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Re: the ring of truth (was This Week's Recommended Reading)

On Thu, 9 Aug 2001, Kelvin Bailey wrote:
> --- John Davis <biglight at pacbell_net> wrote:

> > Against two things: the theory of evolution (hence the emphasis on
> > reading the Bible as a scientific document) and against Henry
> > Fosdick's Social Gospel movement,which stressed the Gospel as a means
> > of healing society, rather than on individual salvation.
>
> I think it would be a bit shortsighted to suggest (if indeed you are)
> that evangelicalism - or even fundamentalism - exists as a reaction of
> these two things.  Sure, this sort of thing may have strengthened the
> fundamentalist movement in the early 20th century, but they weren't
> responsible for the existence of the F's.

Well, like it or not, fundamentalism as we know it is largely a reaction
to modernity, and as such, it is a modernist movement in its own way.  
Fundamentalists think they are defending the old faith, but in reality,
they have accepted modernist habits of thought, and they have allowed
modernists to set the terms of the theological debate.

At the risk of oversimplifying, here's one example of what I'm getting at.  
There once was a time when people who read ancient texts believed pretty
much everything they read.  Then, along came modern scholars with new ways
of reading the texts.  Suddenly, scholars were no longer content to settle
for one or two versions of what happened way back when; instead, they
wanted to go *through* the texts and reconstruct what *really* happened
way back when.  And there was no logical reason, to them, why the Bible
should be exempt from this process.  The Bible's claims concerning
science, history, and so on were as open to scrutiny as anyone else's.

But fundamentalists didn't like the implications of this new way of doing
things.  And so they poured great efforts into "proving" the scientific,
historical, etc. claims of the Bible -- claims that nobody had ever
bothered to prove before, because it had never occurred to anyone to do
so.  Fundamentalists accepted the modernist idea idea the Bible was valid
only to the extent that its propositions were factually correct, and in
doing so, they bought into a frame of mind that was foreign to the
centuries and centuries of Christians who had come before them.  They
believe that modern scholars are "attacking" Jesus and the Bible, and so
they believe they need to "defend" or "rescue" these focal points of their
faith.  One conservative book on the historical-Jesus debate was called
_Jesus Under Fire_, even though all the liberal scholars who were
criticized in that book happen to like Jesus -- they just don't like
conservative interpretations of Jesus!  But in fact, most scholars are
treating Jesus the same way they would treat Caligula or Plato or any
other figure from ancient history.  Scholars read Suetonius and Tacitus
and Josephus with a grain of salt (and then some); ditto the Bible.

So nowadays you have fundamentalists and a good many evangelicals
professing a belief in the "infallibility" and "inerrancy" of scripture,
when these were never part of any Christian creed *before* the modern era,
and the Bible itself claims nothing more for itself than "inspiration",
which means simply that God breathes through the text somehow.  *Some*
evangelicals have expressed reservations about terms like "inerrancy"
because they know that, in practice, many people *really* mean not that
the *Bible* is infallible, but that their *interpretation* of it is
infallible, and so they shy away from those terms, but many other
evangelicals are happy to subscribe to those beliefs.

> I would suggest, however, that the differences are significant.
> Fundamentalists - in the sense in which I think we're speaking here -
> are ultra right-wing, King James only, typically very separatist,
> suspicious of modern culture, very homogenous, and basically all white
> Americans.

Here, I think you may be reducing fundamentalists to a caricature, in
order to get evangelicals off the hook.

> Evangelicals, on the other hand cover a much broader spectrum. . . .
> Basically the only thing they have in common with fundys is their
> adherence to orthodox Christianity and the belief that the Bible is the
> inerrant, inspired Word of God.

OTOH, you may be ignoring the diversity within the evangelical world, too.  
It's true that evangelicals feel obliged to defer to the conservative,
fundamentalist types who insist on "inerrancy", but many will try to
weasel out of a belief in *literal* inerrancy by saying that they believe
God's Word "serves his purposes inerrantly", or some such thing.  Me, I
don't see why I need to believe in "inerrancy" in the first place.

To put this another way, I believe that Jesus rose from the dead --
without that, you simply haven't got Christianity -- but I do not believe
that I have to believe in the infallibility of scripture to hold that
belief.  That would be putting the cart before the horse, no?

--- Peter T. Chattaway --------------------------- peter at chattaway_com ---
 "I detected one misprint, but to torture you I will not tell you where."
      Winston Churchill to T.E. Lawrence, re Seven Pillars of Wisdom

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