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Continuing our look at the card a church produced to outline its defining features, we are told we will experience “biblical preaching.” This is a topic we’ve decoded a lot in the past, but what is doing here, for this particular church? How does it relate to the other defining features this church tells us we’ll encounter? How is being “biblical” a code for social control and the exercise of human authority? Take a dive with Dan in this week’s episode to find out!
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As always, welcome to It's In The Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Thrilled and delighted as always to be with you.
I don't just say that. This is one of those weeks where I sit down to do this and I'm like...
I'm looking forward to this. I feel like I'm talking with friends.
I feel like I'm talking with people who have great questions.
I feel like I'm talking with people who will send me funny emails and new insights and post things on Discord, and so thank you all for that.
As always, all the ways that you support us, thank you.
If you're not a subscriber and that's something that you would consider doing, I would ask you to just give that some thought.
We do a lot of things, try to do more things, a lot of stuff coming up with the election.
With our live events in November, want to do more things like that, and that's what helps us to do that.
Let's dive in here.
We are continuing on.
We've been working down a list of items on a small card that somebody took a photo of.
It was included like in a church bulletin.
It was about the size of a business card and had listed eight things that if you come to this church, presumably, you will encounter.
I've noted this before.
A number of listeners have identified what this church is and have sent me interesting follow-up emails about this, actually.
I'm interested in following up on those, and we may hear more about this after we work our way through this card.
I don't know yet. But we've been working our way to this card, and we are up to point number seven, which is biblical preaching.
And if you're curious about the six before that, just go back, listen to some prior episodes.
We've been just working our way through this.
We are to seven of eight biblical preaching.
And the idea of being quote-unquote biblical, of biblical preaching, of being a Bible church, of being biblical, and the understanding of the Bible that lies at the heart of that language, it's something I've talked about a lot in prior episodes.
Those of you who've been listening to this series from the beginning know that I've done just entire early episodes on what it means to be quote-unquote biblical when somebody says that.
Did a kind of series within the series recently, feels recent, I guess it's been a little while now, on the concept of inerrancy, the doctrine of inerrancy that underlies most of those appeals to being biblical and so forth.
So I could not possibly repeat all that here, and I wouldn't want to because a lot of you have listened to that before.
So I invite listeners who haven't, maybe go back, take a deep dive in those things if you want to.
But what I want to give here is a kind of like, you know...
Top hit points, almost like a top 10 list of some of those considerations.
And I want to specifically highlight how this language of being biblical ties in with everything else on this list.
This list and these eight things are what we're sort of focusing on and what they tell us about a certain kind of conservative Protestantism in the US. And so that's what I want to do.
Again, within the kind of church that produced this card, and this has been an interesting exercise.
I've done most of these before I eventually went and looked up this church and followed up, and I feel pretty good.
A lot of proper decoding here, a lot of things that I thought I knew about this church, I knew about this church from this little card.
And the Bible is true of their view of the Bible as well.
But within churches like this, the Bible isn't just a book, and it isn't just a repository of religious teachings or truth.
I teach a world religions class, and there's a text that I often assign that's like a scriptures of the world religions text, and it has excerpts from sacred texts from different traditions around the world and different times and so forth.
And there are a lot of people who will, like, generally think of those as, like, wisdom texts or that they're repositories of human wisdom or human faith or something like that.
And that is still not as high a view of the Bible as this kind of church will have.
For this kind of church, the Bible is understood as the word of God.
And this means that it is, and these are a couple specialized terms, okay, that it is verbally inspired, that's language that you might run into, and that it is inerrant, that is certainly language that you will run into.
What does that mean?
What it means is that every word of the Bible comes from God.
And there can be a lot of discussions about how God works through human authors and uses their language and so on and so forth, but we can be assured, and this is the point of the doctrine, that every word in the text is what God wants it to be, and that everything in the Bible is without error.
That's what inerrant means.
It's without error. It is fully accurate.
So the Bible within this view is understood as the written revelation of God to human beings.
And as such, it's not just information.
It's not people's reflections on God.
It's not their suppositions about God.
It's not ancient thinkers putting down their best understanding or experience of God.
It is the revelation.
It is God revealing God's self to human beings, which means that it is supposed to be the sole authority for Christian faith and practice.
When Christians want to know what they should believe, how they should act, what they should do, what churches should be like, and so forth, it is their sole authority.
And it is supposed to be the final and ultimate source of truth about God and sort of everything to do with God.
And since God created everything, that basically means the sole and ultimate source of truth about everything, including not just beliefs about God, but including the world, including humanity, including society, including gender and sexuality, and sort of on and on and on and on.
A lot of things that those of us who are not in that world might think of as social issues or Even policy issues or political perspectives or whatever, the Bible is supposed to be what tells us what we should think and believe and do about those things and in those situations.
Okay? That's the view of the Bible.
That the notion that the Bible can be the final source about everything or the sole authority for Christian faith and practice, it's just a concept that can't stand on its own.
There are a million things that every regular church has to do that the Bible just doesn't address.
They are things that are addressed by custom, by social convention, by long-established theological traditions, and so forth.
The way to say this is that everything is radically underdetermined by the Bible.
In other words, if you grow up in one of these contexts and you eventually say to yourself, you know what, I want to really just dig into the Bible and see if everything we do has a biblical justification the way that I've been taught that it does and so forth, and I've done this personally, part of my own movement out of that tradition.
I've talked to, I don't know how many people who've gone through this process, but what they find is That it turns out the stuff they were told is taken straight from the Bible is questionable at best, and sometimes they can't find it there.
There are other ways of interpreting it and so forth, okay?
All of that's there.
I say all of that because I'm not going to talk about any of it anymore today.
I'm going to get emails of people who say, hey, say more about this, and I want those emails.
Let me know. I'm going to say, go back.
Listen to the fuller episodes.
But also, if the Bible feels like this bottomless issue when we talk about high-control American religion, if there are things you want me to take a deeper dive in, things that we should be thinking about, let me know.
DanielMillerSwaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Email me. Let me know what you think about that.
Okay? All of that, setting aside, what all of this means is that that view of the Bible— We're good to go.
It tells us, it tells anybody reading this card, and it is supposed to tell us, that's one of the reasons for having this card, it tells us exactly what kind of Christian church this is.
It tells us that this is a church that is directed by this view of the Bible.
This is what they understand the Bible to be.
This is an understanding that this understanding of the Bible is, I would argue, the defining feature of conservative, white, evangelical, Christian theology.
When it comes to their theology, their statement of what they believe, this is going to be the core piece of it.
And within that world, that means that this, this view of the Bible is the defining feature of true, authentic Christianity.
So that's the claim that's being made, the identity claim.
The claim to be biblical in this sense, to have biblical preaching, is like planting a flag that communicates to everyone involved what kind of Christian identity is in question, and it is these Christians' way of saying, we are real, authentic Christians.
Authentic, true Christians are quote-unquote Bible-believing Christians, and the Bible means all of this.
That's the first piece. I think the second...
Facet to having this on this card is it's a statement that the truth and authority of this church about the truth and the authority of this church's teachings and practices.
For those of you who didn't grow up in the world of conservative Protestantism, I've talked about this a bit in this little sort of series within the series, preaching is the central task and the focal point of the shared worship service.
Everything in the service builds to the sermon, which if you've never been in this kind of service, it's essentially kind of a lecture It's like a mix of like a lecture and a TED talk and motivational speech given by the pastor based on something in the Bible.
There may be a theme, maybe just going through the books of the Bible, whatever it is, but everything in the service builds to the sermon.
During which the pastor presents these sort of core teachings and lessons and applications from the Bible.
So when this church emphasizes biblical preaching, it's making the claim that its teaching, its preaching, when it does the core thing that it does on a Sunday morning, that its teaching comes from God.
So while the teachings will aim to be relevant to those who hear it, relevance is going to matter.
And while the pastor is going to make efforts to show how the ancient teachings of the Bible apply to listeners' current lives, the most important thing is that these teachings are divine.
The claim then is that this is a church that preaches what is true because it comes from God.
This is a church whose preaching can be trusted because it comes from God.
This is a church that we can be sure doesn't teach what it does because it's popular or because it's easy—this is the kind of rhetoric they will use—but because it's what the Bible as the Word of God demands.
And so it's crucial to understand, again, especially if you don't come from this world, that this is a claim that the sermon you hear on Sunday morning, it's not the opinion or even the interpretation of the pastor, it's a message from God.
When things work the way they should, the pastor becomes this kind of transparent medium communicating a message that comes from God.
It has divine power in it.
And that's a bold claim.
For reasons that I've outlined in a lot more detail before, I also think it's a bullshit claim.
I don't think it's something that actually happens.
I'm going to be clear. It's not usually an explicit claim.
It's implicit in the practice and theology of what's going on in the sermon and in the church.
But it's there.
It's a bold claim, and I think it's bogus.
I did a whole series on why I think the doctrine of inerrancy is fundamentally flawed.
Not just flawed, but incoherent.
I think it doesn't even logically hold together.
I have argued repeatedly in that series and other places that despite the claims to be encountering God through the Bible or through church practice or when you hear a sermon or whatever, God is always mediated to us by other human beings and other human institutions and structures.
In other words, despite the emphasis on a kind of direct encounter or communion or information from God, it's always mediated by other humans.
I'm going to talk more about that in some upcoming episodes, but these are points that I've made before.
So there are philosophical and intellectual reasons why I think this claim to quote-unquote biblical preaching and these other elements that it encodes, I think it can't get off the ground to begin with.
But again, let's set that aside.
Let's just stick with this is what the church is claiming.
This is their claim that you will encounter when you walk into this church.
And so what I want to look at is, okay, so what does that claim do in terms of, for example, this church's practices or claims about itself, and how does it operate in relation to these other elements we've discussed on this card?
And I think the key issue here, or anytime somebody claims to being quote-unquote biblical, to be a Bible church for biblical preaching, to be a church built on biblical principles, whatever this is, the key issue at play is authority.
And we'll see next week that the list of defining features of this church, they are all grounded in claims to divine authority.
We're going to finish out this list next week with the final thing on the list is reverent worship.
We're going to talk about this.
It's going to bring us back to this theme of authority.
When the church lauds its biblical preaching, it is claiming, again, that what it teaches and does has the authority of God behind it.
It's not just a human convention or a practice.
It is something that is ordained by God.
And this applies to everything else on the list and everything we have said about it.
Again, if you haven't heard it, if you're intrigued by this, go back, listen to the last six episodes.
It applies to everything on this list.
None of the defining features of this church—smiling wives, obedient children, loud singing, strong handshakes, young marriages, good manners—those are the ones we've looked at.
None of those features of this church are matters of mere preference or convention or just even the church's core values.
No. By situating them within the frame of biblical preaching, we are assured that they are reflections of divine authority.
They are what God wants.
They are what God demands.
And so when the Church says, these are what define us, it is claiming divine authority for what it views, apparently, as its defining features.
The church does what it does and does what it does the way that it does it because it is being biblical.
Which means that it does what it does the way that it does it because God has commanded that that is how it is to be done.
So everything that we have said, for example, about this church's view and practices of gender and sexuality and the family, and if we look at this card, you listen back to these episodes, that's a big focus, as it is within conservative American Protestantism generally.
There's a... I don't know if it's possible to overstate the amount of space in the conceptual room that gender, sexuality, and family occupy in these churches.
But everything that we've said about gender and sexuality in the family, they all reflect divine authority.
When we talked about smiling wives and loud singing and obedient children being about, among other things, approval and enthusiastic support of the teachings and practices of this church, that approval and enthusiastic support represents submission and approval of all the things being done.
Why? Because they are what God commands.
We're not submitting or approving to just what humans want.
No, this is what God wants.
And this appeal to authority, this appeal to divine command, also means that these practices and these understandings, they can't be called into question.
To question these perspectives, to question that things could be otherwise than as they are, that they could be done some different way, including not just small things, but radically different conceptions of, say, sexuality or gender, to question that, to raise those questions, is to question God.
And to go beyond questioning God, to actively challenge these practices, is to position oneself as an enemy of God.
And folks, I have been called an enemy of God by evangelicals that I don't know, by evangelicals that I have known in the past because of the kinds of questions and positions that I state in the podcast or even in my academic work.
I'm an apostate because I have questioned these, and how dare I question these because I've rejected God by doing so.
That's the logic. So the appeal to being quote-unquote biblical, and I've said this over and over and over, and I'll keep saying it, it is fundamentally about social control.
It is the club that can be used to whack potentially wayward individuals and to bring them back into line.
And I think that another piece of this, the way that this control often works, is actually through a kind of relatively subtle code-switching So here's another one.
Somebody will say, well, yeah, I mean, I guess I'm patriarchal.
I believe the husband should be the head of the household.
I believe that the man is the spiritual authority over the woman.
But that's not misogynistic because it's in the Bible.
Or, well, yeah, I'm opposed to queer rights and inclusion.
I oppose same-sex marriage.
And I think that there are just two genders and that gender fluidity or gender nonconformity is a departure from what God wants.
But, I mean, that doesn't make me homophobic or transphobic because it's in the Bible.
Or the person who says, well, you know what?
Like, yeah, I don't accept climate science or vaccination science.
I don't believe in evolution.
I don't believe that, you know, the geological record is accurate.
It's not because I'm an anti-intellectual.
It's because it's in the Bible.
And again, I've had those conversations with real people who the fact that they are appealing to the Bible, that they are being quote-unquote biblical means for them That anti-queer affect is not homophobic or queerphobic.
That anti-intellectualism isn't really anti-intellectualism.
Why? Because it has a religious origin, has an origin in this book.
Now, let me be clear.
There are other ways of reading the Bible.
I know plenty of people who find the Bible to be a source of authority and insight and so forth who are queer-affirming, who believe in the teachings of science, who are not patriarchal, etc., etc., etc.
But within this framework, the framework of this kind of church, you're not going to find that.
And so that's the code switching that occurs.
And I've had this conversation with people who are very, very sincere.
They sincerely believe that their patriarchy is not misogynistic, that their transphobia isn't really transphobic, that their anti-intellectualism isn't really anti-intellectualism.
Why? Because it's in the Bible, as they understand it.
To which my response is always, well, it makes your God transphobic.
It just makes your God an anti-intellectual.
It just, you know... Whatever.
Bigger theological questions.
So what that means, that ability to code switch, that ability to people to deceive even themselves about the significance of what they're saying and doing and believing, what it means is the claims to be biblical allow the communities making those claims to think or do anything with a clear conscience as long as they can convince themselves and others that it's, quote, in the Bible. And of course, that brings us back to this question of mediation.
I don't want to rehash the entire point, but again, in my experience as a pastor, in my experience as a young evangelical, in my experience as a coach working with people dealing with religious trauma—again, I work with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery and working with clients there—almost none of the individual Christians who profess these things We're good to
go.
Hold those views because the church taught them to hold those views.
Even when they eventually went to read the Bible, even when Uncle Ron can pull out his Bible and cite a verse to you and say, this is what it means, he's reading it that way because he was taught to read it that way.
It's not that somebody went to the Bible and built from the ground up this set of beliefs.
Which means, again, that claims to be biblical, they grant tremendous authority.
It's a claim to authority. But they grant authority to those who position themselves as the arbiters of biblical truth.
We never really get to God.
We get to the people telling us about God.
We don't just get to interpret the Bible.
We get to those who interpret the Bible for us and have created the frameworks within which we read it and so forth.
When we talk about social control and the exercise of authority, Those are the people who get to exercise control.
Those are the people who get to exercise authority.
All right, we're out of time here.
I need to wind this up.
And I'll just say to sort of wrap these things together that the claim to be biblical, again, it's one of the most fundamental and widespread, and I think because of this, one of the most familiar features within conservative American Protestantism.
But I think it's commonality, the fact that it is so common, the fact that if you've ever known anybody who's a conservative Christian, they will probably have this view of the Bible.
The commonality and prevalence of this view shouldn't cause us to overlook how much work the claim to be biblical actually does, how much it works as a mechanism of social control, how much it works to license human authority, and so forth.
And so for the purpose of what we're talking about here, it has to do with everything else on this list.
It situates all the things on this list as reflecting the will of God.
They're not just about what the pastor or elders of this church have put together and determined they want to be.
No, no, no, no. They are the will of God.
And it aims to remove all of them from question or contestation.
And in the final episode related to this list, which we're coming up on, We'll consider more of the understanding of God that informs all of this.
Again, that final issue will be reverent worship.
We're going to get into that, and I think that that ties this whole thing together.
In the meantime, again, thank you for listening.
Thank you for the support, the encouragement, the feedback, the kind words, all the things that you send.
I am always perpetually behind in responding, but I do my best.
Keep the questions, comments, insights coming.
DanielMillerSwaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Going to be winding this sort of mini-series down soon.
Always open for new ideas, topics, follow-up questions.
Please keep those coming.
Address some of those follow-up questions in the last supplemental episode that we're putting together.
I think that that is something I may try to do moving forward.
