BIble Believing in (truncated/simplified) History

So--after many successful years as a Southern Baptist pastor in Oklahoma, Missouri, and Louisiana, my father found himself (in 1990/91-ish) unable to find a Baptist church willing to hire him for a wage sufficient to support the rest of us. What was going on? I mentioned the general oddities endemic to congregational church systems as well as the early 90s financial crunch.

A bigger issue, however, was the shift within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) as a whole. I've referenced this before, but to recap: Over the course of the 70s and early 80s, the SBC as a denomination experienced a kind of slow-motion coup. The more fundamentalist/conservative wings of the church--using entirely legal means--won several key leadership positions within the upper administrative bodies of the Convention. These positions enabled the conservatives to purge denominational boards, agencies, and eventually seminaries of non-conservative people.

As is the case with any complex transformation, a number of factors (historical, cultural, geographic) colluded to make this shift possible. Most prominent among these, however, was the "Battle for the Bible," which I've also written about. Conservatives established a bright-line separation between themselves and everyone else with the doctrine of inerrancy: "Do you believe that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God"?

Now--some quick historical review. For most of Christian history (at least that part of history after the canon of scripture had been basically established) one could say generally that Christians viewed scripture as authoritative and reliably "true" in a general sense. Of course, only a thin sliver of Christians through the medieval and early modern periods actually enjoyed access to scripture (people were burned at the stake for translating the Bible in to the vernacular). Nevertheless, the question of the Bible's truth status played little if any role in the first millennium or so of Christianity. None of the many, many creeds churned out to weed heresy from orthodoxy mentioned anything about belief in God's Word as an essential Christian tenet.

What changed, to be brutally simplistic, was Martin Luther. Attempting to reform the Catholic (i.e., "universal") Church, Luther promulgated a number of departures from traditional Roman Catholic doctrine. Among these: sola scriptura--that Scripture alone, and not the edicts of the Popes or the traditions of the Church, serves as the proper basis of all Christian belief and action.

Very quickly, Luther's Reformation inspired Catholic breakaways throughout Europe, many of which began reading and translating the Bible in an effort to establish a uniquely non-catholic (or Reformed) set of creeds (the Westminster Confession of 1646 is a particularly influential example). These creeds notably incorporated belief in the authority of scripture as essential to Christian doctrine.

Reformation Christians soon found, however, that different people (or groups of people) can arrive at stunningly divergent understandings of what the same set of words on a page mean. Schism became and remains one of the defining tendencies of Protestant faiths. Parallel to this rise in "reading the Bible for yourself" trends, the Renaissance and after that the Enlightenment weaned intellectual Europe (and the Americas) further from dependency on the authority of Rome. "Sapare aude," said Immanuel Kant in his famous essay, "What is Enlightenment?": "Dare to think."

But thinking--the Enlightenment faith in the progressive possibilities of human reason--led many to turn a more skeptical eye on the Bible itself as a source of authority. In the 19th century, several northern European seminaries began studying the Bible not (or not only) as a sacred Word to be revered but (also) as a human document amenable to investigation by archeological, literary, and philological techniques. This "higher criticism" came to view the Bible as a patchwork collection of heavily redacted documents from a number of sources.

This higher criticism, as well as other 19th century cultural shifts (Darwinism being a particularly visible one), inspired in various Protestant communities (especially in the US) a counter-reaction, one which reaffirmed the Bible as error-free, complete, and utterly factual in all of its assertions (from creation to genealogies to miracles). This literalist reaction had a higher-education equivalen (mainly Princeton Theological Seminary in the late 1800s), but it spread largely through loose networks of evangelists, speakers, and Bible colleges. "Bible-believers" (fundamentalist wasn't coined until 1920) practiced "Bible-reading," by which they meant a hermeneutic of plain sense.

The Bible, in this line of though, is perfectly understandable to any believing reader--no need for fancy education or philological analysis. God has preserved the Word, protecting it from corruption over the centuries and ensuring that it remains accessible to the common Christian. Its words are to be understood, where possible, in their simplest, plainest sense. The earth created in six days? Check. A global flood? Check. A talking donkey? A man swallowed, then vomited up, by a giant fish? A literal, bodily resurrection? Check, check, and check. Certainly the Bible uses metaphor or parable now and then (no one suggested taking every phrase literally), but these instances are obvious to the common reader and do not counter any commonsense understanding.

Over the twentieth century, as fundamentalism per se largely ceded ground to the neo-evangelical movement of the 1940s and 50s, "Bible believing" remained (and remains) a defining doctrine of evangelicals, including Southern Baptists. Most evangelicals, however, tend not to define "Bible believing" in too terribly specific a way. "Do you believe the Bible?" Yes, of course. "Do you believe that God created the universe in six, twenty-four hour days?" Well..."days" might actually mean "age..." In practice, Bible-believing usually allows for a degree of variation in believers' interpretations.

When the SBC underwent its conversion (or rededication, depending upon your point of view), the conservatives gave "Bible-believing" a very narrow, very specific definition. Those who could not or would not declare themselves in favor of an utterly-true-every-word-every-fact notion of scripture had to go.

As far as I know, my father was never challenged formally with this litmus test. Nevertheless, the inerrancy purge in the SBC had ripple effects throughout the denomination.

More tomorrow,

JF