After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

Later Jewish sacred writings developed ways of reading the Hebrew Bible that would have been hugely helpful if the church had been paying attention. The primary example is the Talmud, which itself became authoritative, and yet Christians generally have no contact with it whatsoever.35 Put simply, the Talmud contains discussions and debates among ra

The people who talk most about the Bible “speaking” are often those most guilty of ignoring or masking their own agency in biblical interpretation. . . . We cannot allow the . . . masking of human interpretive practices that are the actual agents that produce those “meanings” of the Bible so many people point to in their attempts to oppress other p

It would have been so nice if evangelicals could have known of the Jewish traditions of dialogue, debate, argument, questioning. Instead we got inerrancy. Inerrancy made it wrong to question the literal face-value reading of any biblical text—ranging from the Sodom and Gomorrah story to Joshua’s holy war texts.

By “biblicism” I mean a theory about the Bible that emphasizes together its exclusive authority, infallibility, perspicuity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability.

The turn back to Tradition often seems to be a way of resisting the turn to the margins demanded by liberation theologians and other voices focusing on current oppression, especially oppression by the church.

Let’s start by thinking about the average highly devout, nonscholarly evangelical believer. In thinking of this believer, I want to paint a portrait of what we might call garden-variety evangelical biblicism. My thumbnail definition of biblicism is a stance in which the Bible is understood as the definitive, if not the only, source of authoritative

Jesus himself needs to be re-presented and reconsidered, and I will do that here. A term I will offer to describe the vision of Jesus I am embracing is Christian humanism. It is a new term for me to use in my work, though not a new term in Christian history. It basically means orienting our lives by a version of Christian faith that is compassionat

When LGBTQ evangelicals, their families, and allies start pressing for dignity and even full inclusion, they begin their arguments from within an evangelical theological framework. Eventually they tend to discover that evangelical ways of reading Scripture and, more broadly, of observing reality and discerning truth, may themselves be the problem.

The most difficult problem for a theology of biblical inerrancy (or infallibility, but we will focus on inerrancy) is resolving the respective divine and human roles in the writing of the Bible. Belief in biblical inerrancy depends on something like the idea that the Holy Spirit took such entire control of biblical writers that everything they said