The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture in Recommended Readings

Find A Copy At

Group Discussions About This Book

No group discussions for this book yet.

What Members Thought

Feb 05, 2022 Sheila rated it really liked it

This is NOT the most readable book--definitely has a strong academic flavor to it. But it was one of the first books I read as I began my journey out of evangelicalism. Smith says that "Biblicism" has ten beliefs: the Bible is inerrant, it represents the totality of God's communication to humanity, is complete in its coverage of divine will, has "perspicuity"--clarity in its text, is best read in its most obvious sense, can be completely understood without reference to any other texts or traditi ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Feb 05, 2014 Matt LeFevers rated it liked it

I just changed my rating of this book four or five times, back and forth, between two and three. If I could rate its ideas and insights a five and the writing a two, that would hit closer to the mark.

Simply put, this book is densely written. Verbose, loquacious. I have owned a Kindle for several years now and almost never needed to use its "dictionary" feature until yesterday, when I needed it six or seven times in one chapter. For entertainment's sake, I took one random paragraph (maybe four se I just changed my rating of this book four or five times, back and forth, between two and three. If I could rate its ideas and insights a five and the writing a two, that would hit closer to the mark.

Simply put, this book is densely written. Verbose, loquacious. I have owned a Kindle for several years now and almost never needed to use its "dictionary" feature until yesterday, when I needed it six or seven times in one chapter. For entertainment's sake, I took one random paragraph (maybe four sentences long) and wrote down the words in it that I found amusing: "hermeneutical", "ecclesial", "multivocality", "polysemy", and the author's pet phrase, used recurringly: "pervasive interpretive pluralism". I haven't had to work this hard at reading since I left university.

Which is SUCH A SHAME, because this book has totally opened up my worldview regarding faith and the Bible.

The central thesis is this: the narrow "biblicist" view of the Bible is impossible to adhere to. What Smith means by this term (if I have understood correctly) is the particular fundamentalist, Bible-thumping version in which the Bible was dictated, verbatim, by God as a handbook and set of rules for our lives, one in which every rule and statement is equally important and infallible. This mindset admits no contradictions or errors in the text -- which, as someone who has read the entire Bible, I find patently hilarious, rife with contradiction as it obviously is.

Smith spends the first half deconstructing this idea, essentially bypassing the question of the Bible's inspiration to instead attack this idea of the scriptures as a "manual" or "rulebook" -- if the purpose of the text is that each of us should be able to open it and learn what it has to say on any given topic, why is it that no one can agree exactly what it "has to say"? Why can both sides of an argument can always cherry pick quotes that support their side? Clearly if the Bible was intended as an instruction-manual-like reference for all of life's situations, it's not very effective. In the course of a dictionary's worth of words, Smith of course makes this point better than I am summarizing here. But where the book really gripped me was in the second half, where he addresses how we *should* be reading the Good Book.

Instead of mangling the meaning of the difficult passages until they mean what we want them to, forcing a square peg into a round hole, so to speak, Smith advises something else: "Rather than saying, "Here is what God must have given us in the Bible, so let us make it so," a better approach would say, "Here are the scriptures that God in his wisdom has delivered to us. [...] How ought we best to read and understand them?"" Smith makes a case that the purpose of the Bible is to point us to Jesus, and so all of it must be viewed through that lens (a case my own pastor has repeatedly made, and which I agree with). He argues that leaving some of its mystery intact is acceptable, that we are perhaps on something of a "need to know" basis and that if God wanted us to have certain answers, we'd have them. Instead of using the scripture to back up our own preexisting beliefs, insisting it is black and white, we should appreciate it for the possibly flawed, definitely human document it is, while letting it point the way to something more.

I am a Protestant and have always internalized that motto of "sola scriptura" (that only what is actually in the Bible counts), have always been skeptical of the centuries of (mostly Catholic) tradition, legend, and speculation that has built up around it. Smith recommends removing the Bible from its pedestal somewhat, viewing it more as a starting point then the sum total of everything we need for faith. He writes, "[...] the total meaning of the gospel did not land on the apostles' doorsteps the day after Pentecost, like a cognitive FedEx package containing everything the church would ever need to know, think, and believe until Jesus returns in glory. [...] That was a task given to subsequent generations of believers across church history." Citing issues of slavery and women's rights, among others, he points out that in some cases it has taken us a few hundred or thousand years to work out what the gospels really mean for certain issues. This idea that the unpacking of the gospel message is an ongoing work through history, and not a static collection of texts fully complete since ancient times, is profound. I wish it hadn't taken quite so much dedication to read it. ...more

1 like · Like · see review

From the Bookshelf of Recommended Readings…

Find A Copy At

Group Discussions About This Book

What Members Thought

Recommended Readings