If you’re that mythical “ordinary” evangelical Christian, biblicism isn’t the sort of word you hear much in normal conversation. So if I were to guess how most of the evangelicals I grew up with would react naïvely to the concept of biblicism, I would guess that their initial reactions to the term would have positive connotations. On further reflection, I would point out that people are either going to react to the Bible or –ism parts of biblicism. As we react to the Bible part, we might guess that biblicism is a positive thing; as we react to the -ism part, we might guess it is negative.

For some reason, I believe this term has made a significant resurgence in evangelical discourse over about the past five years. I believe properly discussing the definition of that term would be helpful. To that end, what I propose is that biblicism should not really be definitely described, because different people use the term in different ways, but rather the term should be viewed as referring to a spectrum of attitudes and instincts, not a methodology or ideology per se, but rather as an informal aggregation of phenomena.

The simplicity of God is probably not a perfection you heard about much growing up in Sunday School. Discussions of God’s simplicity can quickly get rather abstract and technical. Indeed, whereas most attributes of God mentioned in Sunday School are usually apparently positive, simplicity might seem to be suggesting something negative about God–how could God not be complex? Isn’t complexity in some way better than simplicity? Isn’t the real world messy and complicated?