Feb 12
5
What is the Unity of Diversity?
When Jesus returns, he will surely return to the 50-yard line of Cowboys Stadium, descending bodily on the fog-machine-assisted sun rays streaming through the windows just above the mighty Ford logo, but below the American flag. –Jesus Walks Like A Cowboy
Why are there so many alternative interpretations of the bible among Evangelical Christians in America? Is it because so many of them are just wrong? The inductive Bible study method presupposes (and mistakenly according to Christian Smith) “that laypeople can sit down with the Bible and inductively draw from it the clear, relevant, and universal truth it teaches.” That is exactly what is promoted by Elizabeth A. Marks in her book Your Discovery Series: DYI Inductive Bible Study. Following her method you will be able to assemble a “treasure trove of truth.”
But is the inductive method all that is available to the layperson? Does the sacrament of ordination correct this misguided way of reading scripture?
No. Smith argues that bibicism (which assumes the inductive method) “pervades a large amount of ‘expository preaching,’” because it is “outright justified and authorized, by more normal, institutional, and scholarly expressions of biblicism” expressed in evangelical Conventions, Mission Statements and Seminary standards of ‘conduct and belief.’
Does ordination to the status of clergy promote accuracy of interpretation or a uniformity of interpretation?
Biblicism and the inductive method contradict an absolute necessity toward understanding Jesus, the gospels and Christianity. Because, as N. T. Wright contends, “first-century Jews thought very differently from the way we do now—and, indeed, from the ways in which other first-century people such as the Greeks and the Romans thought. We have to make a real effort to see things from a first-century Jewish point of view, if we are to understand what Jesus was all about.” 120
And what is the unity of American Evangelicalism?
It is, as Michael Horton writes, “our capacity to believe in everything and anything all at once.” “What we require of belief is not that it make sense but that it be sincere.”
As far back as the early eighteenth century, the French commentator Alexis de Tocqueville observed the distinctly American craving “to escape from imposed systems” and “to seek by themselves and in themselves for the only reason for things, looking to results without getting entangled in the means toward them.” He concluded, “So each man is narrowly shut up in himself and from that basis makes the pretension to judge the world.” Americans do not need books or any other external authorities in order to find the truth, “having found it in themselves.” -M. Horton.
The unity of American evangelicalism is our independence of one another and every other. We simply read the bible to find what we already know must be there. And Jesus is the fulfillment of our best image of the self.