BIble-believing and Cultural Confrontations

Why has "Bible-believing" achieved such popularity within conservative evangelicalism?

By "Bible-believing," I refer not merely to a general reverence for Christian scripture but to a view that holds the Bible boasts the following features:

* full inspiration: the Bible's words are not men's words (i.e., not merely Paul or Peter or Luke speaking) but God's words. Imperfections and ambiguities that plague human communication do not apply to the Bible. When the scripture advances a proposition, it is as if God had spoken it word-for-word.

* completeness: the Bible offers no loose threads; it needs no further additions.

* freedom from error: not only does the Bible contain trustworthy precepts for faith; it is also factually accurate in its every assertion (historical, scientific, psychological).

* freedom from internal contradiction: apparent contradictions between scriptures are really human failures to interpret the Bible properly

* coherence: the Bible is reliably self-referential, making trustworthy assertions about itself. The Bible "interprets itself."

* transparency/accessibility: the Bible--in English translations--is perfectly amenable to readings by any person regardless of theological or doctrinal education. It is meant to be understood in its plainest sense.

I reviewed yesterday some historical factors that made Bible-believing attractive to 19th century evangelicals. Specifically, Bible-believing provided a populist basis for resisting certain features of modernity. The 1800s witnessed an increasing secularization of domains (society, politics, economics) once assumed to be part and parcel of theological world-views. As evidenced by Darwinism, the natural sciences had somehow garnered enough authority to challenge the Biblical account of creation. Politics and economics began defining themselves as public, even secular practices, distinguishing themselves from religious convictions they labeled as properly private--and therefore ignorable or suppressible--attributes.

In reaction to these trends, Bible-believing advanced a counter-discourse of divine knowledge as competitively (even superlatively) normative, accurate, and authoritative. The Bible was not "merely" a religious document but also a treatise on politics, science, history, anthropology, and psychology. Moreover, unlike the ivory-tower, esoteric practices of higher criticism or Darwinism, "Bible-believing" offered a way of knowing accessible to anyone who could read. One could become a sophisticate through a comprehensive knowledge of the King James Bible.

The problem is, of course, that once you assert that the Bible boasts a degree of accuracy comparable or superior to (secular) scientific fields, you have set yourself on a certain path of confrontation when the assertions of, say, astronomical science fail to reaffirm a literal understanding of the Genesis creation account (e.g., the sun being created only after plants). You've forced an either-or dichotomy: either science [or history, archeology, anthropology, philology, pyschology, etc.] or literal Biblicism.

Moreover, Bible-believing ramps up the stakes of any such confrontation, asserting another either/or: EITHER the Bible is totally and completely factual in every single assertion it makes OR the entire Bible is a pack of lies and fantasies. Bible-believing makes Christianity entirely into a matter of the reliability of the Bible as a set of truth propositions. If the Bible falls short of a scientific standard of accuracy, then Christianity loses all intellectual force.

Yet, despite some rather stunning defeats (the Scopes monkey trial in 1925 was particularly embarrassing for US fundamentalists--even though they "won," they lost), inerrancy doctrine is perhaps more entrenched than ever in US evangelicalism. The Southern Baptist Church's "Battle for the Bible" serves as one of the most obvious examples. Using the "do you believe the Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God?" litmus test, conservatives were able to transform the SBC from a moderately conservative denomination to a strictly conservative-bordering-on-fundamentalist one.

Given that Bible-believing inspires such sharp divisions within denominations and churches, and given also that inerrancy makes Christian faith into a series of either/or confrontations with modern culture, why would evangelicalism--which is ostensibly oriented toward spreading the gospel and making more disciples within contemporary culture--so consistently and stridently insist upon it?

More on the appeal of distinctions tomorrow,

JF