Hyper-Inductivism: The Heresy-Hugging Hermeneutic

PART ONE

One of the real silent killers in American Evangelicalism's penchant for hating doctrine in specific and despising the mind in general, is an insidious, yet unformulated, interpretive tendency that I call "hyper-inductivism." The name is taken from one of the two main forms of reasoning--induction (thinking from specific data to more general conclusions) as opposed to deduction (thinking from more abstract categories to more specific conclusions). Let me give an example of both, and then proceed to discuss how various systems and academic disciplines seek to balance this out.

An example of inductive reasoning would be: Observation 1- "Water boils at X degrees in Y minutes on my stove." Observation 2 - "Water boils at X degrees in Y minutes on your stove." Observation 3 - "Water does not boil at X degrees in Y minutes in the Himalayas." Conclusion- "Altitude effects the rate of water boiling." An example of deductive reasoning would be: Premise 1- "Socrates is a man." Premise 2- "All men are mortal." Conclusion: "Therefore, Socrates is a mortal." Both forms of reasoning are perfectly valid. And, here's the kicker--There is not a single thing that we think or a single action that we perform that does not depend upon a seemingly infinite matrix of inductively and deductively arrived at assumptions. Many of the truly stupid rabbit trails in the history of Western thought emerged because one of these kinds of reasoning was overemphasized at the expense of the other. The initial split between Plato and Aristotle, the Medieval dispute between Nominalist and Realist, and the Enlightenment divide over Rationalist and Empiricist schools all arose because of a naive attempt to crown one or the other of these forms of reasoning as the epistemological king in all intellectual inquiry. But this is a fool's errand.

Now, out of the late Enlightenment arose a reaction to the inevitable skepticism of Hume that came to be known as Common Sense Realism. It was propounded by the Scot, Thomas Reid (1710-1796), as a means of simply moving on with both ethics and science. It was common sense that mediated between the mind and the external world, and that the self had direct access to the objects of the world "out there." Long story short, this became the dominant reactionary thought form among the American revivalists of the Second Great Awakening in the 1830's, a historical event already mired in anti-intellectualism. Cults and slightly more orthodox movements alike had a new hermeneutic to justify their contempt of, and embarassment at, the first eighteen centuries of the church. During the next fifty years, the vast majority of what is now present day American religion was born--Restorationist, Nazarene, Pentecostal, and, the more cultic extremes--all firmly rooted in the soil of the naive Realist assumption that to go directly to the text with a kind of Lockean tabula rasa (blank slate) was within the reasonable ability of the reader of Scripture. Even the Princeton theologians fell for this in some small measure. Charles Hodge, for example, refered to the Bible as the theologian's "storehouse of facts" in the same way that nature was for the scientist. Now this is not altogether ironic. The fact is that the scientific community in the twentieth century was exposed as opperating under this same presuppositional naivete; and, though the scientific method burns on the fuel of induction, still, inductivism was dealt a swift death by philosophers of science, such as Popper, Kuhn, and Polyani.

Yet no Evangelical thinker has really pulled the lid off of an even more rabid inductivism within the church--a hyper-inductivism. Its main feature is an all-out assault on understanding Scripture systematically. It puts the most minute detail of the leaf under the microscope of the latest layman's reference tool, yet forgets that this leaf belongs to a tree, and the tree in turn to a forrest. One of the more popular examples of this is Precepts Ministries and its celebrated Inductive Bible Study Method. Now I want to make it crystal clear that induction is good; and many of the tricks of the trade suggested by Kay Arthur's ministry can be of immense help. The trouble is that in a church culture that has cherished a suspicion of systematic theology and which has the attention span of a goldfish, to introduce the Bible via this intentionally "grid-free" grid becomes problematic. Is it at all possible that this approach is not the best starting point for the layperson? But let me turn elsewhere, since this is not a critique of Precepts per se.

It would probably be more helpful to see the tendency in action. We will look at the problem first on a popular level, and then in its more systematic (yes, I know: irony) form. In a more formal study of logic, the more simple application of the hyper-inductivist approach would probably better be called the fallacy of immediate inference--or the assumption that because two propositions are logically equivalent, that therefore the one in question is sound about the world. One word or phrase or concept either frequently used in x way or generally assumed in y fashion amounts to cracking the code to the Rosetta Stone. The chief offense in contemporary Bible study is to look up the Greek meaning of a word and behave as if that has settled the matter. I say this is the simple, popular version, but serious theologians such as C. H. Dodd have built entire cases on this meaningless drivel, such as when he dug up the whole corpus of the Bible's usage of hilaskomai (to propitiate) to prove that God's wrath did not need to be appeased in the atonement, and that the phrase "wrath of God" was frequently used "in the sphere of cause and effect: sin is the cause, disaster is the effect." There are clear naturalistic assumptions in Dodd. Orthodox theologians such as Leon Morris, Roger Nicole, and John Stott have all thoroughly refuted him on these points. But this scholar was doing with some degree of sophistication what so many churchgoers today do by means of what has been called "the versification of Scripture."