Biblicism

“Don’t be such a biblicist!” John snapped to Brian in a social media debate over whether the Scripture forbids trick-or-treating for Halloween. Without missing a beat, Brian replies, “Well, if holding to Scripture alone makes me a ‘biblicist,’ then I consider that a badge of honor!” 

Not so fast with that badge.  

Let’s go back to social media for another angle on the problem. One Tweet I saw last week read, “If it’s not in Scripture, it’s a lie.” Only one reply was needed, and someone beat me to it — “That Tweet is self-refuting.” Indeed it was.

But let’s get one thing straight right away. The authentic Protestant doctrine of sola Scriptura never taught that the Bible is to be understood apart from reason or tradition anymore than it can be read apart from the illumination of the Holy Spirit. 

So, no, biblicism is not a label for people who “take the Bible too seriously.”   

Biblicism is a label that has come to describe an approach to Scripture that treats the individual words or limited word-units as interpretive ends in themselves. It is to isolate the words of the text in an “atomistic” fashion, tending to villainize larger circles of meaning, and especially those which may be cast as “philosophical” or “traditional” or “pagan.” The biblicist seems to be saying that only what the Bible says settles a matter; but what that comes to mean is that only the exact form of ink patterns that can fit on a petri dish is allowed to count for what the Bible “says.”

Matthew Barrett gives a helpful list of six marks of biblicism:

(1) Ahistorical mindset.

(2) Irresponsible proof texting.

(3) Anti-metaphysics.

(4) Univocal predication (especially in language about God).

(5) Restrictive revelation (anti-natural theology).

(6) Overemphasis on the human author.1

This is probably the most excellent summary I have seen because of how concise it is, and yet it comprehends the most amount of the biblicist’s ground.

The reason that biblicism descends into something less than “what the Bible says” is very simple.

Think of the conceptual tools we use all the time—e.g. the laws of logic, reason itself, testimony of the saints of the past, wisdom of present teachers and counselors, adherence to proper rules of grammar and literary genre, the memory of what we learned from similar passages, the meaning of the surrounding context, the hierarchy of doctrines so derived from Scripture, etc. We use these whenever we read the Bible.

Now let us notice that none of these indispensable categories are “in the Bible” in the sense of being either formally taught there or in being expressed in the words of the biblical text. However, if we were to ignore any of these, much less several of them, when reading the Bible, we will surely be only reading in a myopic fashion and therefore not really taking the Bible seriously at all.

Larger movements in modern church history especially have tended to feature biblicism as central to their particular claims to “more biblical than thou.” Restorationism, Dispensationalism, and Fundamentalism were prime examples of this. Among the Reformed, Van Tillianism is driven by biblicism. To those who follow Van Til’s apologetic method, no lines of reason that do not follow biblical propositions are allowed.  This is doubly ironic since, first, adherents to this approach are quick to defend the extra-biblical when it comes to the Westminster standards, and secondly, Van Til’s own writings are quite devoid of scriptural justification.

Descriptive versus Prescriptive Biblicism

I had to make up some more terms. But I trust that the reader will recognize the species out in the wild. Let us call these “descriptive biblicism” and “prescriptive biblicism.” I derive these two terms from the fact that biblicism reduces biblical truth to the discrete ink patterns either in order to describe (what is true) or else to prescribe (what to do). 

An example of the former comes from the frontier revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Especially among the Restoration Movement, the “inductive” method of applying Scripture alone meant that doctrines were invalidated if their express labels could not be found “in Scripture,” so that the Trinity was the first, though by no means the last, casualty. 

A classic example of the latter in church history can be seen in the criticism of the Puritans’ piety in general or of the regulative principle of worship in particular. In summarizing the Anglican divine Richard Hooker’s polemic against the more radical Puritans, Brad Littlejohn writes that,

“you needed Scripture not merely to require something, but to do it at all,” and so “in some ways it was an error just as bad as the original Roman error, because it sought to bind consciences by the mere silence of Scripture.”2

Now whether or not one agrees with Littlejohn’s assessment of the Puritans (or the original argument by Hooker) is immaterial. What matters is that everything from worship to doctrine to ethics is held hostage to a particular selection of proof-texts that all traditions derive from a selective process (nothing inherently wrong with the process), but which biblicism turns into a fortress of unquestionable maxims called “What the Bible says.” Truth be told, biblicism gives sola Scriptura a bad name.

Such can be a biblicism of the bottom shelf as well. We have all known individual Christians who cannot pull the trigger on any number of actions in life because the “go ahead” from God’s word is not forthcoming. Biblicism sets us all up for failure not only in interpretation and doctrine, but also in counseling other believers. “What does the Bible say about tattoos?” Or what about this one: “Is dating biblical?”

The expectation is that if the Bible is God’s truth over everything, then you would expect it to say something about anything.

When Christians do not grow out of this simplistic phase of biblical consciousness, they are not growing at all in the one area that grows us the most. When the Bible remains a mere “sourcebook,” a flattened democracy of authority in all things, it never becomes a transformational worldview lens over all things, never forming universal categories in the growing mind that now “judges all things,” having “the mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16).

Biblicism is not the exaltation of the Bible over the non-Bible, so much as the isolation of each part of the Bible from all that makes for actually thinking in a biblical and rational manner, which, we would think, should be one and the same.

Is This Term Fair or Misleading?

Part of the problem with the term “biblicism” is that it is not a long-standing or consensus term among theologians. It is not a technical label. Some will push back in defense of “biblicism” as nothing other than a high view of Scripture and therefore speak as if anyone who uses the term has a low view of Scripture. The description on the “Got Questions” website frames things in that way. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary gives this exceedingly unhelpful definition: “adherence to the letter of the Bible,” and the Collins dictionary is no better: “literal interpretation of the Bible.”

If anyone suspects that the term has no scholarly pedigree, I would commend to them the remark of the renowned biblical scholar James Barr who, in his Gifford Lectures on natural theology, spoke of the “biblicism” of his fellows in the field. How did he use this term? It was,

“in the sense of their occupational unwillingness to see anything decided by factors without the Bible and beyond the range of their competence or expertise. Contrary to the general opinion of recent times, the obvious weakness of the average biblical scholar lay not in his or her bias toward historical approaches, but in his or her lack of philosophical insight or ability.”3

Barr was saying substantially the same thing as Barrett in our earlier concise list of attributes, the only difference being Barr’s insight into the way that modern biblical studies cultivates this suspicion of the extra-biblical.

The well-known Reformed Baptist apologist, James White, has recently defended what he calls a “Reformed Biblicism,” which he naturally makes synonymous with the historic doctrine of men like Luther and Calvin. In the process, he pushes back at what he sees as the straw men that the biblicist must hold that, 1. “the Bible fell down out of heaven three days ago, i.e., we reject the reality that there are generations of interpreters who have come before us”; 2. “it is just you and your Bible under a tree, each person a tabula rasa, starting from scratch each and every day”; or that it is 3. “to reject creeds and confessions”; or 4. “to change our doctrine at our every whim.”

“Hence, the Reformed biblicist is simply allowing Scripture to be God-breathed, the Spirit to be accomplishing His purposes in the Church, those of the past to speak and testify to the truth (and to their own errors and traditions), and the useful and beneficial gifts of God in commentaries, textual resources, etc., to bless us in the present.”4

Now, let us allow White his lament and take him at this word. The trouble remains. Such extremes as he calls out as straw men do exist. Equally, there are others who may share some of the same assumptions as extreme biblicists and yet not be guilty of any of those things White lists. Nevertheless, the avoidance of extreme conclusions is no refutation of the existence of common premises. Many of the criticisms (not least by White himself) against retrieval of classical theology proper share common assumptions with the most dogged biblicist in the American frontier revivals of the 1830s.

At the end of the day, biblicism is a particular view of biblical interpretation that, if pressed, lends itself to a different conception of sola Scriptura. Adherents will say that it does not refuse larger systematic categories — it seeks to interpret Scripture in light of the whole of Scripture — and that it does not shun tradition, much less the Reformed confessional standards (though, notice that when White maintains this, he must be selective in accepting only those narrow streams of tradition as to constitute a few modern babbling brooks).

Of course we should charitably allow for diversity among those who tend in this direction. So perhaps it is best to call “biblicism” a hermeneutical tendency, one with a spectrum that ranges from more flexibility with extra-biblical categories to less flexibility. We might speak of the moderate biblicist and the extreme biblicist, or even a creeping biblicism and a settled biblicism.

Be all of that as it may, the label itself is useful in my view. So long as there is disagreement over what it means for a thing to be “biblical” or “in the Bible,” we cannot allow for a unilateral disarmament of words. Wherever the biblicist tendency operates, more serious theological reading, preaching, discipleship, counseling, and system-building will be barred access at the front door of the discussion.  

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1. Matthew Barrett, The Reformation as Renewal (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2023), 21.

2. Brad Littlejohn, Introduction to Hooker’s The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Volume 1 (Davenant Institute, 2019), xx.

3. James Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 119.

4. James White, “Reformed Biblicism.”