Biblicism beyond biblicism
There is a strange phenomenon in graduate theological education that I’ve never quite been able to understand. Here’s my best attempt at describing it.
Many—it feels like most—young people who enter graduate education hoping to earn a degree in biblical or theological studies are a biblicist of some kind. By that term I mean a Christian, usually but not always evangelical or low-church, who believes that the only relevant source, norm, and authority in and for the Christian life is the Bible.
Upon learning about both the history of the canon and the history of the church, as well as the history and doctrines of theology, the young scholar in question has a choice to make. Assuming he (we’ll say it’s a he) remains a Christian, that choice concerns three options.
Option #1: To cease being a biblicist by embracing the authority of sacred tradition.
Option #2: To remain a biblicist, with an unmoved and likely redoubled commitment to biblicism as both (a) the proper theological understanding of scriptural authority and (b) the best—i.e., intellectually and academically warranted—historical construal of the role of the canon in the church.
Option #3: To remain a biblicist, with a deeply compromised view of the status of the Bible as (a) God’s word, (b) trustworthy, and (c) authoritative.
Any reader of my work knows where I stand on these questions. Moreover, I am friends with as well as read and profit from writers and teachers in camp #1 and camp #2 alike. Both options are long-standing, venerable positions that with good reason continue to converse, not to mention argue, with one another. I more or less make my living in those conversations and arguments. They are a pleasure to partake in because they concern what matters most and because their participants, on all sides, make good arguments full of interesting and compelling ideas.
What I don’t understand is camp #3.
I have never, not ever, not for the life of me, been able to make heads or tails of “non-biblicist biblicism”—that is to say, a radically nuda scriptura position that recognizes no one and nothing besides the Bible as bearing divine or doctrinal or moral authority in the church, whether from the past (sacred tradition from the apostles to today) or from the present (say, a living teaching office), while simultaneously denying to the canon of Scripture abiding, supreme, or final authority as God’s living word.
To compound the confusion, this “biblicism beyond biblicism” often manifests as a kind of mania or obsessive-compulsive focus on the text, on all its details, its every jot and tittle, yet absent the belief that such minute strokes of the pen are in fact the medium of God’s speech. So that, on one hand, we ought to devote ourselves to understand precisely what this redactor or that author of the canonical text meant to say at the time of its writing; and, on the other hand, once we have arrived at an assured deliverance of just what the text meant in its original context, we need not receive it as bearing divine authority in and for our lives—because the author of the Bible is not God but ancient human beings.
Well. Suppose I don’t want to pick at that particular scab (i.e., “not God but human,” as if we didn’t know humans wrote the Bible until recently, or as if the metaphysics of that presumptuous either/or were self-evident rather than question-begging). Suppose I grant the point as stipulated. Will someone then explain to me why it is we spent all that time drilling down into the fine details of the text only to emerge from our excavation with what we are antecedently confident is not God’s word? What is it we are doing here? And why?
The logical problems are bad enough. But if and when this shows up in church life, it’s game over. For once you’ve cut yourself off from sacred tradition and biblical authority, while ostensibly remaining biblicist (if in name only, or at least merely by reflex or temperament, and thus inconsistently applied), you have untethered yourself from any and all sources from beyond yourself. There is no longer authority extant in the parish or congregation. The pastoral leadership certainly make no claim to authority; tradition by definition holds no authoritative status; and now the Bible itself has had its knees cut out from under it. The old trifecta of canon, creed, and episcopate—Scripture, Tradition, and Holy Orders—is bid adieu, with nothing to stand in its place. The only thing to be done is to drift along aimlessly on the seas of personal, political, and cultural change, to be blown by the Zeitgeist this way and that. Eventually, though, the bottom of the boat is going to fall out. For there’s nothing keeping the ship afloat except the remaining vestiges of the old-time religion, that ballast of our faithful forebears. Once it runs out, we’re sunk.
