Christian Smith > Quotes

“Human social life, I suggest, is the magma that erupts and builds up, so to speak, at the fault lines where natural human capacities meet and grind against and over natural human limitations…. This meeting of powers and limitations produces a creative, dynamic tension and energy that generates and fuels the making of human social life and social structures…. It is real human persons living through the tensions of natural existential contradictions who construct patterned social meanings, interactions, institutions, and structures.”
― Christian Smith, What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up

“Rather than leaving generous people on the short end of an unequal bargain, practices of generosity are actually likely instead to provide generous givers with essential goods in life—happiness, health, and purpose—which money and time themselves simply cannot buy. That is an empirical fact well worth knowing.”
― Christian Smith, The Paradox of Generosity: Giving We Receive, Grasping We Lose

“Are we simply self-conscious animals improbably appearing for a moment in a cosmos without purpose or significance? If so, that has implications for life, which even ordinary people can work out. Or are we rather illusions of individuality destined to dissolve into the ultimately real Absolute? That would make a difference. Are we instead really materially acquisitive hedonists or carnally desiring sensualists who have nothing higher to which to aspire than the gratifications of possessions and physical sensations that we can use our money and relations to consume? Or maybe only bodies with capacities to define by means of the exercise of will and discourse our identities through self-description and re-description? Or perhaps are we children of a personal God, whose perfect love is determined to rescue us from our self-destruction in order to bring us into the perfect happiness of divine knowledge and worship? Or maybe something else? The differences matter for
how life ought to be lived, how we ought to live, as individuals and as a society.12 And ultimately we have no choice but to adopt some position, even if by default our culture adopts it for us. I think we ought to want to embrace a position that is deliberately considered and believed for good reasons.”
― Christian Smith, What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up

“Reality has a deep dimension often operating below the surface of empirical experience. To think otherwise is to commit what critical realists call the "epistemic fallacy," namely, to reduce what is to what we can empirically observe. That is a debilitating move.”
― Christian Smith, What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up

“The point becomes not to understand the other’s reasons, perspectives, and beliefs, or to honor them as fellow believers and come to a deeper understanding and perhaps resolution of differences. The point, rather, is to remain on guard from being contaminated by the out-group or allowing them to grow in influence. And in that process the other is very easily turned into an impersonal, two-dimensional caricature. Out-groups are reduced to an abstract “them” whose beliefs are abridged into a few bullet points of greatest disagreement, which need not actually be taken seriously on their own terms but rather simply need to be refuted and discredited as a means to validate the views of one’s own group. In this way, differences between Christian groups cease to be existentially troubling facts that divide Christians. Instead they become dismissible ideas of people far away, ideas already known to be wrong.”
― Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture

“generosity involved in proactively forgiving other people. This form of generosity, and the positive feelings it evokes in generous forgivers, have been shown by studies to reduce stress, tension, and sadness, and to lead to lower heart rates, lower skin conduction levels, and lower blood pressure. By contrast, those who ungenerously hold grudges are more angry, feel less in control of their lives, and, partly as a result, exhibit symptoms of unhealthy physical conditions.”
― Christian Smith, The Paradox of Generosity: Giving We Receive, Grasping We Lose

“Capitalism is not merely a system for the efficient production and distribution of goods and services; it also incarnates and promotes a particular moral order, an institutionalized normative worldview comprising and fostering particular assumptions, narratives, commitments, beliefs, values, and goals.”
― Christian Smith, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers

“Although all things with physical substance are real, not all real things have physical substance.”
― Christian Smith, What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up

“Some sacred projects are so doggedly committed to advancing their particular, packaged views of believed orthodoxies that they can become blinded to good evidence that problematizes their truth-packages and intolerant of other people whom they believe impede their sacred missions.”
― Christian Smith, The Sacred Project of American Sociology

“The major first point to understand in making sense of the moral reasoning
of emerging adults, then, is that most do not appeal to a moral philosophy, tradition, or ethic as an external guide by which to think and live in moral terms. Few emerging adults even seem aware that such external, coherent approaches or resources for moral reasoning exist. Instead, for most emerging adults, the world consists of so many individuals, and each individual decides for themselves what is and isn’t moral and immoral. Morality is ultimately a matter of personal opinion.”
― Christian Smith, Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood

“We despise all reverences and all the objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our own list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us.” Mark Twain, Following the Equator”
― Christian Smith, The Sacred Project of American Sociology

“Persons in their most developed form are conscious, reflexive, embodied, self-transcending centers of subjective experience, durable identity, moral commitment, and social communication who—as the efficient cause of their own responsible actions and interactions—exercise complex capacities for agency and inter-subjectivity in order to sustain their own incommunicable selves in loving relationships with other personal selves and with the non-personal world.”
― Christian Smith, The Sacred Project of American Sociology

“May God’s people never eat rabbit or pork (Lev. 11:6–7)? May a man never have sex with his wife during her monthly period (Lev. 18:19) or wear clothes woven of two kinds of materials (Lev. 19:19)? Should Christians never wear tattoos (Lev. 19:28)? Should those who blaspheme God’s name be stoned to death (Lev. 24:10–24)? Ought Christians to hate those who hate God (Ps. 139:21–22)? Ought believers to praise God with tambourines, cymbals, and dancing (Ps. 150:4–5)? Should Christians encourage the suffering and poor to drink beer and wine in order to forget their misery (Prov. 31:6–7)? Should parents punish their children with rods in order to save their souls from death (Prov. 23:13–14)? Does much wisdom really bring much sorrow and more knowledge more grief (Eccles. 1:18)? Will becoming highly righteous and wise destroy us (Eccles. 7:16)? Is everything really meaningless (Eccles. 12:8)? May Christians never swear oaths (Matt. 5:33–37)? Should we never call anyone on earth “father” (Matt. 23:9)? Should Christ’s followers wear sandals when they evangelize but bring no food or money or extra clothes (Mark 6:8–9)? Should Christians be exorcising demons, handling snakes, and drinking deadly poison (Mark 16:15–18)? Are people who divorce their spouses and remarry always committing adultery (Luke 16:18)? Ought Christians to share their material goods in common (Acts 2:44–45)? Ought church leaders to always meet in council to issue definitive decisions on matters in dispute (Acts 15:1–29)? Is homosexuality always a sin unworthy of the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6:9–10)? Should unmarried men not look for wives (1 Cor. 7:27) and married men live as if they had no wives (1 Cor. 7:29)? Is it wrong for men to cover their heads (1 Cor. 11:4) or a disgrace of nature for men to wear long hair (1 Cor. 11:14)? Should Christians save and collect money to send to believers in Jerusalem (1 Cor. 16:1–4)? Should Christians definitely sing psalms in church (Col. 3:16)? Must Christians always lead quiet lives in which they work with their hands (1 Thess. 4:11)? If a person will not work, should they not be allowed to eat (2 Thess. 3:10)? Ought all Christian slaves always simply submit to their masters (reminder: slavery still exists today) (1 Pet. 2:18–21)? Must Christian women not wear braided hair, gold jewelry, and fine clothes (1 Tim. 2:9; 1 Pet. 3:3)? Ought all Christian men to lift up their hands when they pray (1 Tim. 2:8)? Should churches not provide material help to widows who are younger than sixty years old (1 Tim. 5:9)? Will every believer who lives a godly life in Christ be persecuted (2 Tim. 3:12)? Should the church anoint the sick with oil for their healing (James 5:14–15)? The list of such questions could be extended.”
― Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture

“What holds scripture together is not simply accurate information or inerrant propositions about God, life, and the world. What holds it together is the reality of Christ himself, the living, eternal Son through whom God reconciles the world to himself in love.”
― Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture

“Peter Enns is correct: “We do not honor the Lord nor do we uphold the gospel by playing make-believe.”[164]”
― Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture

“The Reformation thus does not call for celebration. It calls for sorrow, repentance, and reconciliation.”
― Christian Smith, How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps

“The evangelical Old Testament biblical scholar Christopher Wright states the matter even more strongly: “We are listening, not to a single voice, not even to a single choir in harmony, but to several choirs singing different songs with some protest groups jamming in the wings.”[113]”
― Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture

“to Tocqueville, and reiterated by Robert Bellah and collaborators in their landmark study of American life Habits of the Heart, this pursuit of what one does not have makes it difficult for people to form bonds with one another. Their minds “are more anxious and on edge.” Because “they clutch everything,” they can “hold nothing fast.”
― Christian Smith, The Paradox of Generosity: Giving We Receive, Grasping We Lose

“1. Divine Writing: The Bible, down to the details of its words, consists of and is identical with God’s very own words written inerrantly in human language. 2. Total Representation: The Bible represents the totality of God’s communication to and will for humanity, both in containing all that God has to say to humans and in being the exclusive mode of God’s true communication.[11] 3. Complete Coverage: The divine will about all of the issues relevant to Christian belief and life are contained in the Bible.[12] 4. 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.[13] 5. 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. 6. Solo Scriptura:[14] The significance of any given biblical text can be understood without reliance on creeds, confessions, historical church traditions, or other forms of larger theological hermeneutical frameworks, such that theological formulations can be built up directly out of the Bible from scratch. 7. Internal Harmony: All related passages of the Bible on any given subject fit together almost like puzzle pieces into single, unified, internally consistent bodies of instruction about right and wrong beliefs and behaviors. 8. Universal Applicability: What the biblical authors taught God’s people at any point in history remains universally valid for all Christians at every other time, unless explicitly revoked by subsequent scriptural teaching. 9. 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. The prior nine assumptions and beliefs generate a tenth viewpoint that—although often not stated in explications of biblicist principles and beliefs by its advocates—also commonly characterizes the general biblicist outlook, particularly as it is received and practiced in popular circles: 10. 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, health, politics, and romance.[15]”
― Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture

“The Catholic Church does not offer certainty in human knowledge in the way that some ex-evangelicals seem to want to have it. So forget about that. Learn, have faith, seek understanding, and be prepared to give an account. Be forgiven and forgive. Be formed by the sacraments and practices of the Church, particularly the Eucharist, and learn Christian love for God and your neighbor. That’s it.”
― Christian Smith, How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps

“Biblicism, I have said, is impossible. But there are other approaches—including outright liberalism—that I think are even worse.”
― Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture

“In sum, the Bible itself does not lay out the full biblicist program or anything like it. The Bible contains passages showing, for example, a reader of scripture unable to understand what it teaches unless someone guides him (Acts 8:30–31).”
― Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture

“Why stash little ones away in a nursery downstairs with volunteers, who are hard to recruit and who themselves then miss the service, when they can actually be part of God’s people in worship? This can make it hard sometimes when children are acting up. But it keeps families together.”
― Christian Smith, How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps

“Kenton Sparks describes: “At face value, Scripture does not seem to furnish us with one divine theology; it gives us numerous theologies. . . . The Bible does not offer a single, well-integrated univocal theology; it offers instead numerous overlapping but nonetheless distinctive theologies!” Sparks says that “the literary, historical, ethical, and theological diversity in Scripture . . . scholars have documented a thousand times over.”[112]”
― Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture

“About those sociologists have much more to learn. But one thing is certain sociologically: operating at the heart of both personal and religious stability and change are the crucial matter of significant personal relationships—both those that affirm and bind and those that break down and set loose. Rarely do people’s thinking and feeling and behaving change dramatically (or stay the same) without significant social relationships exerting pressures to do so and facilitating these outcomes. Significant personal relationships may not be the heart of religious life itself, but they certainly provide the bones and other muscles within which the heart of religion beats.”
― Christian Smith, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults

“American sociology as a collective enterprise is at heart committed to the visionary project of realizing the emancipation, equality, and moral affirmation of all human beings as autonomous, self-directing, individual agents (who should be) out to live their lives as they personally so desire, by constructing their own favored identities, entering and exiting relationships as they choose, and equally enjoying the gratification of experiential, material, and bodily pleasures.”
― Christian Smith, The Sacred Project of American Sociology

“Numerous other examples could be given of the Christian church across two millennia progressively realizing and working out the meaning and implications of the once-delivered gospel in ways that were not explicitly elaborated in the New Testament. These might include, for example, the centrality of mutual personal love in marriage relationships, the full humanity and dignity of women, and the inestimable worth of every human person culminating in the modern notion of universal human rights. All of these were revolutionary insights, viewed historically, that were prompted not primarily by natural human reason but by the power of the gospel working its way out over time in social life and relations.[280]”
― Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture

“Protestant insistence on the written word in the Bible as the only and sufficient Christian authority for faith and practice relies on an impossible anachronism that artificially projects a modern standard of authority and means of knowledge conveyance retrospectively back into a pre-modern reality that operated by different but reliable and legitimate standards.”
― Christian Smith, How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps

“Because evangelicals view their primary task as evangelism and discipleship,1 they tend to avoid issues that hinder these activities. Thus, they are generally not counter-cultural. With some significant exceptions, they avoid “rocking the boat,” and live within the confines of the larger culture. At times they have been able to call for and realize social change, but most typically their influence has been limited to alterations at the margins. So, despite having the subcultural tools to call for radical changes in race relations, they most consistently call for changes in persons that leave the dominant social structures, institutions, and culture intact. This avoidance of boat-rocking unwittingly leads to granting power to larger economic and social forces. It also means that evangelicals’ views to a considerable extent conform to the socioeconomic conditions of their time.”
― Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America

“On all of these biblical and theological issues”
― Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture