In my experience, few professing Christians are Bereans in spirit. During Paul's New Testament missionary travels, he ventured to Berea, where he taught. But the Bereans did not just accept his representation of Scripture as true; they investigated the text to verify his claims. Below is Acts 17:11, which describes what the author of Acts commended the Bereans for:
"Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true."
If only most Christians actually abided by this principle! I have seen almost nothing to assure me that American Christians at large truly rely not on other people for their Scriptural knowledge, but the Bible itself. How many Christians truly reject, for instance, moral claims that the Bible does not make? According to the Bible there is no such thing as morality beyond the scope of what the Bible reveals (Deuteronomy 4:2, Romans 7:7). Many seem to adopt the morality their church or culture teaches and cherry pick Biblical morality at whim to argue for their arbitrary moral beliefs, which leads to neglect of actual Biblical commands and false guilt over things which are not sinful. Much false guilt in the lives of Christians would vanish if they merely operated as the Bereans did in this area. Likewise, how many needless struggles with doctrines like eternal conscious torment would people not fret over if they realized the utter error of them? I have known very few bold, rational, and committed enough to reject tradition and the consensus of theologians when they study the Bible.
I could list many false theological beliefs which I have targeted on my blog, but I will instead mention only four: the belief that unsaved humans will suffer conscious torment without end [1], that premarital sex is universally sinful [2], that people have a moral obligation to cover a certain amount of their bodies [3], and that humans do not choose to become saved [4]. All four beliefs hold to things which downright contradict the Bible, yet I've sure as hell met a lot of Christians who believe in them! If anyone reading this doubts the falsity of these ideas, let them read the links I have provided and, not committing any logical fallacies, see that what I say is correct.
A legitimate exegesis of the Bible will have no need to appeal to extra-Biblical authority like tradition, popularity, emotion, or ignorance on any matter (the only extra-Biblical authority on theological matters is reason itself); it will, except in cases where extra-Biblical historical support is needed [1], need only the Biblical text and reason to establish itself as an accurate interpretation. It will be Scripturally defensible in and of itself and will not require reading anything into the text or interpreting it with inherited assumptions passed down by generations of irrational theologians (anyone not ruled by reason alone in their belief formation is not a rational person, and most people fall into this category).
Many theological beliefs which one would subject to either rejection or skepticism are ones to which many have deep attachments to. Whether on an emotional or psychological level, many people have biases and presuppositions that prevent actual clarity in understanding the Bible, obscuring to them what the Bible actually teaches. It doesn't take long for a Berean mindset to expose the logical and Biblical errors in many teachings. Take Trinitarianism as an example! The popular conception of Trinitarianism, where God is represented as three distinct beings with separate minds and wills who are somehow still identical beings, is obvious nowhere in the Bible (not to mention this description of the Trinity is logically impossible), yet the vast majority of churchgoers I have met seem to agree with it--though they rarely seem able to recall any verses in its defense when I ask for them, much less formulate a rational and Biblical defense of it! In fact, the common conception of Trinitarianism is not a doctrine the Bible teaches (I have yet to post more elaborately about this). And yet many who do not have the qualities of the Bereans accept this belief as Biblically true.
Trinitarianism, honestly, does not affect people's everyday lives the way that other irrational and unbiblical ideas do. Yet some false beliefs are very destructive and do affect the lives and spiritual health of people who believe them because they are not just abstract ideas that have little to no ability to be implemented in everyday life. When Christians fail to reject them due to intellectual and Scriptural knowledge, these errors can hurt people. I already talked about false guilt above, but more could be said about how erroneous beliefs like eternal conscious torment can truly impact people in a harmful way.
If more Bereans existed, far fewer heresies, distortions of Scripture, and legalistic beliefs and traditions would exist. Wherever genuine knowledge of Scripture flourishes in churches, poor theology gets identified and expelled. Thus the presence of so much bullshit in churches--fallacies, errors, assumptions, heresies, and general shallowness--means that the Berean spirit does not have a presence among them. Whatever lip service Christians at large may pay to the idea of deriving their moral and theological [2] beliefs from Scripture, their beliefs and actions show that they deceive themselves.
[1]. See here:
A. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-truth-of-annihilationism.html
B. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/03/revelation-20-and-annihilationism.html
[2]. See here:
A. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/08/on-exodus-2216-17.html
B. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/12/sexual-legalism.html
[3]. See here:
A. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-folly-of-modesty-part-1.html
B. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/05/bikinis-are-not-sinful.html
[4]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/03/foreknowledge-is-not-predestination.html
[5]. Extra-Biblical historical knowledge may be needed to understand some prophetic or historical passages, but it is unnecessary for knowledge of the most important Biblical doctrines. No one needs to understand what extra-Biblical historical documents say in order to know that the Bible teaches that the universe has a beginning and that God created it, that God has revealed moral obligations which humans have violated, that God will punish people for their sins, and that God has provided a method of salvation and wants every human to become saved.
[6]. No, the Bible is not needed to know that a deity exists, yet almost any knowledge of that deity's nature beyond its existence would require special divine revelation.
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