WE NEED TO DISCOVER THE DEEPER SPIRITUAL MEANING THAT CAN BE SEEN TO BE THE FULFILLMENT TO WHICH THE LITERAL POINTS
Christian Smith may not be a well known name but his book "The Bible Made Impossible" is certainly stirring some conversation between people who want to assert the full authority of Scripture while dealing with the problem of many diverse interpretations of the same biblical texts. How Christians read the Bible is becoming more and more problematic rather than building unity and consensus among faithful believers. Christian Smith wants followers of Jesus to take more credible steps when it comes to scripture, church, and tradition. Here is a list of some of the ways Christian biblicists try to deal with the knotty issue of interpretive pluralism.
1. Biblicists rarely know how to handle texts that frankly everyone ignores because no one lives by them.
2. Some problem texts are explained away by appeals to cultural relativity.
3. Some passages in the Bible are so strange that they are better left alone.
4. Some texts seem to contradict or are incompatible with other biblical texts.
Here are how some of these problems are handled by biblicists according to Smith's study:
1. Ignore the problem texts (a kind of ostrich stick your head in the sand approach).
2. Interpret the problem texts to say things the texts actually do not say.
3. Build huge and complex analogies and illustrations to rescue the texts but in actual life make no practical sense.
Christian Smith proposes what I call a Catholic-Evangelical approach that takes Christ the living Word as the key to solving many of the problems and letting the Bible be the Bible rather than trying to turn it into something it is not. Smith proposes a post-biblicist approach to reading and understanding the Scriptures. He does not believe this will magically do away with interpretive pluralism but he does believe it will have much better results than what we have currently seen with Evangelical biblicism.
I tend to agree that a more humble approach that has Christ as the focus and which understands progressive revelation and the role of the Holy Spirit in more dynamic and flexible ways can be several steps forward in the malaise of global interpretive pluralism.
Christian Smith may not be a well known name but his book "The Bible Made Impossible" is certainly stirring some conversation between people who want to assert the full authority of Scripture while dealing with the problem of many diverse interpretations of the same biblical texts. How Christians read the Bible is becoming more and more problematic rather than building unity and consensus among faithful believers. Christian Smith wants followers of Jesus to take more credible steps when it comes to scripture, church, and tradition. Here is a list of some of the ways Christian biblicists try to deal with the knotty issue of interpretive pluralism.
1. Biblicists rarely know how to handle texts that frankly everyone ignores because no one lives by them.
2. Some problem texts are explained away by appeals to cultural relativity.
3. Some passages in the Bible are so strange that they are better left alone.
4. Some texts seem to contradict or are incompatible with other biblical texts.
Here are how some of these problems are handled by biblicists according to Smith's study:
1. Ignore the problem texts (a kind of ostrich stick your head in the sand approach).
2. Interpret the problem texts to say things the texts actually do not say.
3. Build huge and complex analogies and illustrations to rescue the texts but in actual life make no practical sense.
Christian Smith proposes what I call a Catholic-Evangelical approach that takes Christ the living Word as the key to solving many of the problems and letting the Bible be the Bible rather than trying to turn it into something it is not. Smith proposes a post-biblicist approach to reading and understanding the Scriptures. He does not believe this will magically do away with interpretive pluralism but he does believe it will have much better results than what we have currently seen with Evangelical biblicism.
I tend to agree that a more humble approach that has Christ as the focus and which understands progressive revelation and the role of the Holy Spirit in more dynamic and flexible ways can be several steps forward in the malaise of global interpretive pluralism.
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