Amazon Review...

...Christian Smith's "How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps."


I would be very appreciative if you would go here and give me a helpful vote.

A insightful examination of how the way that we look at the world can make a profound difference in what we see.

December 20, 2011

Christian Smith is a sociologist who recently converted from Evangelical Protestantism to Catholicism. This book is principally an account of the causes, phases and processes he went through in making that move.

Because Smith is a sociologist, he organizes his book around the idea of a "paradigm shift" as adumbrated by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. To that end, Smith starts out with a discussion of the worldview that subsists in Evangelical Christianity, then he recounts the many minor, inexplicable discontinuities that he regularly encountered in Evangelical Christianity, then he builds up to the major problems for which he could not find an answer in Evangelical Christianity, and finally he pointed to the paradigm shift which allowed him to see the world through Catholic eyes.

I am a life-long Catholic, and I found it fascinating to hear many of the things I had observed - or seen but couldn't explain - through Smith's Protestant perspective. In this way, Smith's book is a work of ecumenism - bridging a gap that may be more cultural and epistemological than it is theological. I know that I have had many knock-down, drag-out debates that were never resolved; after reading Smith, I realize that because the problem is cultural, it can't be resolved simply by appealing to commonly accepted texts.

For example, I've noticed the following whenever I get told that Catholics won't get to Heaven because of their "misunderstanding" about "justification":

"18. Note your dissatisfaction with the heavily cognitive, often rationalist, nature of much of Protestantism. There is no denying it: Protestantism is a religion of the head. What matters most are holding the right beliefs. And right beliefs are things that reside between one's ears. Having the right cognitions is the essence of Protestantism. So is possessing, professing, and defending the right words. And those words come from and enter into the head as well. True, evangelicalism includes strains of pietism, charismatic tendencies, revivalist emotion, and a love of practical activism that can help counter-balance the heavily cognitive leanings of Protestantism. But in the end, as you well know, what is ultimately important is having the right beliefs, the right ideas, the right words (even if that is in some ways contradicted among the laity by a simultaneous cultural emphasis on the subjectivistic opinions and feelings of individuals when interpreting the Bible, as discussed below in point 25)."

Smith, Christian (2011-06-09). How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (p. 49). Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

In fact, I recently asked one Evangelical interlocutor if he thought that God gave a test on theology to determine who gets admitted into Heaven.

The flip side is this:

"For most of Christian history, the material and spiritual world was much more enchanted, thicker with spiritual meaning, and full of greater mystery than modern evangelicalism knows. Modernity suffers a "mystery deficit"--an inability to even conceive of unknowns and realities beyond those accessible to rational understanding. Indeed, that mystery deficit is central to the corrosions of secularization. Evangelicalism participates in that mystery deficit."

Smith, Christian (2011-06-09). How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (p. 36). Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

And:

"The University of Chicago theologian, David Tracy, provides a language for this Protestant-Catholic difference in thought and imagination in his book, The Analogical Imagination. We might think of the general Protestant mentality as mapping onto what he calls a "dialectical" mentality, versus the more Catholic "analogical" tendency which he contrasts.16 The Catholic priest and sociologist Andrew Greeley writes similarly about "the Catholic Imagination" in his 2001 book by the same title, in which he emphasizes the Catholic instinct for seeing the mysterious in the plain, the sacred in the material, the holy lurking just below the surface of the ordinary. In the kind of analogical imagination toward which you need to now shift, everything is not simply what it is, only and literally that, and nothing else. Rather, our understanding comes from seeing how some things are like other things, how certain symbols point to other realities, how differences and similarities can work together to create coherent, harmonized understandings of reality.

Catholics, therefore, are much friendlier to what (for Protestants) seem like contradictions, to both/and understandings, metaphorical images, symbolic representations, and non-literal readings and interpretations. In some sense, Catholicism is more confident than Protestantism in its understanding of its apprehension, definition, security, and coherence of Christian truth--it has, after all, been working with the same basic approach for two millennia, and it enjoys the Church Magisterium to guard the deposit of faith.17 So Catholicism tends to feel more relaxed and at ease with differences, tensions, metaphors, and ambiguities in its thought and imagination. This is, again, a very different way of thinking, which takes a paradigm shift to acquire. So keep working on and praying about that."

Smith, Christian (2011-06-09). How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (p. 104). Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

All of this is tied into this gem of an insight:

"Protestantism itself was a crucial force setting modernity into motion. The birth of Protestantism marks the onset of the early modern period in history. And Protestantism in all of its forms has grown up entirely within the developing modern world. There is no such thing as pre-modern Protestantism. Protestantism has no authentically Protestant references, resources, or formations that predate modernity.

Now, start to suspect that a Christian church tradition that is of modernity will eventually be consumed by modernity and postmodernity. The signs of that are already evident, for those who have the eyes to see them. Begin to wrap your mind around the idea that if the Christian church is to survive modernity it very likely needs to have spiritual, intellectual, theological roots that predate modernity. To be of modernity is to be captive to modernity, not just its ways of life but its basic presuppositions and instinctive outlooks. By this I mean things like autonomous individualism, Enlightenment skepticism, distrust of tradition, moral relativism, consumerist materialism, knee-jerk hostility toward authority, the market's colonization of non-economic spheres of life (such as church), and the domination of mass media, advertising, scientism, and rationalism.

In contrast to Protestantism's position, Catholicism goes back to the very beginning with deep roots in the ancient world. That provides references and resources that enable modern Christians to potentially transcend modernity and so perhaps to resist its corrosive effects."

Smith, Christian (2011-06-09). How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (pp. 67-68). Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

By the way, the idea that modernity and Protestantism are twin births from a common cultural moment is not unique to Smith; Alister Mcgrath makes a similar point, albeit in a more upbeat way in Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution--A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First.

Finally, since I have often noticed the tendency of Evangelicals to overuse the word "just" - which I assume is Koine Greek for "We beseech thee, O Lord" - I found this observation worth a chuckle:

"Those around you and maybe you yourself pray with a lot of particular, but by now so-familiar-that-they-usually-go-unnoticed, phrases, such as, "Father God," "we would lift up," "I just have a heart for," "as unto the Lord," "knit our hearts together," "we are convicted," "if it be your will," "pray a `hedge' around," and "in Jesus' name." About 10-20 percent of the words used in the informal prayers of more than a few of the people around you consist of the one word "just"--as in, "Lord, we just ask that you just give us the eyes just to see you, Lord." Your community believes in praying authentic, spontaneous, personal prayers--not rote, ritualistic, formal, dusty, traditional prayers. It once occurred to you, however, that most people's spontaneous, personal prayers sound an awful lot alike. They actually seem to follow standard formats. You yourself wish you could be a better pray-er--and might have some books on your shelf about improving your prayer life--but you usually fall back into your old habits and familiar prayer wordings."

Smith, Christian (2011-06-09). How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (pp. 21-22). Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Smith's book will undoubtedly offend sincere Protestants, and to that extent it is performing a "prophetic" function of having people face their shibboleths. It performs the same function for Catholics. Recently, I found myself quoting this bit to a fellow Catholic:

"Do not become Catholic because you think it will give you certainty. Some evangelicals find Catholicism attractive because they think it offers them certainty about Christian beliefs. Previously, they thought an inerrant Bible alone provided certainty. Then they began to see the real problems with that approach, some of which we have noted above. What then to do? Looking to Rome, some decide that the Catholic Church Magisterium provides the epistemic certitude that conservative Protestantism taught them to desire. Catholicism appeals to such people in these cases because it seems to provide that absolute certainty.1

Don't do that. Don't think that way. Establishing certainty is a distinctively modern secular project, not a Christian one. It was Descartes, empiricism, scientism, and the logical positivists who taught us to prioritize and search after an indubitable and universal foundation of certainty in human knowledge (which only fairly recently we have realized actually does not exist). Christ, by contrast, calls us to drop what we want and expect, to believe, and to learn the truth from and follow him. So, do not become Catholic in order to replace a misguided theory about the Bible with a misguided expectation about the Church Magisterium. The main attraction of both of those, of course, is to make people feel more secure about what they think they know. But managing feelings of (in)security is not what Christian faith is about. So don't replace an old foundationalist Protestantism with a new (falsely) foundationalist Catholicism.2"

Smith, Christian (2011-06-09). How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (pp. 151-152). Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Amen to that.

This is an insightful book, and it is insightful because it was written by somebody who did the hardwork of honestly thinking about the issues. As such, I highly recommend it.

Amazon Review...

So, you're saying that everything in the Emerald City of Oz is green because of these glasses?

A review of Christian Smith's The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture.

This is the second volume in my personal search to get some purchase on the idea of "private interpretation." After a surprising experience on an internet Christian apologist forum where I was roundly condemned for asserting that reading St. Augustine's "On the Trinity" might be useful for thinking about Christian doctrines - because, after all, as my modern interlocutors explained, they had more information than was available to St. Augustine and had at least as much access to the Holy Spirit - I decided to look at this idea of "private interpretation" in order to learn and understand what led these people with an obvious commitment to the intellect to ridicule the idea that they might be wrong and St. Augustine might be right with respect to the interpretation of the Bible.

I started with Alister McGrath's Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution--A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First. McGrath promised that his thesis would be that "private interpretation" was the dangerous idea behind Christianity. I was therefore expecting a discussion of private interpretation and some analysis about how it worked in practice. While I read a lot of heart-warming slogans about the "right of every Christian to read scripture for himself," I also so a lot of instances where various Protestant denominations did everything they could to channel their adherents' reading of scripture into what the denomination considered proper and orthodox. What was strange to me was that McGrath did not discuss, or even seem to notice, the disconnect between his slogans and the actual practice demonstrated in history.

Christian Smith's The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture offers an explanation for that disconnect, and, it seems, the explanation is sociological and not intellectual, which is why McGrath and others don't seem to see disconnect. They get up close to the point where theory starts to transition into practice, and, then, the explanation slides off to more theory.

Smith's target is limited to what he calls "biblicism." "Biblicism" is defined by Smith as "biblicism" I mean a theory about the Bible that emphasizes together its exclusive authority, infallibility, perspicuity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability." This is the view that informs most, or much, of modern American evangelicalism, and explains how Christian bookstores like Bereans can have stacks of books promising the "Biblical approach" to weight-loss, dating, business management, raising children, etc. It is also the reason that many Evangelicals talk about connecting a verse of the Bible to a problem they are facing as if the Bible were a guidebook to modern life written in language accessible to everyone.

Smith points out that this approach misconstrues the Bible. The bible was never intended to be a guidebook to living life. Rather it is a collection of books about God, and for Christians, about Christ. Treating the Bible as a guidebook to life deforms the Bible, according to Smith, by shifting the perspective of readers who employ that approach away from Christ to work-a-day trivia of life. Likewise, treating the Bible as if it were always written in plain and accessible language causes further deformations in that the Bible is not always written in plain and accessible language, which results in "biblicists" having to delude themselves through a variety of tools, approaches and tropes into denying something that is plainly true. Smith writes:

"In order not to let these problematic texts endanger their formal theory of the Bible, biblicists tend to respond in three ways. The first is simply to ignore the problematic texts, essentially pretending that they do not exist. The second is to "interpret" the problematic texts as if they say things that they do not in fact say. The third is to develop elaborate contortions of highly unlikely scenarios and explanations--of the sort to which nobody would ever resort in any other part of life--which seem to rescue the texts from the problems."

A result of this approach is a kind of cognitive dissonance where "biblicists" on one level know that there is a problem with what Smith calls "pervasive interpretive pluralism" as part of which "biblicists" know that there are divisions on major issues in practice, but deny that such divisions exist in theory, except, of course, when they don't, as suggested by the recent ejection of Michael Licona from the North American Mission Board because of his "private interpretation" that the apparent resurrection of the dead mentioned in Matthew 27 was a symbolic "illocution" or "perlocution."

Smith offers a solid analysis of the flaws in the "biblicist" project. Smith argues that the Bible was not intended to speak to our mundane lives. Rather it points to the transcendent God. By ignoring that the Bible is about Christ, Evangelicals have moved away from their christocentric commitment. Further, by insisting that the Bible is clear, plain guidebook, Evangelicals have minimized the reality that God is mysterious.

Smith's solution is tentatively sketched, at best. His solution constitutes a call for Evangelicals to return to their christocentric commitment, and to read the Bible as if it were about Christ, rather than about finding the best way to play the stock market or find happiness or have a good dating relationship. In doing this, Evangelicals will have to re-learn how to live with uncertainty. We may not know, now, soon or ever, whether the saints of Matthew 27 really were raised from the dead, or if that event was meant as a symbolic prefiguring of Christ's role as the "first fruit" before the general resurrection. Or in the case of my experience with the Christian apologists, we may not learn definitely whether the epiphanies described in Genesis were Christophanies, or, as St. Augustine tentatively suggested in "On the Trinity," they were, in fact, angelic visitations.

Smith also advocates a willingness on the part of Evangelicals to distinguish between dogma, doctrine and opinions. One effect of the "biblicist" project, according to Smith has been a tendency to make all theological issues carry the same weight. In my interney discussion on the Augustine's opinion that the theophanies of Genesis were actually "opinions," I soon discovered that no one seemed to understand the concept that I was presenting Augustine's opinion as an opinion, notwithstanding the fact that I made that point repeatedly. I see now from Smith's book that this is simply a feature of the "biblicist" mindset.

As a non-evangelical, the most important thing I picked up from Smith seems to be that I shouldn't expect discusions with most Evangelicals with a "biblicist" state of mind about "private interpretation," or whether a given opinion might be held but may be wrong, to bear much fruit. It seems that what separates Evangelicals (with a "biblicist" state of mind) from non-Evangelicals is not intellectual. That which separates us is more an act of the will by which the two groups adhere to what they see as "the good." It also explains why my quest for an explanation of how the theory of private interpretation works in practice may never bear fruit. There is quite simply "no there there."

The most important doctrine of Protestantism is "private interpretation"...

...except when it's not.

Alister McGrath wrote a massive tome on "Christianity's Dangerous Idea," which apparently was supposed to be "private interpretation," as part of which every believer had the right to their own understanding of the Bible, and which, according to McGrath, paved the way for democracy, tolerance, progress, science, indoor plumbing and free pizza delivery, i.e., in a word, to the modern world.  The problem with McGrath's grandiloquent theory, in my opinion, is that you can't actually spot it in practice when you look at actual history. What actual history looks like is that each Protestant church/denomination/pastor has its own magisterial authority and is as quick to excommunicate and suppress divergent interpretations as they Protestants to allege against Catholicism, up to and including killing those who disagree with the interpretation preferred by the given Protestant church/denomination/pastor (although, admittedly, not so much in the last 300 years more or less.)

One of the reason why I find the Protestant idea - slogan, really - of "private interpretation" to be so problematic are things like this:

A fiery debate has erupted over a leading Southern Baptist apologist's questioning of Matthew 27. The question: whether Matthew's reference to many saints rising from their graves after Jesus' resurrection might not be literal history.


The theological war of words, spurred by high-profile open letters and retorts on the Internet, has raised questions about the meaning of biblical inerrancy. It has also led to the departure of Michael Licona as apologetics coordinator for the North American Mission Board (NAMB).

At issue is a passage of Licona's 700-page The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach, published in 2010 by InterVarsity Press.

"Based on my reading of the Greco-Roman, Jewish, and biblical literature, I proposed that the raised saints are best interpreted as Matthew's use of an apocalyptic symbol communicating that the Son of God had just died," said Licona, former research professor of New Testament at Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina. Licona voluntarily resigned from the seminary on October 4 after the print version of this article went to press.

In a series of open letters posted online, Norman Geisler, distinguished professor of apologetics at Veritas Evangelical Seminary in Murrieta, California, objected to Licona's characterizing the passage as a "strange little text." Geisler accused Licona of denying the full inerrancy of Scripture. He also called for Licona to recant his interpretation, labeling it "unorthodox, non-evangelical, and a dangerous precedent for the rest of evangelicalism."

In a 2,800-word blog post, Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, praised Licona's book as "virtually unprecedented in terms of evangelical scholarship" and "nothing less than a masterful defense of the historicity of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead."

Yet Mohler devoted most of the post to criticizing what he called Licona's "shocking and disastrous argument" concerning the bodily resurrection of the saints.

Licona replied to Geisler that additional research has led him to re-examine his position. "At present I am just as inclined to understand the narrative … as a report of a factual (i.e., literal) event as I am to view it as an apocalyptic symbol," Licona wrote.

In the wake of the controversy, a number of leading evangelical scholars came to Licona's defense—some publicly, others privately.

"I know a good number of evangelical seminary professors who have privately expressed support for Mike Licona but cannot do so publicly for fear of punitive measures," said Paul Copan, an apologist and president of the Evangelical Philosophical Society.

And this is a good point, and the reason why the claim to submtting to the "bible alone" is a great slogan, but makes no sense in practice:

Daniel B. Wallace, New Testament professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, said he disagrees with Licona's interpretation but considers the issue hermeneutical, not a challenge to biblical inerrancy.


"If we view our own interpretation to be just as inerrant as the Scriptures," he said, "this could ironically elevate tradition and erode biblical authority."

Wallace is both right and wrong. To say that someone, anyone, is wrong in their interpretation of the Bible is to say that your interpretation is right, and, therefore, your interpretation is necessarily the correct interpretation of the Bible and, as such, your interpretation is inerrant and, dare we say it, infallible.  But Wallace is wrong if he thinks that he can ever separate a text from interpretation.  Apart from a trivial claim that they exist as physical structures, texts do not exist except to the extent that they interact with a mind. The purpose of a text is to interact with the mind. If a text is not interacting with a mind, then it is no more a text than a rock is a text.  That means that texts are texts only insofar as they are interpreted.

So, just as "words are not crystals with fixed, invariant meaning; words are the living skin of thought," texts are the living skin of thought, and, therefore, getting the interpretation right is getting the text right. Moreover since we interpret in light of a tradition, getting the interpretative tradition right is important.

Saying that all interpretations equally right in order to avoid elevating tradition means that saying that a text is "inerrant" and "sufficient" is absolutely meaningless. Inerrant how? Sufficient in what way? "Inerrancy," "sufficiency" and "perspicuity" may be great slogans, but in practice if there is no interpretative tradition that is sufficiently trustworthy to make the inerrancy, sufficiency and perspicuity of the text known, they are meaningless words.

According to Christian Smith in "Making the Bible Impossible," Evangelicals find themselves in a state of cognitive dissonance between theory and practice.

n.b. - the actual quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes is -

"A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used."