One of the terms that people like to throw around pejoratively every now and then is the word biblicist. When it is thrown around by non-evangelicals, it tends to mean people who value the authority of the Bible over other sources of authority. But I’m not really talking about them. When it is employed by other evangelicals, it usually means something like a refusal to recognise logical inferences and theological consequences with a very leaden approach to literalism and the letter of scripture. It is caricatured as a view that says, if the particular phrase or statement is not found directly in scripture, it isn’t biblical.

That latter sort of biblicism is genuinely a problem. There are all manner of things you won’t find directly stated in the Bible, but the concept is very much there and the theological consequence holds. The most obvious example would be the doctrine of the trinity. The word doesn’t exist in scripture but is a catchall for all the biblical teaching data that points to the fact that there is one God, who subsists as three persons, each person is distinct and each person is fully God. With the exception of there being one God, those bald statements aren’t generally found but the concept and all the biblical data we have assuredly tells us they are true. A hardcore Biblicist of the kind described above might reject this doctrine because there is no overt, singular statement to that effect. All orthodox people recognise the problem here.

But usually, when other evangelicals throw the word biblicist about, they aren’t really referring to people who refuse to accept theological and logical inferences and necessities. Most the time, the people they’re talking to do recognise things like the trinity because it is clear that the Bible teaches the doctrine even if it doesn’t quite make a bald statement that God is trinity and this is what he is like. What the person being called a biblicist is usually saying is something closer to this: can you show me where the bible says that?

There is a distinct difference between being a biblicist – refusing to accept any teaching unless there is a direct statement, using those exact words, in the Bible – and asking for biblical grounds to accept whatever is being said. It is very easy to throw around the term biblicist any time somebody asks us to back up what we are saying from the Bible. It’s particularly easy to employ when – though we might think otherwise – the Bible doesn’t quite say what we are insisting it does.

Of course, sometimes the person saying ‘the Bible doesn’t say that’ is simply missing the logical and theological consequences of lots of the Bible. Sometimes, they might inadvertently be being biblicist. But we still have to show people that is the case with reference to the teaching (and the inferences of) scripture. At the same time, the person saying the bible doesn’t say what is being claimed may not be being biblicist, but arguing you are overlaying the scriptures with assumptions and frameworks that are themselves not biblically warranted and then reading the scriptures through your faulty framework as though it is of necessity a logical inference of scripture. This is not biblicism, it is asking you to take seriously the bible as your highest authority rather than implicitly making your final authority your preferred framework, a particular confession or creed, or the latest book you have read.

There is a place for using the term biblicist. I am concerned that it gets thrown around far too often and has lost much of its use. Most significantly, it is troubling that those who might ask for biblical evidence can be easily dismissed as biblicist when what they’re really saying is: can you show me that from the Bible? Not only is that not biblicism, it is quite legitimate and we may be in theological trouble if we are too quick to dismiss the question.