Over the next couple of weeks, I am going to write an extended book analysis of Dan McClellan’s new book, The Bible Says So. In all honesty, I fear that I am not going to enjoy writing it. I also fear I might get snarky at times. I have occasionally written about various videos McClellan has posted online, and to anyone who follows my blogs, it is clear I am not a fan. The reason why I’m not a fan, though, is not because he offends me, or because I am the kind of “right-wing apologist” he loves to routinely lambast as “ignoring the data” and “clinging to his own dogma” that “seeks to amass power” at the expense of the marginalized. I’m not a fan for two reasons: (1) I think his “scholarship” is shoddy and riddled with his own obvious political biases and dogmas, and sadly, (2) he’s become quite popular—and it’s a shame that someone who does such shallow scholarship and who clearly has an agenda to fashion the Bible in his own biased image has gained a following. People really do tend to be like sheep who are easily led astray.
If you have ever watched his videos, or if you read the introduction to his book, it is quite easy to figure out what basic stances McClellan takes and how he goes about achieving his rhetorical goals (i.e. his modus operandi, so to speak). His modus operandi plays out this way: he first highlights some random person who has made a video on either some topic related to something in the Bible, or a direct criticism of something McClellan has posted—an online social media spat, if you will. He then provides his own retorts to short clips from that forementioned video. Nine times out of then, the random person McClellan is responding to is just some shmuck who no one has ever heard of and who, most of the time, isn’t actually trained in Biblical Studies. Not surprisingly, most of what is said isn’t exactly erudite or informed—it’s low-hanging fruit…really low-hanging fruit.
Now when it comes to McClellan’s response to these videos, he likes to throw out Hebrew or Greek words, throw up screenshots of various books and articles, talk about “what all scholars” think, insist he is only interested in what the “data” is, because as a scholar, he’s all about “data over dogma.” He also loves to accuse anyone who disagrees with him of being an “apologist,” of not being able to handle the “data,” and of clinging to their own “dogma” that is rooted in a desire to exercise power over marginalized groups. In the midst of all that, he never really gives that much actual “data.” Instead, he routinely smuggles in his own particular biases and dogmas that, yes, might be shared by a select number of scholars he likes, but then he mischaracterizes as “what all scholars believe.”
Incidentally, if there is a scholar who doesn’t agree with him, McClellan conveniently labels him an “apologist.” That label initiates a clear Pavlovian response in the “social identity group” to which McClellan is pandering—namely, progressive, ex-Evangelical, or secularist types. “What? An apologist! We freaking hate him! We’ll believe anything McClellan tells us because it is in contrast to…that freaking apologist!” It’s the same trick ultra-conservatives do to cater to their preferred group. Want your group on your side? Call the scholar you’re attacking a “liberal” (even if he really isn’t) and they’ll believe whatever you tell them about that “liberal” scholar.
Simply put, what McClellan likes passing off as “data” is mostly just progressive dogma superimposed on the biblical texts. Now most of the time, what he points out is wrong with these random people whose videos he highlights is really wrong. Of course, that’s not hard to do with such low-hanging fruit. But it is what he smuggles into his own analysis—his own dogma that he tries to pass off as “data”—that’s the problem.
But let me just jump right into the book and address a few more of McClellan’s foundational pieces to the way he understands the Bible.
Introduction to the Book: Inspiration, Inerrancy, and Univocality
In his introduction, McClellan claims that, as a biblical scholar, he tries to understand the Bible on its own terms—that’s good. He also correctly points out that what “the original authors and audiences of the Bible intended and understood it to say isn’t always going to be the same as what I [or anyone in the modern world] understand it to say when I read it” (1)—again, that’s good.
The only problem, though, is that in practice, McClellan does not, in fact, try to understand the Bible on its own terms. What he routinely does (as we’ll see in this book analysis) is dismiss what a particular biblical passage says on its own terms and ignore what the original authors and audiences of that particular biblical passage intended and understood and, instead, inject his own “dataless” assumptions about what was really behind that particular biblical passage. Simply put, he does everything he can to get around the intended meaning of the biblical authors, so that he can offer his own, dogmatic and biased speculations about how those biblical authors twisted the ORIGINAL of the original texts we have. In McClellan’s view, what was really intended and understood isn’t in the biblical texts that we have…it’s in the texts and beliefs the biblical authors changed and “renegotiated” (more on that term later) in order to further their own agendas and attempts to gain power.
If you’re unsure what that all looks like, hang on tight—McClellan’s book is filled with this thinking.
In any case, McClellan insists that he is all about just getting to the “data” of the original authors and audiences. He contrasts himself and his quest for just the data with anyone who disagrees with him by saying that such people are holding on to their particular beliefs, not because they have been “convinced by the data or evidence” (1), but rather because those beliefs are “required or incentivized within the social identities that are important to them” (1). What does that mean? Simple: conservatives have their beliefs about the Bible so they can justify the dominance of their own “social identity” (i.e. white people, patriarchy, anti-immigrant, sexist, anti-LGBTQ etc.). They don’t care about the “data,” they’re just using the Bible to further their bigoted views.
Now, McClellan crystallizes the main problem with people who disagree with him this way. He focuses on three “dogmas” that these kinds of people hold: inspiration, inerrancy, and univocality.
- Inspiration: “The belief that the folks who wrote the texts of the Bible were so thoroughly influenced by God that their compositions are in some sense the very ‘word of God’” (2).
- Inerrancy: “The belief that they are inspired leads to the dogma that the biblical texts are in one sense or another inerrant” (2).
- Univocality: Basically “one voice”—the belief that the Bible as a whole speaks with a unified, coherent message from beginning to end.
The problem with these three labels, though, is that McClellan does a really poor job teasing them out. He leaves them at a very superficial level. Granted, many “right-wing Fundies” treat them in a superficial way as well. Granted, for those types of “right-wing Fundies,” they treat the Bible as if God directly dictated it to human vessels in absolutely a perfect way, with not even one comma out of place, and therefore “If the Bible says it, I believe it!” And yes, those kinds of people easily read into the Bible their own social, cultural, and political biases. And so, again, when McClellan shows where those kinds of people are wrong, he’s right.
But he basically reduces inspiration to mean “God wrote it ultimately,” which is a really lame way to understand inspiration. Now, I have a problem with the modern Evangelical notion of inerrancy (and I write about it here and here; I also did a series on Hugh Ross’ book, “Rescuing Inerrancy”–Part 1 here), but compare my discussion on the topic with McClellan’s, and I dare say you’ll find McClellan’s rather shallow and thin. As for univocality, McClellan beats this like a dead horse in order to avoid any notion there is an ultimate, over-arching message to the Bible, because it is clear that McClellan doesn’t believe there is any sort of over-arching message to the Bible.
In fact, as he states in his introduction, he doesn’t even believe the Bible says anything at all: “The Bible is a collection of texts, and texts do not have inherent meaning” (3). He says that when it comes to the biblical text, “there is no ‘meaning’ inhabiting any of them (whatever that might mean). Meaning is generated in, and confined to, the mind of a reader…” (4). Let’s be clear, since McClellan believes there is no “inherent meaning” in the biblical text, and since he thinks any meaning is generated and confined to the mind of the reader, that means that when he says at the very beginning of the introduction that he, as a biblical scholar, wants to “understand the Bible on its own terms” and that it is important to try to understand what the original authors intended and what the original audiences understood—
…do you see the problem? Do you see the inconsistency? How can he, as a biblical scholar, “understand the Bible on its own terms” and understand what the original authors intended…if he doesn’t think the biblical text has any inherent meaning, and thinks that any meaning comes from the reader’s own mind? Let me be blunt: McClellan doesn’t care about any original meaning or intention because he doesn’t believe it exists. There is no “meaning” in the biblical text to uncover—you just make it up. Don’t believe me? Here’s what McClellan says: “Reading a text is not a matter of excavating or extracting meaning from it; it’s a matter of creating it ourselves and trusting that we’ve come close enough to what was intended” (5). Readers create meaning for themselves…and who knows if it is what was intended? Maybe…maybe not!
McClellan then puts forth a toy chest full of LEGO blocks as his preferred metaphor for Bible interpretation. All the blocks are just stuffed in the toy chest and there “are no instructions or pictures to guide us” (6). Therefore, we can just build whatever we want out of the LEGO blocks. No matter what we do, McClellan says, “we’re creating meaning with the Bible. …I frequently refer to this process as “negotiating” with the text. (8) That’s his basic approach to how to understand the Bible.
If you have a problem with that, or if you’re confused by it, congratulations—you’re obviously an “apologist” who values your own power-grasping “dogma” over McClellan’s preferred “data.”
…or maybe you are just using your critical thinking skills to notice the obvious contradiction in what McClellan is saying. In fact, he ends his introduction by telling his readers, “I’m using critical methodologies to try to reconstruct what people at certain points in history likely understood these texts to mean” (10). …so he is going to try to understand what the texts originally meant? But wait, there’s more! He then turns around and says, “Because texts have no inherent meaning, once they begin to circulate, they mean whatever people understand and use them to mean” (10). …so, he’s going to use critical methodologies to reconstruct what the texts might have originally meant, but still, the texts have no inherent meaning, and end up meaning whatever people want them to mean?
If you don’t accept what McClellan is saying, then, again, you’re just clinging to your own dogmas and biases. And dogmas, McClellan tells us at the end of his introduction, “…often serve the structuring of power, values, and boundaries, and often at great cost to minoritized, marginalized, and oppressed individuals and groups” (11). Translation? If you don’t agree with him, you just want to oppress minorities. McClellan knows this because he is “a specialist in the cognitive science of religion” and he spends his time “studying and thinking about subconscious biases and motivations related to how we think and speak about the Bible and religious questions” (13)—that means you. If you don’t accept what he says, that just means your dogmatic, subconscious biases and motivations are showing. You can trust McClellan because he just wants to put “data over dogma.”
Conclusion
Well, in this post, we’ve laid the groundwork for understanding what McClellan covers in his book by looking at what he himself lays out in his introduction. It will take a walk through his chapters to see how all of what we’ve covered here in Part 1 of my book analysis series plays out in his analysis of specific claims and biblical passages.
Stay tuned…it should be fun…for you to read. Will I enjoy writing it? That is yet to be determined.
The modern love to recognize that people experience the world through a subjective lens loves to conflate that with the notion that there is no such thing as objective fact. To the degree that you can be assured the chair in your house is still a chair in your house when you are not around, it seems absurd to me that anyone can claim subjective experience is all there is to the universe. If meaning, in the sense being used here, is only to be understood by every individual as an individual, why even write a book discussing arguments in the first place? What is the meaning in putting out a work that has no inherent meaning other than to occupy your time? This, I’m sure, will never be thought of by the subjectivists who engage in argumentation.
Also, OF COURSE WORDS HAVE MEANING! Words are representations of objects or concepts, both of which have an objective value, and when words are placed together they create a sentence that, too, has meaning derived from how these words interact with each other. This is also true for the written word. Yes, the meaning of some words change based on space and time, but they clearly had an original meaning or they would not have been expressed at all.
I did not mean to post such a lengthy comment, but the subjectivist types in the culture today annoy me to no end.
Write as much as you want! Intelligent comments are always welcome!
“…do you see the problem? Do you see the inconsistency? How can he, as a biblical scholar, “understand the Bible on its own terms” and understand what the original authors intended…if he doesn’t think the biblical text has any inherent meaning, and thinks that any meaning comes from the reader’s own mind?”
Indeed. If we take what McClellan says there consistently, it means that every single word he himself has even spoken or written is likewise meaningless, including when he says that texts are meaningless. It means that every scientific theory is meaningless, that every text he has ever read and agreed with about the cognitive science of religion is meaningless, that everything he says about “the marginalized” and power dynamics is meaningless, and that communication and truth as a whole are just meaningless fictions.
The fact that you are so severely mischaracterizing McClellan’s argument via your highly uncharitable interpretation of his words really just proves his point in a roundabout way. *Words* don’t have meaning; meaning is the result that comes from the *marriage of words and interpretation.*
You haven’t unearthed any kind of deep contradiction by going “so does that mean McClellan’s words are meaningless???” (Which, let’s not even get into the fact that you’re equivocating on the word “meaningless,” conflating the concept of “absence of valuable meaning” with “absence of the ability to contain meaning ceteris paribus.”) Yeah, Dan McClellan agrees; his ~own~ words do not have any ~inherent meaning absent of a human being’s interpretation of them~.
Additionally, “communication and truth” =/= “words.” In fact, the difference between “communication” and “words” is the entire point McClellan is making. Communication is a *participatory/covenantal process* of signaling. Words are merely the *medium* through which that communication occurs. Like a boat ferrying animals: the boat is not “the animals” on it. But you’re coming here saying “if all boats don’t ~inherently~ have animals in them, then that would mean it’s ~impossible~ to ferry animals across water. But since boats have animals in them sometimes, that means we can conclude that all boats must have animals inside of them automatically by default.”
It’s like the physics of color perception. “Objects do not have inherent color” is a good parallel to McClellan’s claim “words do not have inherent meaning.” Color is an observable property of light reflecting off of objects. As such, if there is no light, then an object ~cannot be~ any color. Of course, objects ~do~ have innate physical-molecular properties which cause them to absorb and reflect different wavelengths of light, and thus ~appear~ to have color. But, critically, if it never has any light shone on it, then it will never be any color. In pitch-darkness, in the total absence of light, all objects are the same color: black (which isn’t even a color, it’s a shade, but whatever). And, more importantly, the same object can “change color” when it is placed under two different light sources (Put a cloth that reflects all wavelengths of light under neutral white light and it will be white. Put the same cloth under a red light and it will be red).
Words, Reading, and Meaning have the same relationship as Dye, Light, and Color. The third (Meaning/Color) can never exist without *both* the first physical component (Words/Dye) and the second perceptual component (Reading/Light) joining together.
Ah, yes, because McClellan has nothing but charity for conservatives and Christians in general. While I agree we should be charitable, he has none and his argument is ridiculous. We can call that out.
The issue is McClellan here and elsewhere (when trying to argue excluding Mormons is a No True Scotsman fallacy) denies the meaning of words. He denies Christian means anything to buoy this argument. But, then, he describes what ecumenical councils are when saying people never did things like then to define what a Christian is, when they quite explicitly did. I think people pointing that out to him is why he won’t even let groups decide anymore. Which means I can redefine Nazi to include him if I get enough people onboard. Or, at the least, I can interpret his book to be of the exact same train of thought as Mein Kampf. If texts have no inherit meaning (which McClellan concedes), that’s at the very least a possible understanding. And, if it is, I’d distance myself from any sort of argument that implicates me with my worst enemies, if I were Dan.
Yes, words themselves are conventional but they point to actual things. The boat analogy (while being totally incoherent) is assuming we conflate word and meaning. We don’t. Nobody is arguing that. Words have a given meaning by their creators but they designate actual things out there. Whether objects or concepts. How do you communicate truth if not by words? What, do we emit a pheromone? The mind boggles.
Or look at color. White, for example, is just a word we use to designate the thing we perceive. Irregardless of if we are there or not, that exists beyond us. Just like light and due exist beyond us. Or observations and testing. Again, it points to real external things. This is where we get into this weird subjectivist/lithic nihilism hybrid where truth is dependent upon your perception but it’s so dependent on you it only exists if you perceive it. I can’t even begin to point out all the ways this works against you but an easy one is now you have to deny a mind-independent world if you believe this, and goodbye science at that rate.
To continue the analogy, McClellan is not simply denying you don’t get meaning without text and reading (which isn’t even true of the second condition in his case), McClellan denies that they have meaning at all, by which I mean devoid of information, hence what he says about the term Christian. It’s up to us to construct that meaning because it doesn’t exist without you. He denies the existence of the color in a shirt in itself. He posits you create the reality by which a text has meaning or a short has color. Which, weirdly, is how he accuses “apologists” of reading the Bible as a dig, then he admits that’s how he reads the text, and that’s not a double standard?
And, from what else Joel quotes, you can’t get to the “true meaning” of a text by reading it because there is no meaning, merely an interpretation. And that’s rich from the guy who uses data as a comma and dogma as a capitalization, You’re giving him way too much credit, his grasp of philosophy (or lack thereof) gives Sam Harris a run for his money.