Tony Jones has been giving a series of posts on euphemisms and words within Christianity that are ridden with assumed values that are more harmful than helpful not only in our discourse, but in our desire to be a community. He also tackles a set of words that have tended to bother me namely, "unbiblical", "unscriptural", "high view of scripture" etc. Some use the the odd phrase "objective reader of scripture" as if there is a clear idea of what that means. This is not new.
What happened, as any reader of American higher education history is aware, is that the Baconian understanding of science began to be pushed out of the emerging university. Science was moving on to new methods and as a result was pushing Baconian science, the humanities, and theology with it out of the mainstream of "useful" studies in colleges and emerging universities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But rather than adapt to these new methods in science and the humanities, traditionalists reinforced Baconian science as an approach to the Bible. This system rejected the idea of a hypothetical construct in favor of sticking only to what presented itself to the senses in an assumed transparency of objectivity. The irony is that as the hypothetical method of theorizing clearly yielded greater and more powerful results leading to the dismissal of Baconian science, those who maintained a "high biblicism" stuck with Bacon and still do!
The Baconian method was nothing more than apprehending what was apparent to the senses, categorizing those things, and then finding cause and effect relationships between them. Some of us have heard the odd phrase "interpret Scripture with Scripture." While it might have some merit in finding out the connections and massive amounts of self referencing that goes on in the Bible (mostly going back to the Torah), it assumes that everything is related in a cause and effect manner. Moreover, it maintains that Scripture is a self-enclosed system that cannot refer to anything outside of itself. This is exactly the way that science was done before hypothesis testing which, by the way, was needed for progress to be made on what Darwin noticed in the fossil record.
The question is why they approached Scripture this way? It was to offer scientific legitimacy to the Bible in a time when people viewed it with less and less cultural and social importance. People were less prone to view its importance in the interests of the development of new knowledge and the development of the academy as something to serve the needs of the commonwealth. This made a lot of sense. If they could show that the Bible was as relevant as ever by using the same methods that were revolutionizing how people were beginning to understand the world, then it would resume its rightful place at the top of the educational and social ladder. Yet when this approach was reinforced and then assumed to be "high" biblicism due to its "objectivity", science had moved on to bigger and better challenges. Locking onto this old scientific approach became evident in the Scopes trial where we can find a pivotal schism in evangelicalism between fundamentalists and moderns who embraced new critical methods to break apart assumptions in the text itself rather than assume "objectivity."
The idea of "Scriptural objectivity" is built on a long since undermined scientific notion of objectivity that even scientists no longer use as a primary method. So-called "high biblicism" is nothing more than an assumed late 19th century understanding of scientific objectivity. Because we no longer give this way of seeing things scientific credibility, much less rational credibility in the arts and in literature to be sure, it remains anachronistic and backward. What once was a way to make the Bible more legitimate in the emerging field of disciplinary knowledge is now a weight that holds a large population of Christians down, and unnecessarily so.
This idea of "high" biblicism is nothing more than an outdated and absurd scientific view that tries to make the Bible more "scientific and objective." It is therefore quite ironic that those who follow this path ignorant of the wondrous depths of scripture beyond a false notion of objectivity bound for failure will adamantly oppose current scientific discourse rooted in the scientific method of hypothesis and theory testing! It is the same old worldview that must reject the revolution of scientific discourse that happened many decades ago. Not to embrace what "high biblicism" actually is, a tired and incomplete scientific world view at best, is merely to invest one's self in ignorance.
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