by James Davisson
"When I see things like this I like to think about how the Hittites were said to have been a creation of the Bible authors, until they found them. David didn't really exist, until they found proof that he did. Pilate wasn't a real person, except that he was. Coelacanth, Wolemi pine, et al were extinct millions of years ago, until they were discovered alive and well. Countless attempts have been made to show the Bible as inaccurate and it tends to be vindicated in time, so I'm not worried about it."If you're unfamiliar with the idea of confirmation bias, the quote above is a pretty great example. Confirmation bias is an incredibly common way of processing information among people of all walks of life; most importantly, it's one of the main reasons it's next to impossible to change peoples' minds about subjects they already have strong opinions on. To quote the Wikipedia entry: confirmation bias is "the tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs." This "tendency" is so common that I'd call it nearly universal. If you have strong opinions about guns, gay marriage, abortion, the environment, or, as in today's case, the Bible, you will tend to believe without question anything you hear that confirms your opinion, and you will tend to heavily scrutinize (or outright reject) anything that contradicts your opinion—unless you train yourself and force yourself to do otherwise. And not just you, dear reader—I regularly delude myself with confirmation bias, too.
We've posted a couple times recently about frustrations and struggles with many Christians' inability to accept the theory of evolution—last week, an anonymous guest described his experience with a fundamentalist Christian colleague at a secular university, and before that, I talked about my own confusion and metamorphosing opinion on the subject as I grew up—and I'd like to build on this problem to discuss a deeper and more intractable problem for American evangelicals: their view of scripture.
Let's back up slightly, first. If you didn't click the link in the quote (here it is again), it's referring to evidence that one small detail among many in the Hebrew Bible is probably wrong: while the stories of the patriarch Abraham in the book of Genesis are usually dated to roughly the 20th century BCE, there is no evidence of camels in the region he lived in until nearly a thousand years later. (Specifically: if camels were a part of human life in the region, we would expect to find their bones in the trash heaps of settlements dated to the 20th century BCE. Bones of other livestock known to have been raised in this period are present and widely attested, so the absence of camels is pretty glaring.) Given that Abraham is depicted as owning camels, this information poses a problem for some folks, like our commenter in the quote above. Fortunately for them, confirmation bias can take care of things like this pretty easily: after all, a lack of evidence isn't the same as proof that there weren't camels in Palestine in the ~2000s BCE, right? Why even scrutinize this further—if it contradicts your worldview, it's easy enough to reject.
Fortunately for us, though, this quote reveals a major issue within American Christianity that's worth talking about. A detail this small (is what kind of livestock Abraham owned really all that important to...anything?) bothers this person enough for them to draw comparisons, not only to other claims about Biblical historicity, but also to coelacanths, in order to help them ignore this data, which means that something bigger and more interesting than camel bones is at stake here.
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| Coelacanths rule, BTW. Did you know a mature coelacanth is the size of a person? |
What's at the root of all this is a way of reading the Bible that I'll refer to as biblicism. In his book, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicicsm Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture, the evangelical sociologist and thinker Christian Smith defines biblicism as a set of widely held beliefs about the Bible in American evangelical Christianity that includes a range of interlocking ideas. The relevant ones for our purposes are the following (though see a full, and very interesting, list of them here):
- Divine Writing: The Bible, down to the details of its words, consists of and is identical with God's very own words written in human language.
- Democratic Perspicuity: Any reasonably intelligent person can read the Bible in his or her own language and correctly understand the plain meaning of the text.
- Commonsense Hermeneutics: The best way to understand biblical texts is by reading them in their explicit, plain, most obvious, literal sense, as the author intended them at face value, which may or may not involve taking into account their literary, cultural, and historical contexts.
- Inductive Method: All matters of Christian belief and practice can be learned by sitting down with the Bible and piecing together through careful study the clear "biblical" truths that it teaches.
- Handbook Model: The Bible teaches doctrine and morals with every affirmation that it makes, so that together those affirmations comprise something like a handbook or textbook for Christian belief and living, a compendium of divine and therefore inerrant teachings on a full array of subjects—including science, economics, politics, and romance. (The Bible Made Impossible, pgs. 4-5)
If you look carefully, you can see how the earlier items in the list logically seem to lead to the later ones: if the Bible is God's direct, inerrant, written word to people (divine writing), it should be easily understood by anyone who wants to know what God has to say (democratic perspicuity); if something is to be easily understood, it should have only one, plain, surface meaning (commonsense hermeneutics); if God's inerrant word is easily understandable and to be taken at face value, then it can serve as a source of clear, consistent, truths—not just in faith, but in all elements of life (inductive method and handbook model).
If any detail in the Bible were proved, without any doubt, to be wrong, this schema unravels; the Bible can't be God's very own words if parts of it are wrong (because God does not lie), and if any details of the words are wrong, they are all suspect and cannot therefore form the basis of Christian faith and life. This is why even the issue of camel bones can make someone resort to the questionably relevant coelacanths for support; it's too important to risk leaving out awesome ancient fish if that will help bolster the argument!
Buying into biblicism is really great; it allows believers a sense of incredible security and certainty in their faith. Also, it allows them access to a whole world of books and teaching on an incredibly wide range of subjects, all backed up with direct quotes from scripture and all completely "biblical." Take a look at Smith's list of titles:
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| This is one of several pages in the list. |
Biblicism was definitely part of my church culture growing up. I read and was profoundly impacted by books like The Purpose-Driven Life and I Kissed Dating Goodbye, self-help books based heavily on key Bible verses. I wore a shirt as a teenager that said "Lost? Need Directions? Read the Map" above a picture of an open Bible—God's map/handbook for human existence. I saw and heard evidence of these ideas everywhere in my experience of Christianity, from the Christian book store to church camp and beyond.
There are quite a number of problems with these ideas; we've talked elsewhere on the blog about changing our minds on the specific issue of inerrancy (or "divine writing" in Christian Smith's terms above), but I'd like to point out a big problem with the larger, interlocking schema of biblicism as a whole. It's a problem Christian Smith calls "pervasive interpretive pluralism," but which might better be labeled "Christians can't agree on anything."
If it's true that (1) the Bible is God's direct, inerrant word, (2) that it's accessible to anyone of reasonable intelligence, and (3) it means exactly what its "plain sense" says it means, then logically it follows that all reasonably intelligent Christians can read and agree on the meaning of the Bible. And anyone who has met more than one Christian will know that this is, like, laughably the opposite of true. Christians can't agree on issues as diverse as free will/predestination, gender equality, wealth and poverty, charismatic gifts, and atonement and justification. Heck, we can't even agree on which issues are the central issues of the faith:
It will not suffice to respond simply by reciting the mantra: "In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; in all things, charity," because many of these matters that sustain multiple "biblical" views that cause division are essentials—particularly as viewed by many biblicists. There simply is not unity on many essentials. Furthermore, this response assumes more fundamentally that evangelicals at least agree on what the essentials are, which they do not. For certain kinds of Reformed believers, the sovereignty of God understood in a certain way and double predestination are clearly essentials of the faith—while for others they are not. For Bible-centered Anabaptist Christians, biblical pacifism and nonviolence are central to the gospel—while others serve in the US military with clean consciences. For some biblicists, the penal satisfaction theory of atonement expresses the pure essence of salvation—but for others it is an unbiblical and misguided doctrine. So not only are Christians divided about essential matters of doctrine and faithful practice; they are also sometimes divided on what even counts as essential. (pgs. 24-25, bolded emphasis and links added)Smith's proposal for a better, "more evangelical" reading of scripture is an elegant and worthy one, neither liberal nor conservative, but simply Christian: read the Bible as, above all else, a book about Jesus. Smith challenges biblicists, and all Christians, to remember that Christ is the "real purpose, center, and interpretive key" to the Bible. If we read the Bible this way, our focus is not on what a Bible verse can tell about us "biblical" dieting or romance or the origins of the universe, but instead on how it relates to our understanding of Jesus Christ. In Smith's words, "We do not then read scripture devotionally to try to find tidbits there that are 'meaningful to' or that 'speak to' us, wherever we are in our personal subjective spiritual experiences. We do not read scripture as detached historians trying to judge its technical accuracy in recounting events. We do not read scripture as a vast collection of infallible propositions whose meanings and implications can be understood on their own particular terms. We only, always, and everywhere read scripture in view of its real subject matter: Jesus Christ."
In the middle of that quote is a sentence that strikes me at least as hard as it does any biblicist; too often I can be a "detached historian" when reading scripture, allowing myself to revel in the literary details of the text without thinking even for a moment how it enriches the picture of Christ, points to an idea about Christ, or relates in any way to Christ and Christian faith. I am as guilty as anyone of misreading the Bible for my own ends, of bending it so that it says what I want it to say rather than coming to it and asking what it says, and particularly what it says about the fact that God came to earth as Jesus, and in the process, taught us, led us, and saved us for God's own better, fuller purposes.
If you are a Christian, and this is not how you have been reading scripture, I challenge you: why not? In the face of evidence that the Bible is not for communicating dating advice or exact knowledge about ancient Palestinian ungulates, would you not rather believe that it is God's written word, sent to tell us about and remind us of God's lived Word in the world, Jesus Christ? It's something to consider, friends.
Photo sources:
1. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/manojvasanth/4119668254
2. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marjorie_Courtenay-Latimer_and_Coelacanth.jpg
3. The Bible Made Impossible, pg. 9
Some seriously good work here! Well done.
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