The Problem With Bible Onlyism
Recognizing the potential pitfalls of having Scriptural blinders
Photo by Luis Quintero from Pexels
(An eight-minute read)
A few months back I was sitting in Bagel Central—my favorite local hangout spot—studying Scripture with a young man when a woman sitting at the next table interrupted us. She was amazed we were studying the Bible together, since we live in such a secular area, and wanted to commend us for doing so.
After a bit of small talk about the state of religion in America, and explaining to her what church I belonged to, she delightedly told us that she’d just started attending a larger church in our area, which she found incredibly refreshing because, unlike her previous church, which featured Bible-lite, seeker-sensitive sermons, this one gave heavy emphasis to Scripture. “What I love about this church,” she said, “is that the pastor just goes verse-by-verse and gives us only the Bible.”
As she shared this, I just smiled and nodded. But I knew it wasn’t true.
I don’t say this to sound smug or condescending. I’ve been to the church a couple times and am casually acquainted with the pastor, who seems to be a nice man, genuinely committed to Scripture and God’s grace. I think he and his church do much good. But I also know that, like the rest of us preachers, he doesn’t preach only the Bible. There’s plenty of other stuff mixed in there—from conservative political rhetoric, to Catholic bashing—which often departs from the text in front of him.
Again, this is no criticism of him. Every preacher does it. I do it plenty.
To me, the biggest issue is not when we mix our interpretations into the study and preaching of the Bible—because that seems inevitable. The biggest issue is when we don’t think or realize we’re doing it.
Sola Scriptura?
From the dawn of the Reformation in the sixteenth century (and even before), Protestants have always emphasized Scripture above all else. The fancy Latin term for this is sola scriptura, which became one of the main battle cries of the Protestant Reformation, as the Reformers sought to liberate Christianity from the shackles of Roman Catholic oppression, which largely relied on tradition to exert its religious agenda. Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Calvin, among others, pushed back against this tyranny.
This goal was applied to different degrees and in various manners throughout Protestantism. Luther, for example, utilized the Bible as a way to critique the abuses of the Catholic church, emphasizing the primacy of grace in salvation, but didn’t feel terribly compelled to consult the Bible for other issues. For him, Scripture was primarily for the purpose of assuring someone of salvation, but it didn’t have much relevance for the practices of the church or daily living.
Others approached Scripture more strictly, however, maintaining that everything a person did must have a Biblical basis. This led the Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli, for example, to prohibit the use of organs in church, since they were never mentioned in Scripture and were the child of Catholic tradition.
The attitude toward Scripture that found its way to American shores was of this latter vintage, following what has been called a “Reformed hermeneutic.” The Puritans, who set the theological agenda in America for the first two centuries, were strict biblicists, believing every practice had to have a strong Scriptural precedent (John Cotton, grandfather of Cotton Mather, who I mentioned in a previous post, and the most influential American preacher in his day, concluded from his study of Scripture that there were sixteen offenses that should be worthy of capital punishment in Puritan New England, including the Mosaic prohibition of sleeping with one’s wife during her menstrual period).
By the nineteenth century, this “Bible onlyism” took on a new form when it was combined with a novel philosophy known as Scottish common sense realism. Essentially, this common sense philosophy, as a product of the Enlightenment, maintained that every person had the right and ability to interpret the world for themselves, the learned and unlearned alike. People didn’t need experts, elites, or clergy to be their interpreter; using objective methods of observation, they could figure out truth for themselves.
This had an earth-shifting effect on religion in America. While the Puritans and the earlier Reformers maintained a sola scriptura posture, and paid a sort of lip service to the idea of the “priesthood of all believers,” they nevertheless still had an elitist view of who was allowed to handle Scripture. Biblical interpretation and exposition were still the domain of the trained clergy. Not just anyone could put out a shingle and peddle Scripture to the masses.
By the nineteenth century, however, all that changed, as Protestants, seeking to contextualize their convictions to the modern age, discovered and began utilizing this common sense philosophy. With the democratization of America came, for the first time, the democratization of Christianity. And that, arguably, ended up being a double-edged sword.
Reading the Same Bible?
Reflecting on the Civil War that was ravaging America, Abraham Lincoln, in his second inaugural address, just six weeks before his assassination, perceptively put his finger on the paradox that had become American Christianity. Speaking of the North and South, which were conducting the country’s bloodiest war, he astutely remarked that “both [sides] read from the same Bible.”
Such was the paradox, and the double-edged sword, that resulted from the democratization of Scriptural interpretation in America. Suddenly, everyone thought they knew exactly what the Bible said, and they were willing to fight over it. Relying on what they thought were objective methods of biblical interpretation, every man, to some extent, became his own pope, believing he could escape the bonds of sixteen hundred years of church tradition and figure out exactly what the Bible meant.
Alexander Campbell, the founder of the Churches of Christ, explaining his approach to the Bible, once boasted that he had “endeavored to read the Scriptures as though no one had read them before me.” Such an approach led the Churches of Christ, following Zwingli’s approach above, to prohibit all instrumentation in Christian worship, since the New Testament doesn’t explicitly mention their use (a practice, among others, which continues to this day).
Similarly, William Miller, who, as a Baptist farmer (the epitome of this “common sense” approach) was the forefather of my own denomination, famously declared that when he sat down to figure the Bible out for himself, he laid aside all “commentaries, former views and prepossessions, and determined to read and try to understand for myself.” He didn’t need the aid of any other sources, and, in fact, to do so would interfere with his “objective” approach to Bible study.
Both Campbell and Miller, as all others in the nineteenth century, believed they were simply uncovering exactly what the Bible meant, and nothing but what the Bible meant, free from all other biases (the fact that these two contemporaries came to diametrically opposing interpretations on key passages of Scripture, despite supposedly using only the Bible, was apparently lost on them). In fact, so certain was Miller in his approach to the Bible that he declared that if a person simply applied his interpretive method to their study of Scripture, their conclusions could “not be in error.”
The problem? Rather than leading to interpretive unity, these supposedly-objective tools, applied to “the Bible and the Bible alone,” led to the greatest interpretive diversity in the history of Christianity. Suddenly America became overrun with all manner of denominations and non-denominations, with every preacher, prophet, and farmer claiming they’d finally figured out exactly what the Bible meant—and tarring and feathering all who didn’t reach the same conclusions (after all, if two people took the “Bible only” and used supposedly-objective methods to interpret it, it was obvious that either they would reach the same conclusions or one—or both—of them were being purposely dishonest if they didn’t).
It should be mentioned, of course, that I believe such a reality is far better than the alternatives (a topic I will return to in a future post). The marketplace of biblical interpretation has been a net gain and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
The challenge, however, especially in our hyper-individualized study of the Bible, is the potential for significant self-delusion—that just because one thinks he or she has formed their opinions based on the “Bible alone,” it doesn’t follow that they actually have. As Justo L. Gonzalez has aptly warned, “The notion that we read the New Testament exactly as the early Christians did, without any weight of tradition coloring our interpretation, is an illusion. It is also a dangerous illusion, for it tends to absolutize our interpretation, confusing it with the word of God.” For a myriad of reasons, confusing our interpretations with the word of God is a very dangerous place to be, including the tendency to close our minds to further light, and potentially leaving us with an attitude of superiority and judgment toward those who don’t agree with us.
From a church perspective, a further danger is that we can be very easily dazzled by slick preachers who like to quote the Bible. We think that just because they give us a long litany of Bible verses that their teaching is based solely on Scripture. But just because a person quotes Scripture it doesn’t mean she or he is using only Scripture (not to be too cynical, but it bears reminding that the devil quoted Scripture repeatedly when he tempted Jesus).
It is thus critically important to be aware of our biases and to hold our interpretations with humility. This is a point that I will return to in the future, but for now, I think Michael W. Casey’s reflections on the history of the Churches of Christ is apropos. Pointing to their quest for Bibly-onlyism and the belief that such an approach would unite all Christians, he submits that “instead of unity,” this approach “created division. Instead of certainty in Scripture interpretation, it created a babble of legalistic ideas. Rather than freeing people . . . it trapped them into confusing their own cultural perspective for biblical ideas.”
To repeat, there is great danger in feeling overly-certain that our interpretations of the Bible are the same thing as the Bible itself, leading to all manner of unfortunate results. And the bottom line for me is that I think striving for “Bible onlyism” is something we should ever aspire to but never assume or boast we’ve arrived at.
Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil student at the University of Oxford (what they call a PhD), focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.