defining exactly what they believed and why they believed it, even those who don’t embrace classic Reformation confessions. Not being Biblicists, we see how the Reformers naturally would defend or argue for their theology looking back at early church fathers, for example.

Since God didn’t gives us a textbook or a how-to manual, it is helpful to see exactly what kind of book He gave us, or like I said books, 66 to be exact, written by 40 or so authors over approximately 1500 years. The Bible is the history of redemption, specifically of the Jewish people in what we call the Old Testament, developing over time into the history of the redemption of the world, including Gentiles, those who are not Jews. Because the Old Testament is more history than statements of belief, we see develop in Judaism differing parties of interpretation. This happened in what we call the Intertestamental period between the cessation of prophecy with Malachi in the mid to early 400s BC to the coming of Christ and the writing of the New Testament. The focus was primarily on the law or the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, and three contending parties, Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes developed rival interpretations of the law, though they differed in other areas as well. Biblical faith was always messy, as God obviously planned it.

All of the first followers of Christ were Jews and believed authoritative teaching was part of this faith they’d been given by Christ. As Paul says, the church was “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone” (Eph. 2:20). In the first century the writings of the Apostles came to be seen with the authority of Scripture, and by the mid to late second century we see a well-defined canon, or list, of New Testament books. However, the Christians found like the Jews, there was often disagreement as to the meaning of a text or passages. Because of heretical movements in those early centuries, Church fathers realized Scripture itself wasn’t sufficient to give Christians full definition of their beliefs. There’s a wonderful saying I first heard applied to economics and liberty, that liberty is necessary but not sufficient to develop a capitalist economy. In a way, this “necessary but not sufficient” concept can apply to Scripture as well. What I mean is that the Bible doesn’t say something about everything, and biblicism gives us that impression. However, it is sufficient in a big picture way that is crucial for living the Christian life and advancing God’s kingdom on earth. As the Apostle Paul says,

¹⁵ The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. ¹⁶ “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

What biblicism does is limit Christians to words on a page, and keeps them from developing a transformational worldview lens enabling them to “judge all things,” or forming the universal categories to see all things as Christ the Creator sees them. As my favorite and overused quote from ex-atheist C.S. Lewis says,

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

Words on a page isolated from their immediate and ultimate context can’t give us this kind of perspective and understanding, nor the wisdom that comes from seeing the bigger picture. It didn’t take long for me to realize what the implications were for my own form of biblicism, and I used three words to describe it.

• Ahistorical – In Greek an a in front of a word negates it, so for example, theos means God, and atheos means no God, from which we get our English atheist. Taking from Greek, ahistorical means no or without history. Since I believed as a young Christian the Bible was written to me, not so much for me, the history from its writing to me was irrelevant. For me, the Bible existed in an historical vacuum.
• Anti-theological – Given the church’s history of theological engagement with the text, it isn’t surprising theology was non-existent in my Biblicist days. Doctrine, another word for theology, was disparaged as divisive. When I discovered Reformed theology I found it helped me to understand what I believed and why I believed it.
• Anti-intellectual – While this is not true for all Biblicists, especially in my Reformed tradition, the me-and-the-Bible mindset made being overly intellectual suspect. Taking Paul in I Corinthians 8 out of context, I was taught, mostly implicitly, that “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up,” as if love and knowledge are mutually exclusive. There are plenty of ignorant people who are plenty puffed up.

We can see from the early church none of these things were true of them. This becomes apparent as the church delt with heretical movements arising in the first several hundred years of Christianity. Directed by the providence of the Almighty God, the author of Scripture, this complicated and messy process gave us what we call the historic, orthodox Christian faith. This came down to us in the creeds, specifically the Apostles, Athanasian, and Nicene Creeds, also adding a later creed which came out of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, thus the Chalcedonian Creed.

The Bible in the Christian’s Life
You might think from all this that I don’t believe the Bible has an inherent spiritual power within the text itself, that all its power comes from our human intellect and ability to reason and understand it. Certainly, the human ability to think is instrumental in bringing Scripture to life which God must use, but spiritually, the power of the Bible goes well beyond the human intellect, or imagination, to conceive. We can’t chalk up the change in the human heart and transformation of lives merely to our reason. It’s much more mysterious and profound than that. That’s because we’re dealing with the literal Word of God who is God himself in Christ. As John says, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God.” How that all works I have no idea, but God moves in powerful ways in the heart of His people as they faithfully read and pray through His word, and through the words of His word, preferably every day. Keep in mind how blessed we are to have access to cheap Bibles, and free online, so have God’s word always at our fingertips. This wasn’t true for most of Christian history as books were incredibly expensive, and thus rare. Most Christians were likely only able to hear the word read at church.

For me, daily Bible reading was a habit in my early Christian life, but then I allowed life to get in the way for a couple decades and it wasn’t as consistent as it should have been. In 2012 that changed when I made a commitment to read the Bible every morning and get on my knees and pray. I’ve pretty much done that ever since, although not always on my knees, and it was transformational. God, and everything about my daily life with him became more real. That’s a difficult thing to quantify, realness, but it’s powerful. We’re staking our lives, deaths, and eternity, on something, someone, who is invisible, who we can’t physically touch or feel, so it can easily come to feel un-real, which is why daily time in the word and prayer, and weekly worship and fellowship with God’s people is critical to experiencing God’s realness. That awareness is mediated through God’s word found in the text of Scripture in our Bibles. There are numerous verses I can cite before I get to the principles of how we understand it, but Hebrews 4:12 says it well:

For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.

The words on the page are the tools the Holy Spirit uses to kindle the parched timber and brush of our souls dried out by sin and life in a fallen world, and alight our hearts afire for the Living God. The results in God’s people are captured perfectly by Isaiah (26):

⁸ Yes, Lord, walking in the way of your laws
we wait for you;
your name and renown
are the desire of our hearts.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism first question asks what the chief end of man is, and accurately expresses it in elegant simplicity:

Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him ever.

Everything we are looking for to fulfill us, to give our lives meaning, hope, and purpose, is found in God Himself, and in glorifying and enjoying him we can truly appreciate everything He gives us in life, including the challenges and suffering He may call us to. The question is, how do we get an accurate understanding of what God is communicating through the words on the page. That brings us to hermeneutics, simply, the study of interpretation. Words on a page have meaning, they need to be interpreted, and all human beings are interpretive creatures, whether it’s interpreting text on a page or scenes in a play or movie, or news items, or other human beings. The word interpret simply means to give or provide the meaning of; explain; explicate; elucidate.

So, as we come to the text of Scripture, we need to keep these four hermeneutical principles in mind if we are to interpret it rightly:

1. Authorial intent: what we can assess the author intended when he wrote the words.
2. Audience understanding: what the intended audience would have been expected to believe the words meant. This means context counts, specifically the moment in history and culture in which it was written.
3. Scripture interprets Scripture: never read a text in isolation from the rest of Scripture.
4. Scripture is all about Christ (Luke 24): the overarching theme of God’s revelation to us is Jesus.

To fully benefit from the scope of redemptive history revealed to us in Scripture, we must understand how the puzzle pieces fit into the overall big picture. The pieces can only give us a limited picture, and an easily distorted one. Fortunately, we’re not in this alone, which is why we must read more than just the Bible. We have easy access to books, and the Internet, to help us grow in our understanding of the big picture, and all the little pictures that make it up. If we are to obey the imperative of Scripture itself to grow in our knowledge, then we will want to take advantage of the great minds who have come before us, as well as those of our contemporaries. The treasures are endless.

Lastly, we’re aware how much disagreement there has been in the history of the church over interpretation. We might reasonably ask, if these principles are so helpful, why is there so much disagreement, and so many arguments about the meaning of the text. You might not expect the answer I will give, but I believe because God wants it that way. God is sovereign, so if he wanted everyone to agree on everything it would have been that way, but it’s not so he didn’t. Why might that be? First, we are finite and so limited in our understanding. Two, we are sinners, which messes everything up. I often see Christians appeal to Jesus’s command that his disciples should love one another, or this passage of Paul in I Corinthians that they should always agree with one another:

¹⁰ I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.

There you go, that’s what we should do, but Paul’s appeal is just that, and not a command, mainly because it’s impossible. It might be an aspiration, but even then, aspiring to agree can only get us so far. Like the great creeds of the church. I believe all the disagreement gives us the opportunity to obey the actual command of Jesus to love one another. If the entire law and the prophets, in effect, the entire Old Testament is summed up in loving God, ourselves, and our neighbor, then it’s pretty important. All we need to do is do it, and watch the word of God come alive in us and in those around us; it’s glorious to behold.