I'm auditing a class at Murray State that examines early church history and "Alternative Christianities." During the course of the class, students make presentations on an alternative. I made one last week on Biblical Literalism as something differing from traditional Christianity. This blog entry is based on that presentation.
There are obvious contradictions in scripture. There are contradictions in timing, placement and genealogies in the Old Testament. A cursory comparison of the four Gospels shows a difference of opinion on when certain events took place in Jesus' ministry (or whether they occurred at all) and who was present. At one point, Tatian tried to smooth over the differences in the Gospels by combining them into one account called the Diatessaron. It was used for several decades in some churches, but eventually discarded as not being as good a witness as the "Four-square Gospels" and their differing points of view.
Pre-enlightenment critics noticed these inconsistencies. When St. Jerome translated the Old and New Testaments into Latin in the 300s, he remarked that there appeared to be parts of the Gospels that might be original, and other parts that might be later add-ons. It was apparent to him from the difference in Greek. The church father Origen, commenting on these differences, pointed out that the purpose of scripture was spiritual instruction, not conveyance of facts, "The spiritual truth was often preserved, as one might say, in material falsehood." Medieval interpreters believed that Scripture existed on four levels, the Plain, Allegorical, Tropological and Anagogical senses. (Too much detail to go into here.) Considering this long tradition of more-than-literal interpretation, how did we get to statements of factual infallibility, such as the American 1978 Chicago Statement, which reads, "We affirm that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit?"
It all started with Martin Luther and his doctrine of Sola Scriptura. Luther wanted to move authority back in the church to that of the early witness of scripture to combat the abuses he saw committed in the church in the name of tradition. Luther was not a literalist - far from it - but the placement of scripture for the first time as the pre-eminent source of authority laid a basis for later development. Moody and Darby in the 1800s contribute to this heightening, but it is not until the early 1900s that a true doctrine of scriptural infallibility emerges.
The term fundamentalist is a self-applied term that is derived from the collection of essays, The Fundamentals: A Testimony To The Truth written between 1910 and 1915. The first of the fundamentals is the literal inerrancy of scripture. The formulation of a doctrine of textual inerrancy can be found here - it is a 20th-Century American innovation.
I maintain that Fundamentalists (abbreviated FD afterwards) and so-called Secular Humanists (abbreviated SH afterwards) have world views that are formed on the same Enlightenment foundations. After some thought, I think there are five principles that FD and SH share in common:
- There is a knowable, absolute truth.
- Reality is factual, not narrative.
- Everything can be distilled down to a Boolean (yes or no) argument.
- Any answer can be discerned by a test.
- There is only one valid Epistemology.
I believe that there is an absolute truth, and that truth is God. However, I am convinced that human beings cannot encompass all of the truth of God. Both FD and SH believe that humans can ultimately discern the full truth although they vary in their source of authority.
Both SH and FD look at the world as a series of facts. Their versions of history look like a list of people, places and dates. This ignores the way humanity has traditionally experienced reality - through the medium of story. For both FD and SH, story has no value because it is not factually accurate. For most of human history, story (which conveys our deepest values) has been more important than factual accuracy. Jesus used parables to teach because he understood the power of story intrinsically, but I have heard people claim that the parables were actual, factual events that Jesus was relating. To think in this way is to vastly reduce the power of the Bible to inspire and instruct.
There is no gray for either FD or SH. Everything either works or does not, is true or is not, is always permissible or never permissible.
For both, all propositions can be reduced to a test that will determine the boolean answer. The difference is the Epistemology (way of knowing.) For SH, the Epistemology is the Scientific Method. If it cannot be proven by scientific test, it is not true. For FD, the test is the Bible. If it exists in the Bible, it is true, otherwise it is false.
In short, the difference between Fundamentalism and Secular Humanism is the source from which they draw their truth. Is it from observation or from a book? Otherwise, their methods and assumptions are identical. Of course, these two extremes are caricatures. Most people who might fall into these groups are not that extreme.
I'm not the first to notice the similarities between Fundamentalism and a exclusively rationalist scientific view. Theologian Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse has remarked that literalism is to be regarded as "the bastard child of science and religion." It seems like the elevation of a text, even the Bible, to such a high level borders on Idolatry. The Bible consists of the Word of God as inspired in the Gospel Writers, but is not the Word in the highest sense. According to John, Jesus is the Word. The Bible points to God, but is not divine itself. To maintain the divinity of scripture stretches the place of the Bible so much that it begins to obscure other parts of the Gospel witness, most notably the role of the Holy Spirit in the church. In 1980 the pastoral theologian Urban T. Holmes observed flatly that "Literalism is a modern heresy-perhaps the only heresy invented in modern times."
There are many responses to literalism. Marcus Borg in The Heart of Christianity asserts that there is an "Earlier" and an "Emerging" understanding of scripture. I don't buy that. The Christianity that Borg identifies as "earlier" follows a literal interpretation and is a new heresy - one with a less than century of pedigree. To turn to an interpretation that is more narrative-based and respects pre-enlightenment exegesis is not something new emerging, but instead a return to a more traditional interpretation.
Dr. Kevin Lewis writes, “The combative answer: there are better, more legitimate, less blasphemous ways than (literalism) to affirm that the Bible is the Word of God. The Word is to be affirmed without the heresy of divinizing each word of Scripture as though it fell from heaven a perfect expression of the mind of God. The drive for certainty in a skeptical age is more dangerous to our faith than we might suppose. It leads away from "faith" to a calculating "belief" not satisfied with the promises of God but restless to prove, verify, and guarantee those promises with scientific precision.”
This blog entry is available as an audio item on the AskThePriest Podcast.