Biblical literalism

If you ask a conservative theologian, can God change his mind, they'll say, of course God can't change his mind, and they'll rattle through all this stuff about perfect knowledge and temporality and whatever.

If you ask a lot of regular Christians— People who go to church, they go to those same Biblicist churches.

They would call themselves inerrantists.

They go to the church with the pastor who studied at the seminary where the professor said that this wasn't a thing.

And so we've substituted evolution in some foolish Christian men who call themselves apologists, who are doing a great disservice to the Christian faith, who say that you can believe in theistic evolution.

Listen, you cannot believe in theistic evolution and be a Biblicist, because it puts death before the fall, and the Bible is clear that death does not happen until after the fall.

And so people are always looking for water on some planet, on some star, because in their mind, water is the womb of life.

And God is going to judge the waters of this world, and it's going to be a miserable triple judgment that He brings.

Like that's not some, you know, post enlightenment, whatever.

Literalistic reading is the actual, if you are a conservative, you should be more interested in the allegorical understanding than the literalistic one, because the literalistic one is a post enlightenment invention.

Not saying that that's wrong, I'm not saying that the things that the Bible says happened didn't actually happen, but to say in terms of how to understand what the Bible's actually trying to tell you, the allegorical approach is far more entrenched in Christian

history than the literalistic one.

He's like, bring the scriptures to me and let's talk about this.

And people would ask him, are you a Baptist? What denomination are you? And he would say, well, I'm a Biblicist.

He would talk about the fact that he studies the Bible.

believes in a literal interpretation of the scriptures.

okay

um and there there are a lot of other issues involved in the founding of course i mean you know taxes and parliamentary sovereignty and um you know enlightenment ideas that are not really kind of evangelical, Biblicist types of ideas.

The Enlightenment, whatever that term means, it's not always, you know, anti-Christian at all.

Right.

Yeah, I think that, so the other two in David Bevington's multilateral are biblicism, so particular regard for the Bible, and activism, so what we might call social action type ministries today.

And certainly those things existed in Spurgeon as well.

He's kind of many senses the stereotypical evangelical bevington may or might have as well just to kind of had a poster of spurgeon up as he's describing the movement um but i think for his biblical interpretation in particular The traits of Biblicism and the tenets that we might think of Biblicism, they do come and go.

He obviously has a huge regard for Scripture.

He obviously loves Scripture and is invested in getting everyone to read it for themselves and see what it says.

What is the basis when we start talking about a topic? Where should we go for our answer? We should go to the Bible.

Like I say, I am a full Biblicist.

You want to talk to me about the Antichrist? The first thing I would say is, where is the word Antichrist found? And people might say, you know, I really don't know.

And a lot of people don't know.

What might be some of the strategies? What are the ways we can most effectively engage and transform the landscape on this right now? I have in my notes here that there's a ditch on either side of the road.

On one side, there's Biblicism, which says, well, the only worthwhile knowledge that you can have about anything is found in the Bible.

And, you know, the science, these guys are doing scientific research, just it's not important.

And then on the other side, the scientism, which says, well, actually, you know, this kind of, yeah, there's a vague, I mean, among Christians, a vague, there's a spiritual knowledge about salvation in the Bible.