Christian Smith (1)
Autor de Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers
Para otros autores llamados Christian Smith, ver la página de desambiguación.
Sobre El Autor
Christian Smith is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, where he directs the Center for the Study of Religion and Society and the Notre Dame Center for Social Research. He is the author or coauthor of several books, including What Is a Person? and Soul mostrar más Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. mostrar menos
Créditos de la imagen: Houghton College
Obras de Christian Smith
The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture (2011) 258 copias
What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up (2010) 78 copias
The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life (2003) 52 copias
How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (2011) 41 copias
Obras relacionadas
The Believing Primate: Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Reflections on the Origin of Religion (2009) — Contribuidor — 38 copias
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Género
- male
Miembros
Reseñas
Listas
Premios
También Puede Gustarte
Autores relacionados
Estadísticas
- Obras
- 25
- También por
- 1
- Miembros
- 1,950
- Popularidad
- #13,198
- Valoración
- 3.9
- Reseñas
- 16
- ISBNs
- 93
- Idiomas
- 1
There is a fine balance between supporting your point and belaboring it. In this book, Smith makes a very important case against what he calls biblicism, but nearly everything you need to get the core point can be found in the introduction and the conclusion. The rest of the book expands the points made there, but not in a way that enlightens. But the core insight of the book is one of those valuable "ah hah!" ideas that is worth pondering for anyone who cares about how the Bible is read[1].
Rather than try to summarize the book, I'll link to a couple other reviews[2][3]. This quote from [3] nicely summarizes Smith's key point:
"What is biblicism? Concisely, it is a theory (often unstated) about the nature, purpose, and function of the bible. Its ruling idea is that the meaning of the bible is clear and transparent to open-minded readers. The implication of this idea is that when people sit down to read the bible a broad consensus can be reached about the will of God for any number of issues or topics, from gender roles to the plan of salvation to social ethics to the end times to church organization.
"The first part of Smith's book is engaged in blowing up this idea. Empirically speaking, the bible does not produce consensus. Empirically speaking, what we find, to use Smith's phrase, is 'pervasive interpretive pluralism.' Even among biblicists themselves consensus cannot be reached. For example, Smith points us to books like the Four Views series from InterVarsity Press. Surf over to that link and look at the titles of the series. Four (and sometimes five!) views on just about every topic in Christianity. What does that say when conservative evangelicals, who hold that the bible is both clear and authoritative, can't agree?
"Thus, Smith concludes that biblicism is a wrongheaded way of approaching the bible. Biblicism doesn't deliver on what it promises: consensus and clarity about 'the will of God.'"
That really sums it up.
[1] If you know me you might be saying, "Wait Erika, aren't you an atheist?" Yes I am, but I still care about how the Bible is read. First, how believers read the Bible impacts society and at large. Second, it's hard not to be interested in something when you spent a year intimately engaged with it (http://oneyearskeptic.blogspot.com/).
[2] http://rachelheldevans.com/biblicism-christian-smith-bible-impossibleand see the rest of the series about that book on Rachel's blog
[3] http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2012/01/why-bible-made-impossible-is-im...… (más)