If a tree falls in the forest…. There is an assumption that words convey meaning. And that meaning is what the speaker intended to say. When communication breaks down it may be either the speakers fault or the fault of the listener, but we do not assume that the meaning of the speaker is determined [...]
“In the end, I wonder what pastors are left with after they lose their “biblicism.” I am all for gaining a Christocentric hermeneutic and keeping the main thing the main thing. But in Smith’s mind the big problem with “expository preaching” today is that it “proceeds on the assumption that a minister can select virtually [...]
If God is one (Mark 12:29-31; Ephesians 4:4-6; 1 Timothy 2:5) and if he speaks with one voice, why do intelligent, sincere, committed believers hear him saying so many contradictory things? The bible contains a variety of conflicting ideas about God, Christianity, the church and morality. We can know this because intelligent, sincere, committed believers [...]
The problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism, writes Christian Smith, is that “it simply does not matter whether the Bible is everything that biblicists claim theoretically concerning its authority, infallibility, inner consistency, perspicuity, and so on, since in actual functioning the Bible produces a pluralism of interpretations.”
“The very same Bible—which biblicists insist is perspicuous and harmonious—gives rise to divergent understandings among intelligent, sincere, committed readers about what it says about most topics of interest. Knowledge of “biblical” teachings, in short, is characterized by pervasive interpretive pluralism.”