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
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Friday, August 21, 2009
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
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
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