My claim from yesterday: fundamentalist pastors like Steven Anderson and Fred Phelps operate from a more coherent hermeneutic base than many other conservative evangelicals. What do I mean?
As I've written about in this week's posts, Anderson and Phelps each represent examples of an overtly hate-ful theology, arguing that God does not love everyone and that in fact God's hatred of particular people--reprobates--is an essential feature of who God is. Both men base their theologies on the plain words of scripture, pointing out that the Bible, when taken whole and literally, simply does not support the popular myth of an all-loving God. Because God does not love reprobates, because God in fact despises reprobates, so too are Christians supposed to hate such people.
Now, conservative evangelicals for the most part repudiate Phelps as a hatemonger, casting their own stances against, for instance, gay and lesbian people not hatred of humans but as a disapproval of an action. Love the sinner, hate the sin. Again, such not-quite-fundamentalist evangelicals typically base their stances in this (and other) areas on the plain truths expressed in the Bible. Such evangelicals often foreground the solid Biblical foundation on which they stand when criticizing more liberal varieties of Christianity that do not consider homosexuality to be sinful (or which ordain women, or which use higher criticism, or which value social justice as part of the Christian mission, and so on).
Such liberals, goes the critique, always begin by calling into question the plain words of scripture, re-interpreting or "contextualizing" (scare quotes theirs) particular verses to mean less than or the opposite of what the plain English (or plain Greek) means. Liberals then begin to suggest that some parts of scripture are more human in origin than divine in origin, leading them to discard or marginalize particular sections in favor of others. For Bible-believing (in the sense of inerrantist) evangelicals, once a person sees the Bible as less than the complete, literal, cohesive, and inerrant Words of God, the downward slope becomes ever steeper and slipperier, curving downward into the abyss of apostasy. Evangelicals derive a great deal of their populist, common-sense ethos from the plain-and-simple premise that the Bible is either wholly reliable in every aspect or wholly false.
Here's where Phelps and Anderson come in. Judged from the standard of who reveres the Bible as inerrant more, evangelicals hold the high ground when debating liberals. But when distancing themselves from Phelps's and Anderson's acidic rhetoric ("God Hates Fags" for Phelps, "I pray that Obama dies and goes to hell" for Anderson), the situation gets reversed. Phelps and Anderson themselves make the argument that theirs is the more clearly supported stance.
And they're correct. That numerous scriptures speak of God's extremely negative emotions or violent actions toward living human beings is undeniable. "Break their teeth, oh God, in their mouths" isn't a verse that Steven Anderson just made up. Fred Phelps can and does draw on a host of scriptures that speak of the hatred of God. I have yet to encounter an evangelical treatment of Phelps, Anderson, or someone like them that even attempts to out-Bible the fundamentalists.
I frankly doubt it can be done. If the sole and most important criterion for Christian belief is the literal, plain-sense, non-historicized words of scripture (in King James English), then Phelps's and Anderson's different doctrines of hate clearly enjoy the superior support. It is they who can (and do) criticize evangelicals for ignoring or prioritizing different parts of scripture evangelicals find inconvenient: "Let me introduce you: this is the Bible," Anderson loves to say to his flock. ''Christian? Meet the Bible. Bible? Meet the Christian." Anderson doesn't say it's wrong to love people like Barack Obama; the Bible does. Any argument to insert context or nuance into Anderson's interpretation constitutes a tampering-with-Scripture just as blasphemous as that of the gay-apologetic liberals.
Ditto with Phelps. Think what you will of Phelps and his tiny Westboro Baptist Church's theology, but I have to respect the fact that they are more dedicated to fleshing out, justifying, and realizing their understanding of what God wants than most Christians are--heck they're more dedicated than most believers of any cause or faith are. I think the common dismissal of Phelps and his followers as homophobic or obsessively hateful misses the mark. Purely reactive hatred is a powerful but short-lived emotion. It encourages violent outbursts, not long-term, year-after-year projects. Phelps and his crew have gone beyond mere bigotry; theirs is a life discipline of hate similar to a nun's life discipline of chastity or poverty. In interviews and documentaries, members of the Phelps congregation are generally quite calm, even when discussing the filthy practices of the sodomites and the fools that support them. What they say may seem crazy, but how they say it is not. They are dispassionate, objective, and even clinical about their beliefs and demonstrations. They are True Believers in the imperative of divine hate, not fair-weather haters.
I describe them thus to contrast them further with most other conservative evangelicals who find themselves pressed into rendering an opinion on this or that culture war issue. Confronted with the notion of a female pastor or a gay member of church, for instance, the average conservative evangelical will likely register opposition based on their understanding of the Bible's literal words. Confronted with the spectacle of Phelp's "Thank God For AIDS" or "Fags Burn In Hell" signs (or with the soundbyte of Anderson asking God to make Michelle Obama a widow), however, that same evangelical will castigate such acts as un-Christian and un-Biblical.
Anderson and especially Phelps, however, are much better versed in justifying their stances via reference to the Bible than evangelicals in general are in criticizing them using that same criterion. And that's one of the major weaknesses of a doctrine of strict inerrancy: there's always someone whose theology is both more inerrant and more repellent than yours.
More tomorrow,
JF
Showing posts with label inerrancy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label inerrancy. Show all posts
Friday, September 11, 2009
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Gays, Steven Anderson, and Fred Phelps
Why, if the Rev. Steven Anderson espouses such an overtly hateful message, do I bother listening to hour after hour of his sermons? I use hateful in a technical sense--Anderson himself claims divine hatred of reprobate evildoers as an intrinsic characteristic of God. It is only an act of love, Pastor Anderson says, for him to point out the truth that God does not love everyone. God delights in the suffering of the evil, a group that for Anderson includes (but is not limited to) serial killers, child rapists, abortionists, and homosexuals.
In fact, it was Anderson's particular fixation on homosexuals ("queers," as he often likes to refer to us) that first drew me to him. His sermons popped up on my iTunes as I searched for anti-gay preaching. And there in one of his many sermons that mention homosexuals was a version of his take on reprobation. Reading Romans 1 literally (and in the King James Version), Anderson notes that such people began not as people with an erotic attraction to the same sex but as apostates, people pridefully turned away from God. As punishment for their apostasy, God gives them up to sinful, beastial desires, i.e., homosexuality.
Thus, in stark contrast to most conservative evangelical stances on homosexuality, Anderson defines gay people (and lesbians) in terms of the list of evils outlined in Romans 1:29-31: "Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful." In other words, Anderson argues that scripture "proves" that anyone who is homosexual is effectively an antisocial, anti-God, lying, merciless murderer. He has proudly claimed the label "homophobic." Who wouldn't, he asks, be frightened of such psychopaths? Gays are for Anderson the reprobates par excellence.
This hard-line stance seems to link him to another infamous anti-gay pastor, the Rev. Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church, known for his congregation's high-visibility protests of funerals of AIDS victims and Iraqi war veterans (among others) and for their central motto, "God Hates Fags." I have written about Phelps's particular brand of anti-gay rhetoric elsewhere. Phelps shares with Anderson a theology of reprobation. Like Anderson, Phelps views homosexuals ("fags" is his preferred term) as lower than animals and worthy of the death penalty. All of his church's actions against members of the military (e.g., "Thank God for 9-11" signs at war veterans' funerals) are motivated from his conviction that God is punishing the USA, that God in fact hates the USA, chiefly though not exclusively for refusing to apply the death penalty to homosexuals. Again like Anderson, Phelps repudiates any vigilantism. Indeed, his congregation is scrupulously law-abiding, knowing local, state, and federal free speech codes backwards and forwards.
Despite their similarities, however, it would be a mistake to lump Anderson and Phelps into the same theological basket. Unlike Anderson, Phelps subscribes to a kind of hyper-Calvinism in which God loves only the Elect (mainly: Phelps and the members of his church), hating with a holy hatred everyone else. He and his crew call on sinners to repent, which Anderson considers heretical (repentance not being for Anderson a part of the salvific process).
Most importantly however, Phelps and his congregation are simply not interested in the efficacy of their demonstrations, if by efficacy you mean winning converts to Christ. Drawing again on his strict interpretation of Calvinist doctrine, Phelps views salvation as entirely the work of Christ. The elect have already been chosen and have already been saved. They and they alone will repent of their sins and believe on Christ, and they will do so regardless of what Phelps and his followers do. Evangelism as such is a nonstarter with them. Their demonstrations aren't interested in winning converts; they are instead God's finger of accusation, pointing toward a world that has in its reprobation rejected God.
Anderson, as I've noted, rejects Calvinism as an extra-Biblical (and therefore evil) doctrine. He and his church devote nearly all of their resources to evangelistic outreach, knocking on doors and spreading the gospel systematically. Unlike Phelps, Anderson is passionately interested in winning souls. When soul-winning, he exchanges his fire-breathing rhetoric for a calm, friendly demeanor. The church services and Bible studies in which he waxes theological are not themselves evangelical instruments aimed at the unsaved. Church is meant primarily for the faithful, to help them grow and become more well-equipped as disciples.
It is most likely that Anderson and Phelps would, if made aware of each other, find deep fault with each others' theologies even as they share a strikingly anti-gay stance. I am fascinated, however, by how these two pastors in different ways live into the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy.
More tomorrow,
JF
In fact, it was Anderson's particular fixation on homosexuals ("queers," as he often likes to refer to us) that first drew me to him. His sermons popped up on my iTunes as I searched for anti-gay preaching. And there in one of his many sermons that mention homosexuals was a version of his take on reprobation. Reading Romans 1 literally (and in the King James Version), Anderson notes that such people began not as people with an erotic attraction to the same sex but as apostates, people pridefully turned away from God. As punishment for their apostasy, God gives them up to sinful, beastial desires, i.e., homosexuality.
Thus, in stark contrast to most conservative evangelical stances on homosexuality, Anderson defines gay people (and lesbians) in terms of the list of evils outlined in Romans 1:29-31: "Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful." In other words, Anderson argues that scripture "proves" that anyone who is homosexual is effectively an antisocial, anti-God, lying, merciless murderer. He has proudly claimed the label "homophobic." Who wouldn't, he asks, be frightened of such psychopaths? Gays are for Anderson the reprobates par excellence.
This hard-line stance seems to link him to another infamous anti-gay pastor, the Rev. Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church, known for his congregation's high-visibility protests of funerals of AIDS victims and Iraqi war veterans (among others) and for their central motto, "God Hates Fags." I have written about Phelps's particular brand of anti-gay rhetoric elsewhere. Phelps shares with Anderson a theology of reprobation. Like Anderson, Phelps views homosexuals ("fags" is his preferred term) as lower than animals and worthy of the death penalty. All of his church's actions against members of the military (e.g., "Thank God for 9-11" signs at war veterans' funerals) are motivated from his conviction that God is punishing the USA, that God in fact hates the USA, chiefly though not exclusively for refusing to apply the death penalty to homosexuals. Again like Anderson, Phelps repudiates any vigilantism. Indeed, his congregation is scrupulously law-abiding, knowing local, state, and federal free speech codes backwards and forwards.
Despite their similarities, however, it would be a mistake to lump Anderson and Phelps into the same theological basket. Unlike Anderson, Phelps subscribes to a kind of hyper-Calvinism in which God loves only the Elect (mainly: Phelps and the members of his church), hating with a holy hatred everyone else. He and his crew call on sinners to repent, which Anderson considers heretical (repentance not being for Anderson a part of the salvific process).
Most importantly however, Phelps and his congregation are simply not interested in the efficacy of their demonstrations, if by efficacy you mean winning converts to Christ. Drawing again on his strict interpretation of Calvinist doctrine, Phelps views salvation as entirely the work of Christ. The elect have already been chosen and have already been saved. They and they alone will repent of their sins and believe on Christ, and they will do so regardless of what Phelps and his followers do. Evangelism as such is a nonstarter with them. Their demonstrations aren't interested in winning converts; they are instead God's finger of accusation, pointing toward a world that has in its reprobation rejected God.
Anderson, as I've noted, rejects Calvinism as an extra-Biblical (and therefore evil) doctrine. He and his church devote nearly all of their resources to evangelistic outreach, knocking on doors and spreading the gospel systematically. Unlike Phelps, Anderson is passionately interested in winning souls. When soul-winning, he exchanges his fire-breathing rhetoric for a calm, friendly demeanor. The church services and Bible studies in which he waxes theological are not themselves evangelical instruments aimed at the unsaved. Church is meant primarily for the faithful, to help them grow and become more well-equipped as disciples.
It is most likely that Anderson and Phelps would, if made aware of each other, find deep fault with each others' theologies even as they share a strikingly anti-gay stance. I am fascinated, however, by how these two pastors in different ways live into the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy.
More tomorrow,
JF
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Baptist to UMC--the Quadrilateral
Switching to the United Methodist Church after a lifetime spent as Southern Baptists, as my family did in the early 1990s, challenged me to re-think my faith practice without many of the components I had long considered essential to that practice. The UMC's connectional rather than congregational structure meant that ministers and congregations worked within a standardized set of procedures and theological boundaries. The closer ties to Anglican and other high-church traditions made services and ordinances more formal.
But the most significant paradigm shifts I had to navigate were theological. As is the case in any denomination as large and longstanding as the UMC, Methodist doctrine is complex and multifaceted. Explaining all of its intricacies is beyond my abilities. I want instead to focus on three elements of UMC doctrine, that gave me a way to think of Christianity beyond evangelicalism.
First, although Methodists revere the Bible as the inspired and authoritative word of God, they do not espouse a "Bible-only" doctrine. I have recounted in past posts the "Bible-believing," plain/literal-sense, no-fancy-learning-necessary ethos underlying much of conservative evangelicalism. All you need, insist many evangelical churches, is a good Bible and the Spirit to lead you in reading it.
Historians of evangelicalism and fundamentalism, however, point out that evangelicalism in practice does not, can not, and has never worked purely by the People of God reading the Divine Words and acting on them in perfect accord. (Indeed, there are many stories in the 1800s of people locking themselves away with a Bible, reading it in the Spirit to see what God was really saying through God's Word, and emerging with profoundly Unitarian-Universalist conclusions). The sick, sad, truth is that different people will read the same text--even a divine text like the Bible--in radically divergent ways. As historians are quick to point out, the early Bible-believers also had strong, charismatic leaders who dictated exactly how believers were to be led in reading the scripture, grappling with its apparent contradictions, interpreting its ambiguities, and deciding (above all) which parts were more important to value than others.
There is to this day surprisingly little admission on the part of evangelicals that interpretive consensus by a few plays any part in shaping the evangelical theology and practice of the many. So dedicated are many conservative evangelicals to the notion of sola scriptura (i.e., Luther's argument that scripture rather than Church tradition ought to be authoritative) that they scoff at the very idea of a hermeneutic practice more complicated than "just read what it says."
I admit that the most common cause of my frustration with evangelical spokespeople I listen to or encounter comes from their tendency to meet differences of belief and practice with a smug, "Well, I just do what the Bible says." And yet, when pressed by a knowledgeable critic about why they manifestly do not do everything the Bible says (e.g., impose the death penalty for homosexuals, refuse to wear clothing made from two different fibers, keep slaves, honor the Jewish Sabbath), out come a whole host of complex interpretive guidelines not themselves contained in scripture: "Oh, see, that's the Purity code, and Christians don't have to follow that..." To be clear: I do not blame people for having interpretive or hermeneutic frames through which they read scripture, but I do expect that they be honest enough to admit such frames exist.
The Methodist tradition mirrors other traditions in recognizing and celebrating the fact that, of the many ways to regard scripture, Methodists practice a particular way. Methodists are not shy about valuing the writings of John Wesley as primary interpretive guides to use when reading scripture. But Methodists do not affirm simply: "Bible alone, with help from Wesley." Indeed, Methodists embrace what they call the Quadrilateral, a philosophy of balancing the testimony of scripture with three other considerations: reason, tradition, and experience.
Instantly, such a view makes scripture into something other than a stand-in for God. The more I learned about reading, writing, and literature, the more I realized how untenable it was to view the Bible as the literal, inerrant, infallible words of God written down by men. Human language is just too tricky a vessel to contain the flow of Divine discourse. Insofar as words are read, heard, or otherwise taken in by people differently, basing the whole of Christian faith and practice on the assumption that all true Christians read the Bible in one particular way strains credulity and produces a culture of heretic-hunting (is everyone reading just the correct way?) and schism (I don't think you're reading correctly, so I'm starting my own church).
The quadrilateral forces other factors than pure reading to share the burden of discerning What It Is We Christians Should Do. It expects and allows for divergent readings while recognizing overtly that limitations around those readings exist. It frees Methodists from being stuck following culturally bound norms espoused in the Bible (i.e., slavery, subjugation of women) while making it difficult simply to shift with the present-day cultural wind.
Most of all, the quadrilateral recognizes that, as Christians, we worship not a book, not even a God contained in a book, but a dynamic God-Spirit-Savior who speaks and acts constantly even today. Certainly that God acts and speaks through the book especially--but not exclusively. God gives us minds to reason, experiences to learn from, and forerunners in faith to converse with.
Encountering a tradition in which I could think beyond the (secretly unique Baptist understandings of) the literal reading of Scripture was life-giving for me.
More tomorrow,
JF
But the most significant paradigm shifts I had to navigate were theological. As is the case in any denomination as large and longstanding as the UMC, Methodist doctrine is complex and multifaceted. Explaining all of its intricacies is beyond my abilities. I want instead to focus on three elements of UMC doctrine, that gave me a way to think of Christianity beyond evangelicalism.
First, although Methodists revere the Bible as the inspired and authoritative word of God, they do not espouse a "Bible-only" doctrine. I have recounted in past posts the "Bible-believing," plain/literal-sense, no-fancy-learning-necessary ethos underlying much of conservative evangelicalism. All you need, insist many evangelical churches, is a good Bible and the Spirit to lead you in reading it.
Historians of evangelicalism and fundamentalism, however, point out that evangelicalism in practice does not, can not, and has never worked purely by the People of God reading the Divine Words and acting on them in perfect accord. (Indeed, there are many stories in the 1800s of people locking themselves away with a Bible, reading it in the Spirit to see what God was really saying through God's Word, and emerging with profoundly Unitarian-Universalist conclusions). The sick, sad, truth is that different people will read the same text--even a divine text like the Bible--in radically divergent ways. As historians are quick to point out, the early Bible-believers also had strong, charismatic leaders who dictated exactly how believers were to be led in reading the scripture, grappling with its apparent contradictions, interpreting its ambiguities, and deciding (above all) which parts were more important to value than others.
There is to this day surprisingly little admission on the part of evangelicals that interpretive consensus by a few plays any part in shaping the evangelical theology and practice of the many. So dedicated are many conservative evangelicals to the notion of sola scriptura (i.e., Luther's argument that scripture rather than Church tradition ought to be authoritative) that they scoff at the very idea of a hermeneutic practice more complicated than "just read what it says."
I admit that the most common cause of my frustration with evangelical spokespeople I listen to or encounter comes from their tendency to meet differences of belief and practice with a smug, "Well, I just do what the Bible says." And yet, when pressed by a knowledgeable critic about why they manifestly do not do everything the Bible says (e.g., impose the death penalty for homosexuals, refuse to wear clothing made from two different fibers, keep slaves, honor the Jewish Sabbath), out come a whole host of complex interpretive guidelines not themselves contained in scripture: "Oh, see, that's the Purity code, and Christians don't have to follow that..." To be clear: I do not blame people for having interpretive or hermeneutic frames through which they read scripture, but I do expect that they be honest enough to admit such frames exist.
The Methodist tradition mirrors other traditions in recognizing and celebrating the fact that, of the many ways to regard scripture, Methodists practice a particular way. Methodists are not shy about valuing the writings of John Wesley as primary interpretive guides to use when reading scripture. But Methodists do not affirm simply: "Bible alone, with help from Wesley." Indeed, Methodists embrace what they call the Quadrilateral, a philosophy of balancing the testimony of scripture with three other considerations: reason, tradition, and experience.
Instantly, such a view makes scripture into something other than a stand-in for God. The more I learned about reading, writing, and literature, the more I realized how untenable it was to view the Bible as the literal, inerrant, infallible words of God written down by men. Human language is just too tricky a vessel to contain the flow of Divine discourse. Insofar as words are read, heard, or otherwise taken in by people differently, basing the whole of Christian faith and practice on the assumption that all true Christians read the Bible in one particular way strains credulity and produces a culture of heretic-hunting (is everyone reading just the correct way?) and schism (I don't think you're reading correctly, so I'm starting my own church).
The quadrilateral forces other factors than pure reading to share the burden of discerning What It Is We Christians Should Do. It expects and allows for divergent readings while recognizing overtly that limitations around those readings exist. It frees Methodists from being stuck following culturally bound norms espoused in the Bible (i.e., slavery, subjugation of women) while making it difficult simply to shift with the present-day cultural wind.
Most of all, the quadrilateral recognizes that, as Christians, we worship not a book, not even a God contained in a book, but a dynamic God-Spirit-Savior who speaks and acts constantly even today. Certainly that God acts and speaks through the book especially--but not exclusively. God gives us minds to reason, experiences to learn from, and forerunners in faith to converse with.
Encountering a tradition in which I could think beyond the (secretly unique Baptist understandings of) the literal reading of Scripture was life-giving for me.
More tomorrow,
JF
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Ecclesia Militans and Vacation Bible School memories.
Today in church the pastor disclosed a contention that had brewed within the staff over the last week. As I've mentioned, I attend a United Methodist church connected with the university where I'm employed. Today was the welcome-(back)-to-university-life Sunday, where freshman, returning students, alumni, faculty/staff, and assorted friends and family all attended. Apparently (I had missed this fact in previous such Sundays), "Onward Christian Soldiers" traditionally serves as the closing hymn. Long-time church members fully expect to hear it on Return Sunday.
My pastor, however, described how some of the church staff (including himself, I suspect) expressed reservations about a hymn that advances so militaristic a vision of the church.
With a pang of nostalgia/embarrassment, I remembered how central that hymn had been to my childhood. It was one of the first hymns I learned how to play, doing so in order to accompany the throng of children and teachers marching in every morning of Vacation Bible School. And I have to say, though I share my pastor's uneasiness with jingoistic spirituality, many of my favorite hymns from my Baptist past are in essence rousing calls to military confrontation. "Onward, Christian Soldiers," "Once to Every Man and Nation,"
Or take "Faith is the Victory" (here's a midi of the tune):
Encamped upon the hills of light
Ye Christian soldiers rise
And press the battle 'ere the night
Shall veil the glowing skies
Against the foe in vales below
Let all our strength be hurled
Faith is the victory, we know,
That overcomes the World.
Faith is the victory,
Faith is the victory
Oh, glorious victory
That overcomes the World.
It's quite rousing! I'm humming and grinning just writing out the words. And try as I might, I cannot deny that much of my Christian heritage mobilizes a battle imagery. Why, even the text my pastor used today comes from Ephesians 6:10-20, about putting on the "full armor of God" (the shield of faith, the sword of the Spirit, the breastplate of righteousness, etc.).
I mention this to trouble the line of criticism I've been leveling at hard-line, confrontational biblical inerrancy doctrine. I described, for example, how conservative-fundamentalists in the Southern Baptist Convention used the doctrinal litmus-test question "do you believe the Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God" as a knife to cut away those they viewed as heterodox. I've dipped into the history of evangelical (or even fundamentalist) "Bible-believing" to suggest that inerrancy doctrine, when forcefully emphasized, inevitably collides with the culture at large. My implication was that fundamentalism's (and by relation evangelicalism's) reputation as being anti-everything (anti-evolution, anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-abortion, anti-science, anti-intellectual, etc.) has largely to do with the abrasive nature of inerrancy.
But, as the militaristic hymns and warlike Biblical imagery suggests, some degree of friction with the non-Christian world seems intrinsic to my faith. A truism of sociological theories of community notes that, as touchy-feely-inclusive as a word like community may seem, communities exist thanks not only to their inclusivity but also of their exclusivity. A community that accepted everyone equally would cease to be a community except in the most vapid-metaphorical sense. Communities qualify as communities insofar as they are not other communities (or unattached individuals). Distinctiveness is vital to any community.
Onward Christian Soldiers Bible-believing calls not only for distinctiveness but for resistance, opposition, even fierce struggle. But, to be honest, so too do Christian movements I have less qualms about identifying with--movements of social justice and liberation. Abolitionists, for instance, preached a not-just-different-but-better message: slavery is wrong. It should be resisted, abolished. Ditto the Christian socialist movements that decried economic exploitation or fought against the idea that anyone deserves to die for lack of money to buy food or medicine (a view that I hope catches fire again).
Or take the mid-1900s civil rights movements, whose songs shared the rousing confrontationalism of "Faith is the Victory": "We Shall Not Be Moved" or "We Shall Overcome" are just as defiant, just as abrasive a call to arms, as any song of my childhood.
"For our struggle is not against enemies of flesh and blood," writes the author of Ephesians, "but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness..."
I would think it a poor faith indeed that sees nothing dark in this world, nothing worth fighting against. Whether racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, apathy, selfishness, greed, and the like qualify as "cosmic powers" I am not sure, but such tendencies certainly seem adept at ensconcing themselves within human authority structures. And to that extent I hope my faith rouses me to battle with them in society, in my church, and in myself.
If, then, confrontation--forward resistance to aspects of culture--is not necessarily a flaw, where do I think the "Bible-believing" trend goes wrong?
More tomorrow,
JF-- Oh, yes: my church resolved the dispute over the closing hymn by choosing "Forward Through the Ages"--a hymn that puts different lyrics to Arthur Sullivan's "Onward, Christian Soldiers" tune. Just a reminder that the full armor of God includes shodding your feet in the gospel of peace.
My pastor, however, described how some of the church staff (including himself, I suspect) expressed reservations about a hymn that advances so militaristic a vision of the church.
With a pang of nostalgia/embarrassment, I remembered how central that hymn had been to my childhood. It was one of the first hymns I learned how to play, doing so in order to accompany the throng of children and teachers marching in every morning of Vacation Bible School. And I have to say, though I share my pastor's uneasiness with jingoistic spirituality, many of my favorite hymns from my Baptist past are in essence rousing calls to military confrontation. "Onward, Christian Soldiers," "Once to Every Man and Nation,"
Or take "Faith is the Victory" (here's a midi of the tune):
Encamped upon the hills of light
Ye Christian soldiers rise
And press the battle 'ere the night
Shall veil the glowing skies
Against the foe in vales below
Let all our strength be hurled
Faith is the victory, we know,
That overcomes the World.
Faith is the victory,
Faith is the victory
Oh, glorious victory
That overcomes the World.
It's quite rousing! I'm humming and grinning just writing out the words. And try as I might, I cannot deny that much of my Christian heritage mobilizes a battle imagery. Why, even the text my pastor used today comes from Ephesians 6:10-20, about putting on the "full armor of God" (the shield of faith, the sword of the Spirit, the breastplate of righteousness, etc.).
I mention this to trouble the line of criticism I've been leveling at hard-line, confrontational biblical inerrancy doctrine. I described, for example, how conservative-fundamentalists in the Southern Baptist Convention used the doctrinal litmus-test question "do you believe the Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God" as a knife to cut away those they viewed as heterodox. I've dipped into the history of evangelical (or even fundamentalist) "Bible-believing" to suggest that inerrancy doctrine, when forcefully emphasized, inevitably collides with the culture at large. My implication was that fundamentalism's (and by relation evangelicalism's) reputation as being anti-everything (anti-evolution, anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-abortion, anti-science, anti-intellectual, etc.) has largely to do with the abrasive nature of inerrancy.
But, as the militaristic hymns and warlike Biblical imagery suggests, some degree of friction with the non-Christian world seems intrinsic to my faith. A truism of sociological theories of community notes that, as touchy-feely-inclusive as a word like community may seem, communities exist thanks not only to their inclusivity but also of their exclusivity. A community that accepted everyone equally would cease to be a community except in the most vapid-metaphorical sense. Communities qualify as communities insofar as they are not other communities (or unattached individuals). Distinctiveness is vital to any community.
Onward Christian Soldiers Bible-believing calls not only for distinctiveness but for resistance, opposition, even fierce struggle. But, to be honest, so too do Christian movements I have less qualms about identifying with--movements of social justice and liberation. Abolitionists, for instance, preached a not-just-different-but-better message: slavery is wrong. It should be resisted, abolished. Ditto the Christian socialist movements that decried economic exploitation or fought against the idea that anyone deserves to die for lack of money to buy food or medicine (a view that I hope catches fire again).
Or take the mid-1900s civil rights movements, whose songs shared the rousing confrontationalism of "Faith is the Victory": "We Shall Not Be Moved" or "We Shall Overcome" are just as defiant, just as abrasive a call to arms, as any song of my childhood.
"For our struggle is not against enemies of flesh and blood," writes the author of Ephesians, "but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness..."
I would think it a poor faith indeed that sees nothing dark in this world, nothing worth fighting against. Whether racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, apathy, selfishness, greed, and the like qualify as "cosmic powers" I am not sure, but such tendencies certainly seem adept at ensconcing themselves within human authority structures. And to that extent I hope my faith rouses me to battle with them in society, in my church, and in myself.
If, then, confrontation--forward resistance to aspects of culture--is not necessarily a flaw, where do I think the "Bible-believing" trend goes wrong?
More tomorrow,
JF-- Oh, yes: my church resolved the dispute over the closing hymn by choosing "Forward Through the Ages"--a hymn that puts different lyrics to Arthur Sullivan's "Onward, Christian Soldiers" tune. Just a reminder that the full armor of God includes shodding your feet in the gospel of peace.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
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
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
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
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Word of God Battle of the Bible (PK Confessions)
So--to continue with the whole inerrancy issue (i.e., the notion that the Bible is a cohesive, error-free set of divine propositional truths unblemished by any shade of contradiction or error).
As a youngster Southern Baptist, I remained ignorant of the fine distinctions between theological terms like inerrancy, infallibility, and inspiration. I more or less endorsed a simple, "if the Bible says it, it's true" doctrine. I would venture to say that this is where most of the members of my father's churches lived. This is not to say they weren't committed Christians; it's just that debates about which exact doctrine of inspiration one subscribes to tends to be the stuff of professional theologians. The average church member is as likely to know about the 1978 Chicago Statement on Inerrancy as the average US citizen is likely to know how many amendments there are to the US Constitution (27) or who the current Secretary of Agriculture is (Tom Vilsack). Yes, these are important bits of information, but the average citizen can operate without knowing these. They exist on the back burner of vital civic knowledge.
Similarly, the inerrant-infallible status of the Bible in my early church training operated as a kind of sub-principle shaping other, more obvious facets of church life. I don't remember ever hearing a sermon or Sunday school lesson about inerrancy per se, but a high reverence for the Bible permeated church experience.
There were songs, such as "The B-I-B-L-E/That's the book for me." There was the Pledge of Allegiance to the Bible we recited each day during Vacation Bible School ("I pledge allegiance to the Bible, God's holy word, and will make it a lamp unto my feet, a light unto my path, and will hide its words in my heart that I might not sin against God"). There was the expectation that everyone attending church would own and bring to every worship service their own Bible (all the better if you had a fancy leather carrying case). Readings from the Bible structured every level of worship: sermons were based on a passage (or passages), Sunday School curricula took classes systematically through particular books of the Bible, endless contests or requirements urged children to memorize verse after verse (I can still recite tons of them), and of course stories from the Bible filled home and church life.
What I was unaware of as a youngster was the degree to which the question of Biblical inerrancy as such had moved to the forefront of the minds of many Southern Baptist leaders. Time and a lack of expertise makes this a brutally abridged account, but basically the 1970s and early 80s saw a massive shift in the ideological and theological focus of the Southern Baptist Convention--the denomination as a whole. This shift--alternately called the fundamentalist takeover or the conservative resurgence, depending on the historian's perspective--consisted of the conservative segments of the denomination establishing control over the political levers of the denomination.
For instance, by flooding the Convention's ballot boxes with local church supporters (I say flood, not stuff--they did nothing illegal), conservatives gained control of some key leadership positions. These conservative leaders in turn nominated similarly conservative sub-leaders, and so on. They thus democratically achieved a political hegemony within the denomination.
At the same time, conservatives pushed for and achieved a purge of non-conservatives (who were typically described not as "liberals" but as "moderates") from both denominational and seminary leadership. They did so through the tool of a doctrinal question: Do you affirm the Bible as the inerrant, infallible Word of God? Those leaders, missionaries, seminary professors, etc. who did not affirm this position were forced out.
The seminary victory was particularly important. Pre-takeover (i.e., when my parents got their degrees), Baptist seminaries featured a range of theological and biblical-critical methods. Post-takeover, any pastor with seminary credentials (typically a Master of Divinity) would have been trained in methods of Biblical criticism hostile to the "higher criticism" of other Protestant traditions.
The inerrancy question had thus assumed a kind of definitional importance it had not had previously in Baptist culture. Now, Southern Baptists are congregational rather than connectional in structure. That is, each congregation enjoys a good deal of autonomy in terms of its operation (contrasting with connectional systems like the Roman Catholic Church or the United Methodist Church). The Convention itself could not directly enforce inerrancy orthodoxy on the local church level, and some Southern Baptist churches remained moderate-to-liberal. Ripples from the takeover were thus slow to reach me personally as a Southern Baptist.
By the mid-80s, however, my parents--both of whom were moderates--had begun to feel that their time in the Southern Baptist Church might be limited. They returned from yearly denominational meetings increasingly dispirited. My mother wrote (and saw published) a letter critical of the takeover in the national Baptist periodical. My father began considering parachurch ministries, such as hospital chaplaincy.
Coincidentally, this was also around the time that I began to have some questions about the whole inerrancy thing...
As a youngster Southern Baptist, I remained ignorant of the fine distinctions between theological terms like inerrancy, infallibility, and inspiration. I more or less endorsed a simple, "if the Bible says it, it's true" doctrine. I would venture to say that this is where most of the members of my father's churches lived. This is not to say they weren't committed Christians; it's just that debates about which exact doctrine of inspiration one subscribes to tends to be the stuff of professional theologians. The average church member is as likely to know about the 1978 Chicago Statement on Inerrancy as the average US citizen is likely to know how many amendments there are to the US Constitution (27) or who the current Secretary of Agriculture is (Tom Vilsack). Yes, these are important bits of information, but the average citizen can operate without knowing these. They exist on the back burner of vital civic knowledge.
Similarly, the inerrant-infallible status of the Bible in my early church training operated as a kind of sub-principle shaping other, more obvious facets of church life. I don't remember ever hearing a sermon or Sunday school lesson about inerrancy per se, but a high reverence for the Bible permeated church experience.
There were songs, such as "The B-I-B-L-E/That's the book for me." There was the Pledge of Allegiance to the Bible we recited each day during Vacation Bible School ("I pledge allegiance to the Bible, God's holy word, and will make it a lamp unto my feet, a light unto my path, and will hide its words in my heart that I might not sin against God"). There was the expectation that everyone attending church would own and bring to every worship service their own Bible (all the better if you had a fancy leather carrying case). Readings from the Bible structured every level of worship: sermons were based on a passage (or passages), Sunday School curricula took classes systematically through particular books of the Bible, endless contests or requirements urged children to memorize verse after verse (I can still recite tons of them), and of course stories from the Bible filled home and church life.
What I was unaware of as a youngster was the degree to which the question of Biblical inerrancy as such had moved to the forefront of the minds of many Southern Baptist leaders. Time and a lack of expertise makes this a brutally abridged account, but basically the 1970s and early 80s saw a massive shift in the ideological and theological focus of the Southern Baptist Convention--the denomination as a whole. This shift--alternately called the fundamentalist takeover or the conservative resurgence, depending on the historian's perspective--consisted of the conservative segments of the denomination establishing control over the political levers of the denomination.
For instance, by flooding the Convention's ballot boxes with local church supporters (I say flood, not stuff--they did nothing illegal), conservatives gained control of some key leadership positions. These conservative leaders in turn nominated similarly conservative sub-leaders, and so on. They thus democratically achieved a political hegemony within the denomination.
At the same time, conservatives pushed for and achieved a purge of non-conservatives (who were typically described not as "liberals" but as "moderates") from both denominational and seminary leadership. They did so through the tool of a doctrinal question: Do you affirm the Bible as the inerrant, infallible Word of God? Those leaders, missionaries, seminary professors, etc. who did not affirm this position were forced out.
The seminary victory was particularly important. Pre-takeover (i.e., when my parents got their degrees), Baptist seminaries featured a range of theological and biblical-critical methods. Post-takeover, any pastor with seminary credentials (typically a Master of Divinity) would have been trained in methods of Biblical criticism hostile to the "higher criticism" of other Protestant traditions.
The inerrancy question had thus assumed a kind of definitional importance it had not had previously in Baptist culture. Now, Southern Baptists are congregational rather than connectional in structure. That is, each congregation enjoys a good deal of autonomy in terms of its operation (contrasting with connectional systems like the Roman Catholic Church or the United Methodist Church). The Convention itself could not directly enforce inerrancy orthodoxy on the local church level, and some Southern Baptist churches remained moderate-to-liberal. Ripples from the takeover were thus slow to reach me personally as a Southern Baptist.
By the mid-80s, however, my parents--both of whom were moderates--had begun to feel that their time in the Southern Baptist Church might be limited. They returned from yearly denominational meetings increasingly dispirited. My mother wrote (and saw published) a letter critical of the takeover in the national Baptist periodical. My father began considering parachurch ministries, such as hospital chaplaincy.
Coincidentally, this was also around the time that I began to have some questions about the whole inerrancy thing...
Friday, July 10, 2009
The Word of God--explanations (PK Confessions, part 3)
You know, I started this mini-series about The Faith I Grew Up With thinking I was just doing some necessary exposition--who is this guy writing?--before getting to nitty gritty details about conservative evangelicalism.
In relating some of the key components of my childhood faith culture, though, I realize I'm actually running through some of the commonly mentioned distinctives of present-day evangelicalism. There's the emphasis on personal conversion (with heavy stress on a literal heaven/hell afterlife), the emphasis on personal evangelism, and--today's topic--the status of the Bible as inerrant, infallible Word of God.
Actually, a full discussion of inerrancy would take much longer than a single blog posting to deal with. I'd go so far as to say that few other issues can compete with Biblical Inerrancy for the title of Most Perennially Divisive Issue in Evangelicalism. To keep things sanely short, then, I'll restrict myself to some basic definitions and clarifications in this post.
In general, biblical inerrancy refers to the belief that the Christian Bible (as Protestants affirm the canon--sixty-six books) is accurate, consistent, and factual in all aspects--not just authoritative in matters of faith or doctrine but reliable on any subject (science, psychology, history, geography) that it cares to mention.
Scholars and theologians (evangelical and otherwise) often distinguish between inerrancy and infallibility, the latter referring to a belief that affirms the Bible's reliability in matters of Christian faith but declines to endorse the "every detail" case of inerrancy.
More general still is the doctrine that the Bible is inspired, "God-breathed," full of divine truths about life and faith if not necessarily a set of cohesive, comprehensive propositions about faith. Most Christians of any stripe (evangelicals, non-evangelicals/mainline Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and many groups that evangelicals would consider pseudo-Christian sects, like the Mormans or Jehovah's Witnesses) would affirm the inspiration of the Bible.
Most conservative evangelicals, however, stress a particular brand of inspiration, commonly referred to as "verbal, plenary" inspiration. Plenary means "complete"--as in everything in the Bible, every book, every sentence, every story, every bit of doctrine. By verbal, evangelicals mean an understanding that God inspired every single word in the scriptures. Thus, by "verbal, plenary inspiration," evangelicals (those that affirm verbal-plenary inspiration, that is) propose that the scriptures contain no human-authorial excrescences or textual surpluses.
Now, for a variety of reasons I'll detail later, I do not subscribe to plenary-verbal-inerrant-infallible inspiration (indeed, I find the doctrine pernicious). Be that as it may, I need to make some quick clarifications about what a doctrine of inerrancy does not entail, lest I erect a straw-man of a belief central to many evangelicals. Most of these qualifications (and more) are included/explained in a much-cited document, the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, found here.
1. Inerrancy does not mean literalism. Like other writings, ancient and otherwise, the Bible occasionally uses literary devices like metaphor, simile, symbolism, allegory, or poetic imagery. It would be rare for an inerrantist to insist that a phrase like "built like a lion" means the person being described resembles some nightmare patchwork of lion-parts and human-parts. Inerrancy as most commonly conceived and practice recognizes and works with literary forms as they are found int the Bible. If there is some ambiguity as to whether a passage could be taken literally or allegorically (e.g., the Genesis creation account), however, inerrantists will typically affirm a literal reading. "Literal where possible" is the rule of thumb.
2. Most inerrantists tend to affirm that plenary/verbal inspiration applies to the original texts in the original languages--what are called the autographs. This qualification grants a few advantages. First, it lets evangelicals off the hook of having to affirm the authority of Bible copies that are clearly corrupted or misprinted (see this Wikipedia article for an idea of what I'm talking about). Second, the autograph concession gives evangelicals an "easy out"--or at least an Ultimate out--if they are confronted with what seems like a clear contradiction in scripture (a difference in numbers or names in parallel accounts of the same event, for instance). Since the autographs are lost, an irresolvable contradiction could be blamed on a copyist's error. I should mention, though, that in practice most scholars who subscribe to inerrancy will do their utmost to explain or reconcile seeming contradictions without recourse to the "easy out."
Finally, the autographs qualification defuses (or attempts to defuse) much of the debate about versions of the Bible--i.e., which English translation of the Bible is authoritative? Those inerrantists who affirm the 1978 Statement or something like it can endorse a range of translations (King James, New King James, New International Version, etc.). Crucially, though, there's a considerable number of conservative evangelicals who will insist not only on verbal/plenary inspiration but also on a corollary doctrine of preservation--namely that the only version of the Bible that preserves the autographs' (and therefore God's) exact words is the 1611 King James Bible, based on the Greek Textus Receptus. Such "King James Only" believers can be quite adamant in insisting in the inadequacy, even heresy of other versions.
Most evangelicals, however, are not KJV-only.
Why is all this important? What does this have to do with my Southern Baptist childhood?
To answer that, we'll have to get into what's known as the Battle for the Bible.
Peace,
JF
In relating some of the key components of my childhood faith culture, though, I realize I'm actually running through some of the commonly mentioned distinctives of present-day evangelicalism. There's the emphasis on personal conversion (with heavy stress on a literal heaven/hell afterlife), the emphasis on personal evangelism, and--today's topic--the status of the Bible as inerrant, infallible Word of God.
Actually, a full discussion of inerrancy would take much longer than a single blog posting to deal with. I'd go so far as to say that few other issues can compete with Biblical Inerrancy for the title of Most Perennially Divisive Issue in Evangelicalism. To keep things sanely short, then, I'll restrict myself to some basic definitions and clarifications in this post.
In general, biblical inerrancy refers to the belief that the Christian Bible (as Protestants affirm the canon--sixty-six books) is accurate, consistent, and factual in all aspects--not just authoritative in matters of faith or doctrine but reliable on any subject (science, psychology, history, geography) that it cares to mention.
Scholars and theologians (evangelical and otherwise) often distinguish between inerrancy and infallibility, the latter referring to a belief that affirms the Bible's reliability in matters of Christian faith but declines to endorse the "every detail" case of inerrancy.
More general still is the doctrine that the Bible is inspired, "God-breathed," full of divine truths about life and faith if not necessarily a set of cohesive, comprehensive propositions about faith. Most Christians of any stripe (evangelicals, non-evangelicals/mainline Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and many groups that evangelicals would consider pseudo-Christian sects, like the Mormans or Jehovah's Witnesses) would affirm the inspiration of the Bible.
Most conservative evangelicals, however, stress a particular brand of inspiration, commonly referred to as "verbal, plenary" inspiration. Plenary means "complete"--as in everything in the Bible, every book, every sentence, every story, every bit of doctrine. By verbal, evangelicals mean an understanding that God inspired every single word in the scriptures. Thus, by "verbal, plenary inspiration," evangelicals (those that affirm verbal-plenary inspiration, that is) propose that the scriptures contain no human-authorial excrescences or textual surpluses.
Now, for a variety of reasons I'll detail later, I do not subscribe to plenary-verbal-inerrant-infallible inspiration (indeed, I find the doctrine pernicious). Be that as it may, I need to make some quick clarifications about what a doctrine of inerrancy does not entail, lest I erect a straw-man of a belief central to many evangelicals. Most of these qualifications (and more) are included/explained in a much-cited document, the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, found here.
1. Inerrancy does not mean literalism. Like other writings, ancient and otherwise, the Bible occasionally uses literary devices like metaphor, simile, symbolism, allegory, or poetic imagery. It would be rare for an inerrantist to insist that a phrase like "built like a lion" means the person being described resembles some nightmare patchwork of lion-parts and human-parts. Inerrancy as most commonly conceived and practice recognizes and works with literary forms as they are found int the Bible. If there is some ambiguity as to whether a passage could be taken literally or allegorically (e.g., the Genesis creation account), however, inerrantists will typically affirm a literal reading. "Literal where possible" is the rule of thumb.
2. Most inerrantists tend to affirm that plenary/verbal inspiration applies to the original texts in the original languages--what are called the autographs. This qualification grants a few advantages. First, it lets evangelicals off the hook of having to affirm the authority of Bible copies that are clearly corrupted or misprinted (see this Wikipedia article for an idea of what I'm talking about). Second, the autograph concession gives evangelicals an "easy out"--or at least an Ultimate out--if they are confronted with what seems like a clear contradiction in scripture (a difference in numbers or names in parallel accounts of the same event, for instance). Since the autographs are lost, an irresolvable contradiction could be blamed on a copyist's error. I should mention, though, that in practice most scholars who subscribe to inerrancy will do their utmost to explain or reconcile seeming contradictions without recourse to the "easy out."
Finally, the autographs qualification defuses (or attempts to defuse) much of the debate about versions of the Bible--i.e., which English translation of the Bible is authoritative? Those inerrantists who affirm the 1978 Statement or something like it can endorse a range of translations (King James, New King James, New International Version, etc.). Crucially, though, there's a considerable number of conservative evangelicals who will insist not only on verbal/plenary inspiration but also on a corollary doctrine of preservation--namely that the only version of the Bible that preserves the autographs' (and therefore God's) exact words is the 1611 King James Bible, based on the Greek Textus Receptus. Such "King James Only" believers can be quite adamant in insisting in the inadequacy, even heresy of other versions.
Most evangelicals, however, are not KJV-only.
Why is all this important? What does this have to do with my Southern Baptist childhood?
To answer that, we'll have to get into what's known as the Battle for the Bible.
Peace,
JF
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