In the course of a review of Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture, Robert H. Gundry summarises, first, what Smith means by the word ‘biblicism’:

‘Biblicism means an emphasis on the Bible’s “exclusive authority, infallibility [or ‘inerrancy’], perspicuity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability,” though not every version of biblicism contains all these ingredients—at least not all in equal measure.’

Then, according to Gundry, Smith notes that this set of emphasis produces ‘pervasive interpretative pluralism’, with the result that:

‘Evangelical Christians differ widely on what they should believe and how they should behave; and their differences include important as well as unimportant matters. Thus “practice” includes belief as well as behavior, and “impossible” has to do with shared practices. For example, biblicists differ over

• human free will and divine sovereignty;
• penal satisfaction and Christus Victor;
• creation and evolution;
• sprinkling and immersion;
• divorce and remarriage;
• complementarianism and egalitarianism;
• just war theory and pacifism;
• pretribulationism and posttribulationism;
• amillennialism, premillennialism, and postmillennialism;
• everlasting torment and annihilation;
• soteriological exclusivism, inclusivisim, and universalism;

and on and on. In other words, biblicism fails to produce the theological and behavioral unity that Smith thinks necessary to validate it.’ (Bulleting added)

I have to confess that the rather extreme plurality of evangelicalism(s) is a significant stumbling block.  No doubt, we could be thankful for the ‘right of private judgement’ that lies behind this plurality.  And we could say that evangelicals are (or ought to be) united in their commitment to the historical creeds of the church universal, and to evangelical expressions of faith such as that produced by the Evangelical Alliance.

Still, this plurality remains something of an embarassment.

Smith (an ex-evangelical) no doubt thinks that he and others have found the desired unity in Roman Catholicism.

But at what cost?