Christian Smith (1)Reseñas

(2/5 for presentation, 4/5 for the main point)

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...

Skimmed. Not very good or engaging. The primary burden of this book is its desire to dress up what is essentially a conversion narrative in academic regalia. But the real pain and suffering in wading through it is that it lies to the reader, for this is no critique of "Biblicism" at all but rather a dislike and distaste for the Bible disguised as pseudo-scholarship that has been dispatched time and time again well into the last century. Smith has no appreciation for either the Bible or the depth and breadth of traditional Protestant doctrine, and as a result this is a critical screed in search of an easy opponent. If you've done any work at all in Biblical studies, this territory has been covered well so often that your time is better spent on authors such as N.T. Wright (for example).

This book has been really difficult for me to read. As someone who grew up on the edges of mainstream culture, I have often found myself puzzled and confused by the attitudes and ideas of my peers, especially in their perspective on education, success, and morality. The researchers of this book not only interview emerging adults to get their own words about what they believe, the choices they make, and why, but also examine the sociological implications of their findings; they look at the impact of the community, of teachers, of family and parents, of the media and the surrounding culture to find the foundations of the seemingly adrift emerging adult. They are quick to point out what is researched data, and what is anecdotal from their interviews; however, the interviews make up the bulk of the book, and are fascinating to read. I found much of it to be disturbing, as did the researchers, especially when it came to attitudes towards materialism, consumption, and the cursory mention of conservation by most of the interviewees.

The authors provide plenty of references for the research they cite alongside the interviews, so there is a good body of work available for those who wish to continue their studies in this field.

I was given this book to read by my colleague. He has recommended books for my edification before and I greatly appreciate this gesture. Over the past couple weeks I have been able to digest this book section by section.

I have to give the author only 3 out of 5 stars for the actual composition of this book. While it is extremely well reasoned, I believe the points could have been articulated in a clearer, more organized manner...

Read the rest of the review at: http://www.wetalkofholythings.com/2016/08/the-bible-made-impossible-bookreview.h...

"Passing the Plate" is a sobering sociological study of patterns of American Christian giving, built off prior studies as well as some original survey and interview work by the authors. In its essence, the key finding of the book is that the majority of American Christians barely give any money at all to churches and charities, especially when compared with their actual capacity to give. In fact, according to the authors' rather-conservative estimate, American Christians are currently capable of giving $1.334 BILLION to churches and charitable causes…in addition to their current giving.

However, the goal of the study is not to estimate the American Christian generosity deficit but to explore the reasons why so many American Christians choose to give so far below their potential. It is here that the bad news becomes even worse. What becomes quite clear is that there is a clear and fundamental disconnect between church teaching, pastoral leadership, and lay commitment and action that spans denominations. (In that sense, especially, this study is sobering for many aspects of church teaching, say, for example, on the sanctity of human life and/or a biblical understanding of marriage.) Another equally disturbing finding is that many of the Christians who do not give faithfully at their full capacity clearly recognize that they can and should do better in this area, but simply choose not to. They live with what Wiman and Emerson call "comfortable guilt." They know that what they are doing is wrong, but that knowledge is not enough to cause them to change their ways.

There are several things that I, as a non-sociologist and as a practicing church leader, appreciate. First, the opening chapter gives detailed lists of exactly how that untapped $100+ billion could be used across a broad spectrum of Christian missionary and humanitarian efforts; as you can imagine, the change it could affect is immense…"world-changing" in every meaningful sense of the term. Second, the authors' use of interviews (ch. 4) to give "faces to the figures" of the data-based chapters helps to clarify how these oft-contradictory attitudes about giving coexist within otherwise deeply-committed believers and those who lead them.

Third, the authors offer up two very intriguing models (or perhaps patterns) in local congregations' approaches to the spiritual discipline of giving (end of ch. 4). The first (and inferior) model they describe as a "Pay the Bills" approach; the second (and superior) model they describe as a "Live the Vision" approach. In this "Live the Vision" approach,

"Financial giving was cast as an important opportunity to live fully, to grow, to become who one truly is. Money was framed not as a necessary resource for organizational upkeep but as a crucial means of shaping one's values, vision, purpose, identity, and life direction."

Fourth, and finally, the authors humbly offer some suggestions for church leaders to encourage their congregants. These range from the ideological (e.g., move away from the "Pay the Bills" to the "Live the Vision" approach to money) to the practical (e.g., enable online giving methods to "routinize" generosity).

Though I am unable to comment on the validity of the methodology or the figures presented (I can only say there were a lot of 'em), I did get a distinct impression that this was carefully-done research that worked very hard not to overstate its claims, even when such claims were frankly astounding. Even though now about 10 years on from publication, I found the book an enlightening description of some of the challenging patterns I have observed in my own current congregational context. In fact, I think this would be a VERY good book for local pastors and elder boards to read together as a way to start this very important conversation. And if this book can for at least some churches and individuals shatter the stranglehold of "comfortable guilt" and motivate true and lasting change, then it will well repay the authors' efforts. And might even actually change the world.

The following article is located at: http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2015/julaug/university-blues.html

University Blues
Lessons from Catholic higher education.
Mark Hutchinson | posted 6/18/2015

K: Notre Dame as a culturally-accepted (somewhat) religious institution of higher learning seeking to true to its religious principles

In Building Catholic Higher Education, Smith is mainly interested in the internal effects of such dynamics: after all, every staff member hired by an intentionally Catholic institution such as Notre Dame has to come out of that secularizing "public square."

Some readers might think it a weakness of Smith's book that it does not take account of almost any of these predecessors, or even (except in John Cavadini's charming theological epilogue) classic Catholic writing on the matter, such as Newman's The Idea of a University (1854) or John Paul II's Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1990). But this tightness of focus—despite Smith's obvious desire for the book to speak to wider Catholic collegiate circles—is intentional: these reflections are clearly directed to the Notre Dame community.

"All rational thought requires the rule of some kind of law based on irreducible assumptions" (The Bible Made Impossible, p. 258). The attraction of Catholicism as a framework for authority, and of Notre Dame as a place to embody its "irreducible assumptions," is worked out here, less as an expansion on general principles than as a codification ("some kind of law") for those who, like himself, came late to a Notre Dame incarnation.

The irony of the book, of course, is that Smith is asking the question partially because Notre Dame has been deliberate about engaging with both secular and Protestant intellectual life.

The reflective, fulsome documents by Notre Dame's president, John I. Jenkins, and provost, Tom Burish, are instructive, and act as the effective framework for the book, around which Smith proceeds to "fill in" what he sees as the programmatic details. The most potentially useful section of the book—where Smith reflects on the ramifications particular to his own disciplinary area, the social sciences—is symptomatic: too short, lacking in embedded case studies, and without much engagement of the primary concerns of the discipline itself. A latter-day manifesto for a Catholic university of the Arthur Holmes type (The Idea of a Christian College, 1975) this is not.

But Building Catholic Higher Education still offers a useful window onto the big issues facing a Christian presence in higher education in the West. As a sociologist, Smith mirrors the challenges of secularization throughout the text. He reminds us that secularization is a social trend, and so reversible or at least resistible.

n the age of "wicked problems,"[2] the solution is not "better knowledge" (there is none) but wisdom and patience. It is here that Christian institutions emerging from coherent wisdom traditions have something of an edge. Smith could not find that in evangelicalism (though it is there, if constantly challenged by evangelical rationalism); here we read his joy in finding it within Catholicism, the tradition which self-consciously "invented" the university in the West.

A university does not simply set its own culture, any more than it can run disciplines detached from the broader, respective literature. Universities are (these days) institutional extensions of national economies, treasured less for their contribution to debate than for their impact on employment, GDP, and/or OECD rankings. The trap is thus not so much in wanting to be a "Catholic university" as in gaining access to the politics of respectability wrapped up in Notre Dame's desire to be a "preeminent university."
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Imagine. You are in Paris in 1901 where, impacted by the death of his friend Casagemas, Picasso is about to exhibit the product of his "blue period." Now imagine that the entire city has been struck (à la John Wyndham) with chronic color-blindness. Science fiction? Not entirely. While, over the longer term, Picasso's "blue" paintings became among (to use Paul Levy's words) his most "easy to love," the immediate reaction to the stark representations was negative. Paris, apparently, took some time to overcome its color blindness, while other places had their own filters. G. K. Chesterton expressed the broad British reaction when he described a 1911 work as "a piece of paper on which Mr. Picasso has had the misfortune to upset the ink and tried to dry it with his boots."[1] It is an experience shared by many writers and scholars when, having trained and developed their particular "voice" over many years, the "age" is rendered—by its politics, its ideologies and parties, or simply by becoming lost amidst commercial massification—color-blind to their productions.

This is the setting in which many Christian scholars and institutions work. As Christian Smith points out in his recent "unofficial reflections from the University of Notre Dame", the particular, the unique, the "blue" in which Christian institutions paint is either tacitly filtered out of public discussion or actively rejected by the academic powers that be. In Building Catholic Higher Education, Smith is mainly interested in the internal effects of such dynamics: after all, every staff member hired by an intentionally Catholic institution such as Notre Dame has to come out of that secularizing "public square." Moreover, the seemingly conflicting aims of the institution—to become a "world leading" institution in each of the areas of undergraduate education, research, and Catholic identity—interpose additional filters which limit both who they can bring on staff, and what those staff do when they get to South Bend. It is a problematic explored much more extensively by Smith's colleagues at Notre Dame—George Marsden, who through The Soul of the American University (1994) sparked wide debate and myriad emulators, and more recently in passing by Brad Gregory (The Unintended Reformation, 2011). Some readers might think it a weakness of Smith's book that it does not take account of almost any of these predecessors, or even (except in John Cavadini's charming theological epilogue) classic Catholic writing on the matter, such as Newman's The Idea of a University (1854) or John Paul II's Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1990). But this tightness of focus—despite Smith's obvious desire for the book to speak to wider Catholic collegiate circles—is intentional: these reflections are clearly directed to the Notre Dame community.

It is a frequent criticism of academics that they find it difficult to say things in a manner which is either concise or direct. This is not something which can be said of Christian Smith. Affronted by the sleight of hand by which secularists debased religion and/or excluded Christians from academic institutions and disciplines, he told them so (2003, and more recently in The Sacred Project of American Sociology, 2014). When he decided that evangelical Christianity was critically flawed by mounting contradictions, he told them so (The Bible Made Impossible, 2011) and converted to Catholicism (How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps, 2011). His Building Catholic Higher Education, therefore, is best seen in this network of struggles over conviction, and Smith's concern that "All rational thought requires the rule of some kind of law based on irreducible assumptions" (The Bible Made Impossible, p. 258). The attraction of Catholicism as a framework for authority, and of Notre Dame as a place to embody its "irreducible assumptions," is worked out here, less as an expansion on general principles than as a codification ("some kind of law") for those who, like himself, came late to a Notre Dame incarnation.

The irony of the book, of course, is that Smith is asking the question partially because Notre Dame has been deliberate about engaging with both secular and Protestant intellectual life. Such people, Smith repeatedly notes (too insistently, perhaps?), are "first-class citizens" of the republic of knowledge at South Bend. The success of the Marsden/Noll nexus, and the bevy of evangelical doctoral students who circulate on the campus, however, must raise questions about the appropriate balance between Catholic and other faculty, and how (given the restrictions and biases in "the public square") once can ensure a "preponderance" of Catholic staff at a similarly high level. This book doesn't really engage with the issue; rather, Smith begins with lengthy quotation of the authoritative documents produced by the institution itself, a useful introduction to the way that Notre Dame is thinking about its challenges. That it takes nearly 11 pages for him to reference the pope shows how Notre Dame-centric this book is. Large statements about Notre Dame's uniqueness also betray an Americano-centrism which again limits the book's scope: the claims are defensible in the English-speaking world, but ignore the vast Catholic tradition in the Spanish, Italian, and other cultural spheres. We are reminded that Chris Smith is first and foremost a social scientist. The reflective, fulsome documents by Notre Dame's president, John I. Jenkins, and provost, Tom Burish, are instructive, and act as the effective framework for the book, around which Smith proceeds to "fill in" what he sees as the programmatic details. The most potentially useful section of the book—where Smith reflects on the ramifications particular to his own disciplinary area, the social sciences—is symptomatic: too short, lacking in embedded case studies, and without much engagement of the primary concerns of the discipline itself. A latter-day manifesto for a Catholic university of the Arthur Holmes type (The Idea of a Christian College, 1975) this is not.

But Building Catholic Higher Education still offers a useful window onto the big issues facing a Christian presence in higher education in the West. As a sociologist, Smith mirrors the challenges of secularization throughout the text. He reminds us that secularization is a social trend, and so reversible or at least resistible. This is a position reinforced by the weight of his chosen tradition—the Church which saw off Julian the Apostate and which sidestepped the French Revolution by going out into the world has a right to think that no zeitgeist is permanent. The crisis of the Church in the 19th century now seems, after all, to have given way to the crisis of the nation state in the 21st century. Here too there is a tension, however—waiting too long to bring about necessary change can be deleterious to an institution, while not having patience with the longue durée can see institutions leap to change direction when no choice is necessarily a good one. In the age of "wicked problems,"[2] the solution is not "better knowledge" (there is none) but wisdom and patience. It is here that Christian institutions emerging from coherent wisdom traditions have something of an edge. Smith could not find that in evangelicalism (though it is there, if constantly challenged by evangelical rationalism); here we read his joy in finding it within Catholicism, the tradition which self-consciously "invented" the university in the West.

Also striking is the laicità of the text. The hierarchy (apart from the Congregation of the Holy Cross) doesn't appear here. Some readers will find this odd, given the tensions between the "speaking," clerical Church and its laity around the world which are now so much a part of the public statements of Pope Francis. Much of Smith's language is managerial, reinforcing the importance of "committed leaders" working out of "clear and compelling visions." How one produces such people is as much a problem for Christian colleges generally as it is for Notre Dame: the cultures of acquiescence that one often finds in churches have a tendency to repress or functionally secularize the laity in order to make space for the clergy. This is a challenge for a Christian university, which is not a libertarian free zone, but a meeting place where lay expertise is necessarily encouraged and incorporated within a context where clergy necessarily also play a key leadership role. It is all the more so for a Catholic university, given the decline in clerical vocations around the world. Smith reminds us of the tension between permission and restraint in an institution which has been reframed in the West as a place for free inquiry. Here one is permitted to have "Alternative perspectives, in the right amounts and expressed in the right ways."

Such a "blue" stance—the "witness" of a religiously framed university—is offensive to the mainstream. Smith is correct in saying that, in fact, the same restraints may be found in secular institutions. If the Catholic tradition claims to be a "universal" Church, then so (as Smith points out in the Sacred Project of American Sociology) does the ideological reformism of most secular, intellectual disciplines. Explanation is rarely just about the subject, but about how the subject is a case illustrating universal statements. The confronting element for a Catholic institution is the public nature of its confession. A university does not simply set its own culture, any more than it can run disciplines detached from the broader, respective literature. Universities are (these days) institutional extensions of national economies, treasured less for their contribution to debate than for their impact on employment, GDP, and/or OECD rankings. The trap is thus not so much in wanting to be a "Catholic university" as in gaining access to the politics of respectability wrapped up in Notre Dame's desire to be a "preeminent university." Being Catholic within the walls is a lesser problem, as the recent Canadian brouhaha over Trinity Western University's law school demonstrates: it is when Christian academics take their tradition into debates which matter, into a non-neutral public square, that the rewards and punishments for difference become apparent.

Mark Hutchinson is dean of humanities at the Scots College in Sydney, Australia, and a historian of ideas who has written on evangelicalism, issues of intellectual freedom, and the history of universities.

1. Quoted in Paul Levy, "A Shortsighted View of Picasso," Wall Street Journal, Europe, February 17, 2012, W.10.

2. Horst Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning," Policy Sciences, Vol. IV (1973), pp. 155-169.

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Catholic apologetics tailored to evangelicals. Basic message: if you start thinking seriously about evangelical theology and especially ecclesiology, it all falls apart.

In his book, "The Bible Made Impossible" Smith takes on the issue of Biblicism, an extremely high view of Scripture held by many Evangelicals today. Smith defines Biblicism as: "a particular theory about and style of using the Bible that is defined by a constellation of related assumptions and beliefs about the Bible's nature, purpose, and function." This "constellation" is represented by ten assumptions or beliefs that Smith goes into great detail about. Smith does not question the inerrancy or inspiration of Scripture, only how it is read and understood by many who ascribe to Biblicism. He points out several things wrong with Biblicism, primarily pervasive interpretative pluralism, perscuity, and multivocal understandings. Smith provides many examples on a range of theological topics. He then provides an alternative view in how we should read and understand Scripture. This alternative view is the Christocentric Hermeneutical Key, an approach in which we always read Scripture through the lens of Christ, reading and understanding Scripture in a way that always points to Christ, the key and central figure for all of the Bible. The Christocentric reading of Scripture is truly the evangelical way of understanding the Bible. I highly recommend this outstanding book for those who may suspect something doesn't seem right with Biblicism and for those who are surrounded by many people who ascribe to Biblicism.

NCLA Review - A few years ago Christian Smith published a seminal work summarizing his research into the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers. All the research for that book derived from the National Study of Youth and Religion. His findings changed dramatically our understanding of teen religion. He emphasized that teens are more traditional than we had thought, adopting, for the most part, the religion and spirituality of their parents, a vague, self-defined spirituality Smith titled Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Souls in Transition is the follow-up study to Soul-Searching, analyzing data on the teenagers who are now emerging adults. Smith is a sociologist of religion, so the book reads like a work of sociology, with a heavy emphasis on statistics and data-analysis from interviews. However, it is not a dry read. Librarians will want to acquire Soul-Searching and Souls in Transition as a set. Together, they will give readers a better picture of the spiritual lives of teenagers and emerging adults than any other book on the market today. Rating: 4 —CS

agreed with other reviews that the book got too bogged down in information to read - if I needed some statistics for a project or something like that, it would be a very good resource, but as a book to read on the topic, it just wasn't a good fit for me. (I have so many books I want to read that I have determined that I just need to allow myself not to finish any books that aren't "good enough" - thus my new DNF (did not finish) "shelf")

Passing the Plate is a very useful book, but is very dry reading. I would recommend it for pastors, elders, or anyone in church leadership who needs to understand how and why people give money. It probably is best skimmed and used for reference than read cover to cover.

This is one of the driest books I've ever read, page-by-page - I thought I'd never get through it - and yet, taken as a whole, it's far from boring.

The authors explore a variety of research in attempt to the answer the question: Why don't American Christians give away more money? It is jammed full of statistics, which is why it's sluggish reading. What it reveals, however, is fascinating (or was to me, anyway).

For a book of a statistical nature, I found this one superbly written. Although it is apparent that the authors are likely Christians themselves, the writing was about as unbiased and well-balanced as it gets. They don't make any assumptions - with a few exceptions, where they are very clear about the fact that they are well-educated assumptions and not facts - but let the facts speak for themselves and arrive at only those conclusions which are firmly upheld by the research. In other words, I found no errors of logic here. The authors are gracious, as well, allowing for the minority of American Christians who truly do not have anything above and beyond that which meets their basic needs and not discounting them.

At the very end of the book, in the conclusion, there is some more subjective content, as the authors make recommendations of changes that pastors, in particular, could make to perhaps encourage more generous giving within their congregations. They make it clear, however, that these are ideas they came up with and are worth giving thought to, but which may or may not work in a given situation. In short, the authors are very humble.

I would highly recommend this to anyone in church leadership.

An important study for American Christians to digest and reflect upon as it shows a great disconnect between belief and practice that needs to be addressed on an individual basis.

A must read for every parent and youth worker!½

The definitive, sociological study of the religious lives of American teenagers. At points it challenges commonly-held conceptions of adolescence, but also paints a quite disturbing picture of what is taking place with regard to religion in the lives of American teenagers as their families. A must read. (JKC)

With a new afterword. .