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The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture is unavailable, but you can change that!

Biblicism—an approach to the Bible common among some American evangelicals—emphasizes together the Bible’s exclusive authority, infallibility, clarity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability. Acclaimed sociologist Christian Smith argues that this approach is misguided and unable to live up to its own claims. If evangelical biblicism worked as its...

evangelicals can appropriate and more clearly emphasize in order to move beyond biblicism. Yet such short, isolated Christocentric statements are rarely if ever strong enough to counter the implications of the many other declarations about complete coverage, the handbook model, and so on, which tend to lead to a flat, centerless, biblicist reading of scripture. The reality is that it is not possible to take fully seriously a Christocentric hermeneutic of scripture and to hold to biblicism. One or
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