“X is not in the Bible”
In an annual course I teach on moral philosophy I assign a textbook that contains a chapter on X. The author of the textbook is an ethicist, and the ethics he seeks to present to his readers (imagined as college students) is general or universal ethics; though he doesn’t out himself as a Kantian, those with ears to hear spy it from the opening pages. In the chapter on X the author has a sidebar dedicated to religious, by which he means Christian, arguments about X. He observes blithely that the Bible doesn’t mention X, though he allow that one or two passages have sometimes been trotted out as containing implicit commentary on X. Accordingly, he deploys a few perfunctory historical-critical tropes (without citation, naturally) to show how and why the original canonical authors in their original cultural context could never have meant what contemporary readers of the text sometimes take them to mean with respect to X.
I always dedicate time in class to discuss this sidebar with students. It is a perfect encapsulation of the naive inanity of non-theological scholars commenting on Christian thought. So far as I can tell the author is utterly sincere. He really seems to think that Christian thought, whether moral or doctrinal, is reducible to explicit assertions in the Bible, double-checked and confirmed by historical critics to have been what the putative author(s) could have or likely would have meant by the words found in a given pericope.
I used to think this sort of stupidity was willful and malicious; I’ve come to see, however, that it is honest ignorance, albeit culpable in the extreme.
A few days ago I was reminded of this annual classroom discussion because I read an essay by a scholar I otherwise enjoy and regularly profit from, who used the exact same argument, almost identically formulated. And he really seems to have meant what he wrote. That is, he really seems to believe that if he—neither a Christian nor a theologian nor a scholar of religion not a religious person at all—cannot find mention of X in the Bible, then it follows as a matter of course that:
Christians have no convictions about X;
Christians are permitted no convictions about X, that is, convictions with a plausible claim to be Christian;
no Christian teaching about X exists, past or present; and
Christianity as such neither has, nor has ever had, nor is it possible in principle that Christianity might have (or have had), authoritative doctrinal teaching on X.
All this, because he, the erudite rando, finds zero results when he does a word search for “X” on Biblegateway.com.
So far as I can tell, this ignorance-cum-stupidity—wedded to an eager willingness to write in public on such matters with casual authority—is widespread among folks of his ilk. They are true believers, and what they truly believe in is their own uninformed ineptitude.
The answer to the riddle of what’s going on here is not complicated. Anti- or post-Christian scholars, writers, and intellectuals in this country who spurn theological (not to mention historical) learning—after all, we don’t offer college courses in alchemy or astrology either—are sincerely unaware that American evangelicalism in its populist form is not representative of historic Christianity. They don’t realize that the modernist–fundamentalist debate is itself a uniquely modern phenomenon, and thus bears little relationship either to what Christianity is or to what one would find in Christian writings from any period from the second century to the seventeenth. They don’t know what they don’t know, and they’re too incurious to find out.
Were they to look, they would discover that Christianity has a living body of teaching on any range of topics. They would discover that over the centuries Christianity has had a teaching office, whose ordained leaders speak with varying degrees of authority on matters of pressing interest, including moral questions. They would discover that, in its acute American form, radical biblicism—the notion that Christians have beliefs only about things the Bible addresses directly and clearly—is one or two centuries old at most. They would discover that, even then, said biblicism describes a vanishingly small minority of global Christianity today. They would discover that the modernism on offer in Protestant liberalism is but the mirror image of fundamentalism, and therefore that to ape claims like “X isn’t even in the Bible—QED,” even intended as secular critique of conservative Christians, is merely an own goal: all it reveals is one’s own historical and cultural parochialism and basic theological incomprehension. They would discover that the church has never read the Bible the way either fundamentalists or historical critics do, in which case the word-search proof-text slam-dunk operation is not only irrelevant; in light of exegetical and theological tradition, it is liable to induce little more than a suppressed snort laugh.
They would discover, in a word, that the Bible does contain teaching about X, because the Bible contains teaching about all things (you just have to know where to look, that is, how to read); that the church’s tradition likewise contains considerable and consistent teaching about X, as any afternoon in a library or quick Google search would reveal; that Christianity is a living, not a dead thing; that Christian moral doctrine did not fossilize with the final breath of the last apostle; that postwar American evangelicalism is not the center of any universe, much less the Christian church’s.
They would discover—rather than learning the hard way—that asking someone in a position to know before writing about something of which one is wholly ignorant is a wise and generally admirable habit. But then, owning the fundies is a lot harder to do if you treat them as adults worthy of respect. This way is much more fun.
It’s all just a game anyway, right?
