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‘A hermeneutical Pandora’s box’

‘A hermeneutical Pandora’s box’

Last updated on: October 13, 2026 at 5:39 pm by Fred Clark

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‘A hermeneutical Pandora’s box’ 2026-10-13T17:39:22-04:00 Fred Clark

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I want to dip back into the post we were looking at yesterday from Richard Beck, “Are Most Evangelicals Egalitarian?” to highlight one particularly perceptive point he makes. Beck writes:

When our church became egalitarian, about half the congregation left, and those who left rejected egalitarianism precisely because they experienced it as a move toward progressivism — as though we were opening a hermeneutical Pandora’s box.

The end of that sentence gets at two key points. Discussion of “egalitarianism” is always also a proxy for a defense of evangelical hermeneutics (broadly and generously applied). And that defense of hermeneutics is shaped by fear — by the worry that allowing or considering any other hermeneutical approach would be “opening Pandora’s box,” unsettling everything and creating a kind of spiritual insecurity.

1611 and 1619

White evangelicalism has its own hermeneutic — its own approach to reading and interpreting the Bible. More than that, white evangelicalism is that hermeneutic.*

This is the proof-texting, clobber-verse concordance-ism that arose as two** revolutionary, world-changing new things arose at the same time and worked together to shape religion and life in the English-speaking colonies of the New World.

The first of those two things was the availability, for the first time in history, of mass-produced, affordable Bibles in an English translation. The “biblicism” that David Bebbington includes in his four-part definition of evangelicalism was not a possibility before the availability of such Bibles gave individual Christians individual, unmediated access to the scriptures.

This access arrived almost exactly concurrently with the other huge, world-changing new thing: the transatlantic slave trade. The King James Version arrived in 1611, the first ship carrying enslaved Africans arrived in 1619. The reception of the latter shaped the reception of the former. It taught English-speaking white Christians in the colonies how to read their new Bibles — how to “examine the scriptures every day” to defend and accommodate and support their new status as “masters.”

My favorite book describing this double-helix that formed the DNA of “evangelicalism” is Mark Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. That book recounts the long history of white Christians “debating” slavery, but what it also does is trace the gradual development and reinforcement of a particular, peculiar approach to the Bible — a method that involves consulting, citing, and reciting select passages (while dismissing and ignoring others) as the primary way of engaging with and seeking meaning from the text.

This strange new hermeneutic, in turn, brought with it whole new theologies — new soteriologies, in particular, with an otherworldly focus that, in turn, further shaped how and which texts and proof-texts would come to constitute the evolving “authority of the scriptures.”

That raised the stakes. It was no longer merely “Yes, but if we read the Bible this particular way — selecting and emphasizing these particular passages in this specific way — then we can justify injustice.” It became “We must read the Bible this particular way — selecting and emphasizing these particular passages in this specific way, or else we will fall into sin and go to Hell to be tortured for eternity.”

That’s what those folks were frightened of when they argued against “opening a hermeneutical Pandora’s box.”

It’s the same fear undergirding every evangelical “debate” over “issues” that they perceive as proxies for this hermeneutical divide. Whether it’s “egalitarianism” or “the [abstract] issue of homosexuality” the perceived underlying matter is “the authority of the scriptures” — that is, the viability of the concordance-driven, proof-texting, slave-traders’ hermeneutic. That hermeneutic provides their understanding of salvation and their assurance of that salvation, and so any perceived challenge to it is felt by them as a challenge to their eternal security.

It’s fear. Genuine fear.

We sometimes see this fear expressed in the semi-reluctant, semi-remorseful anti-egalitarianism or in the semi-reluctant, semi-remorseful embrace of some other “stance” on some other “issue” where a devout evangelical allows an apparent proof-text to trump conscience.

This is Parable of the Talents stuff here. It is precisely that same fear: ” I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground.”

It is the fear that comes from refusing to believe in grace — from imagining that our gracious impulses exceed those of God, who we imagine to be “a hard man.” It comes from imagining that it’s safer, or even possible, to avoid the need for grace by never doing anything that might incur such need, never risking doing anything that might go wrong and incur the hard man’s wrath. And thus it is a fear that leads us to bury our heads as well as our talents, never doing anything.

In that parable, of course, it is the servant who refuses to believe in grace and who strives to never require it and never extend it who ultimately cuts himself off from grace.

That’s how that works. Fear makes us selfish. It makes us Billy Zane on the Titanic. Fear is not malice, but it becomes malicious.

* I sometimes illustrate this by remembering my own mentors, the leaders of my own peculiar tribe of “progressive evangelicals”: Ron Sider, Jim Wallis, and Tony Campolo. Ron was absolutely an evangelical. Jim still is and has always been thoroughly evangelical. But Tony was not. Tony never subscribed to, and was never constrained by, the hermeneutic that defines white evangelicalism.

Ron and Jim befuddled and enraged their fellow white evangelicals by taking its proof-texting hermeneutic and applying it to parts of the Bible that history and culture had trained their fellow evangelicals not to see. Whenever Ron spoke about “Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger,” he’d go on about the “biblical data” on wealth and poverty. Nothing could be more white evangelical than that notion of “biblical data.” Jim’s Sojourners 101 talk always includes his own variation of this idea of “biblical data” — reminding his fellow evangelicals of the “more than 2,000” verses in the Bible addressing wealth, poverty, and injustice.

But Tony befuddled and enraged and intrigued white evangelicals by bringing them something very different — something from outside of their tradition. He was an Italian guy who was raised and discipled in the Black Church and who was literally ordained and commissioned as an indigenous missionary sent by that church to bring the gospel to his fellow white Americans. He wasn’t a proof-texter engaging white evangelicals on their own terms, exchanging verses like playing cards in a game of “War.” He didn’t make appeals to “the biblical data.” He treated the Bible as a book and a narrative and story, not an anthology of caselaw.

And as a result he helped some white evangelicals understand that this wasn’t about “opening a hermeneutical Pandora’s box” but about a veil being ripped asunder. Still terrifying, but in a very different way.

** I mean, yeah, more than just two. A lot more than just two. But the way that white Christian participation in the slave trade shaped and trained and formed the way that centuries of white, English-speaking Christians would come to read their Bibles from the very moment they first got their hands on them is vast, pervasive, and inescapable. It may not be the only thing that formed and deformed that new, developing hermeneutic, but it may be the biggest thing, and it also shaped every other thing involved in that development.

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