What does it mean when a Christian says something is “biblical?” Why do some Christians talk this way, while others don’t? What do “biblicist” claims tell us about Christians’ understanding of religious authority and social control? Do all Christian groups share these understandings? In this episode, Dan helps to crack the code of being “biblical” to answer these and other questions.
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Axis Mundy Axis Mundy You're listening to an Irreverent Podcast.
visit irreverent.fm for more content from our amazing lineup of creators hello and welcome to it's in the code an ongoing series of the podcast straight white american jesus i'm I am your host for the series, Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
As always, I want to welcome everybody who's listening.
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Before diving in, I also want to just remind everybody that we have the next Straight White American Jesus seminar coming up, Purity, Culture, Race, and Embodiment, hosted by Sarah Mosliner.
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I won't repeat all of that.
But the seminar is coming up here starting in just a couple weeks, so please do check out the Straight White American Jesus website for information about that.
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Highly recommend any of Sarah's work and teaching and the different things that she does.
So yeah, let's dive in here.
This week was kind of a crazy week for me.
I'm not going to go into the whole story, but I spent most of last week chasing a dog, an escaped dog, and did finally get her back.
And I'm delighted about that, but it put me way behind.
So I was going through emails, not just the emails from this week and the things that people have sent, but some other ones.
And a theme starts to emerge that, you know, I was looking at it and I was like, ah, like, this is one of those themes that is so near the surface of so many of the topics we've talked about in this series, but sort of hasn't been directly dealt with.
And it was the idea of being biblical.
Right, that is when a church or a group will say that they are biblical, or they follow biblical teachings, or that we should be biblical, the sort of aspiration to be biblical, or it's the kind of related idea when somebody says, or a church says that they are Bible-believing.
And I wanted to take a look at this because, as I say, it's such an ever-present and sort of defining theme and aspiration within many Forms of American Christianity that it's easy to overlook.
I think I had sort of overlooked it as I was looking back at some of the other different kinds of topics.
But it's there.
It's there.
And all of you are reminding me of it.
And it's been painful for some.
It's confusing for others who wonder, you know, what does that mean?
For some, it's hurtful or infuriating or it creates a sense of shame.
There can be a lot of negative emotions attached to this.
And it's another element of American Christianity that's so common that I think we typically assume we understand what it means, but I think it's worth decoding because it's not as straightforward as it might seem, okay?
Now let me pause here and say that one of the first episodes that we did in this series, I think it was back in May, was on the idea of the Bible church, right?
So we sort of touched on this idea.
If you were to do the Venn diagram, you remember those diagrams with the little circles that have overlap, right?
There would be some overlap between these.
And I don't want to just repeat everything that I said there, right?
There are some important differences.
So I want to emphasize, you know, if you're interested in that, if you want to sort of Listen to that again.
It's in May.
The topic was Bible church, I think.
And in that episode, I really emphasized the way that for lots of Christians, appeals to the Bible are coded statements of political and cultural identity.
I really focused on the identity dimension of specifically organizations or congregations that claim this term Bible, right?
I'm not going to delve into all of that again, right?
But all of that is in the background here, and we'll touch on it briefly, but I'm not in the detail that we did there, that appeals to being biblical.
When somebody says, I'm biblical, I'm a biblical Christian, we're biblical Christians, Christians should be biblical, they should follow biblical teachings, they affirm things like biblical marriages, on and on and on, that adjective biblical It is telling you, typically, a lot about their identity and their self-understanding of who they are.
But what I want to focus on here is to go beyond that to look at some other dimensions that appear when we begin to crack the code of being biblical, okay?
So let's start with what's probably the obvious, but if I've got folks listening who are really uninitiated with this, really uninitiated with the kind of religious folks who will talk this way, It's worth noting that what we're talking about, obviously, is the point that the Scriptures of the Christian tradition are contained in the Bible, right?
And Christians of every stripe—Catholic, liberal-progressive Protestants, conservative Protestants, the Orthodox, You name it, they all preach and teach from the Bible.
And we could delve into some of the differences in the biblical texts, by which I mean that there are different Christian traditions that accept certain, you know, some groups accept scriptures that others don't.
That is, sometimes the Catholics and Orthodox will accept as authoritative texts that Protestants don't recognize as part of the Bible.
But that would take us sort of way off topic.
But the point is, That they all appeal to the Bible.
And I can see somebody who's not familiar with American Christianity and the sort of ins and outs of it saying, well, isn't that just what biblical means?
It doesn't just mean Christian, right?
Christians use the Bible.
That's their set of scriptures.
So to be biblical is just to be Christian, and to be Christian is to be biblical, right?
Isn't that how it works?
And that's where we can get confused because that's not how it works.
And this can also be confusing to some people within the Christian tradition.
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