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Theology

definitions and a history lesson, part three

definition

First, I want to send a general thank-you and shout-out to everyone who participated in my invitation to discuss fundamentalism yesterday. So many of you shared your experiences, and your thoughts, and some of the tragedies you’ve been through, and I thank you for sharing them with me. I treasure them all.

I’m going to put together a general “conclusion” post some time next week, pulling together what many of you have said– both positive and negative. In the mean time, I hope you’ll continue following this series and hashing things out with me.

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On Wednesday, I left off with German higher criticism and the concepts of inerrancy and inspiration. Some of you are way more qualified to talk about these concepts than I am, so I encourage you to correct anything I misstate or explain poorly.

But, here we go: A Very Brief Crash Course in Bibliology 101.

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Inspiration

Inspiration is a term used to describe how the Bible got written. There’s a whole host of ideas about how this possibly happened. Some believe that this issue is highly nuanced (<–excellent article you should read), while others think it’s straightforward and obvious. These perspectives run the gamut between that of it being a purely man-made document all the way through mechanical dictation (God dictated the Bible to man word-for-word). There’s two views that are commonly accepted inside Protestant orthodoxy: the verbal plenary view, and the degree view.

Verbal Plenary, has, unfortunately, been a term hi-jacked by biblical docetists and fundamentalists. It was term I heard over and over again growing up, and the way it was described to me in college falls into the “mechanical dictation” view, more or less. However, it’s important to think about the verbal plenary view in terms of the hypostatic union: the doctrinal belief that Jesus was 100% God and 100% man, simultaneously. Scripture is full of paradoxes, and this is one of them, and it’s a doctrine that’s been fairly accepted in Catholic and Protestant orthodoxy since 321 A.D.

The verbal plenary view applies a similar sort of thinking to Scripture– that it is a book written by man, and simultaneously, a book written by God. If you’re practicing good hermeneutics, you’ll approach it as a book written by man first. This is an incredibly important distinction, and I’ll get to why in a bit.

The degree view is the idea that while Scripture is inspired by God, there are degrees of inspiration in each text. This is a complicated view, and I’m not sure I understand it well, but it’s the idea that there are elements in Scripture– like the creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2, that are man-made stories that God used to reveal himself. I’m not a Bible scholar, but I will admit there are certain elements of this approach to inspiration that I appreciate.

The most important thing to remember when discussing inspiration is that even if the Bible is not inspired, it doesn’t completely remove the basis for Christian faith.

That might sound like a shocking statement– it was to me, the first time I time I encountered it. But, if we treat the Bible like any other ancient historical document, it is still a reliable source of information. The Gospels are some of the most reliable ancient texts we have, by any test we can put them to. They pass every single test for historical accuracy with flying colors. This means we can believe, based on just treating the Bible like an ordinary book, that Jesus lived, died, and rose again.

I’m trying to keep this brief, so if you have questions about what I’ve just said, I encourage you to read Habermas’ and Licona’s The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus.

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Inerrancy & Infallibility

A simple definition of inerrancy would be that the Scriptures are true in all that they teach. This is not the fundamentalist definition of inerrancy, it’s the Protestant orthodox one. It’s a general statement, and some believe that it is entirely too vague to be useful. I disagree– I think that this is far about far as we can go with a statement about inerrancy without getting ourselves into deep theological trouble.

A huge argument against this concept is that Scripture contains self-contradictions and historical contradictions, and thus any of these contradictions completely invalidates inerrancy. This is why it is vitally important to have a healthy view of inerrancy– it is simply dangerous to make the case that the Bible does not contain any contradictions AND to believe in biblical literalism. These two ideas cannot co-exist.

Because, if you read the Bible literally, it will contain errors.

One of the best examples I can think of as Matthew 27 and Acts 1– the death of Judas Iscariot. If you read the Bible literally, these two stories contradict. However, if you believe in the concept of inerrancy as the Bible being true in all that it teaches, the description of how he died is not a problem. In either telling, Judas killed himself in a field, and the only thing we have is how two human narrators chose to tell a true story. I highly encourage you to read this powerful rendering of Judas— Paul Faust, a colleague of mine, explains it in such a beautifully human way, and he avoids the obviously weak explanation that “he hung himself, and then he decomposed, so his guts spilled out.”

This is why it is paramount to approach Scripture as a human book first. For whatever reason, God chose to use humans to write it, and he didn’t undermine that decision by creating an “easy to swallow, theologically airtight religion.”

Here’s a simple example, but it’s one that speaks to me very well.

You’re a police officer, interviewing two witnesses. You separate them, you interview them at different times. You interview them using the same questions.

If, in the course of the interview, you get the same exact answers, what do you immediately suspect?

Collusion.

Pre-meditation.

Lies.

However, if in the course of the interview, you get a slightly different telling of the events, but two stories that contain all the same basic elements, are you more or less confident that they were telling the truth?

The same thing applies to an understanding of inspiration and inerrancy. The Bible was written by people guided by God. If everyone said the same exact thing without any variations, we wouldn’t have a book that is a complex, as deep, as rich, as full of nuance and meaning, as what we have. It would be a book written by automatons, by puppets. Personally, I find that whole idea distasteful.

This also results in a book full of “hard sayings” that aren’t necessarily easy to work out. But, I think that this is a beautiful, wondrous thing. I’m uncomfortable with dismissing every single thing that appears in the Bible that seems contradictory, or of finding the first, easiest way to “explain it away.” There’s no reason to explain it away. It’s a human book, written by humans– people who lived a long time ago, and we no longer share a culture or even a language with them. If the book were “easy,” it would be useless and probably a fraud.

Now, there are many people that also think that defining infallibility is important. Personally, I don’t. Infallibility tends to be used to align the concept of inerrancy with biblical literalism, and I shy away from that. The book of Esther is why I don’t think infallibility is something I need to struggle with. Traditionally, Esther has been labeled as “history.” However, a more modern understanding of genre in the Bible tells us that it’s a disaspora story– and thus, being perfectly historically accurate in all of it’s “facts” (which it isn’t) is unnecessary. The Bible contains myth (which doesn’t necessarily mean non-factual, just so we’re clear), poetry, romance, history, biography, law, prophecy, autobiography, and personal letters. Treating all of these components as strictly literal does irreparable damage to the text, and our understanding of it.

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Okay, now that we’re done with the theology lesson, we’ll move on in part four to how these ideas are presented in fundamentalism.

April 12, 2013 by
Theology

definitions and a history lesson, part two

definition

With the writing, publication, and dissemination of The Fundamentals, the modern Christian fundamentalist movement began in the early part of the 20th century. What is important to note about this development was that the fundamentalist movement began as a reaction against a perceived threat. The threats the early fundamentalists saw were scientific, cultural, and philosophical– and many Christians were perceived as being corrupted by modernity. This reaction is still happening, and has led to what many have identified as an “us vs. them” mentality or an isolationist stance.

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Science

Darwinian evolutionary theory was painted as the attempt by science to diminish God’s power and sovereignty. They argued that evolution was a weak ploy by the atheists to ignore God. This attitude still exists today, as anyone who is familiar with Answers in Genesis or the Institute for Creation Research can attest to. Keep in mind that the fundamentalists felt threatened by evolutionary theory– they were only capable of seeing it and engaging with evolutionary theory, and science itself, as the enemy. This was not helped by events like Oxford Evolution Debate  or Nietzsche’s case that “killing God” was a horrible necessity for progress. These issues are extraordinarily complex, but one thing I’d like to highlight is that the “death of religion” was encouraged by modern thinkers as “necessary”– because of the attitude of established religion. The Scopes Monkey Trial occured during this time, which contributed to the hostility. If you want a break down of the interplay between the established church and the birth of modern science, I highly recommend Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes.

We have a hundred years of history separating us from the initial context, and a few things have happened. First of all, the modern scientific approaches to chemistry, anthropology, geology, and biology barely resemble what they were like in the early 20th century. No evolutionary biologist turns to Origin of Species or Descent of Man as a credible way of studying the life sciences– however, modern fundamentalists frequently portray modern Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory as if it is exactly the same. They portray the study of geology as still dominantly Uniformitarian (“the present is the key to the past“)–which is not the case. Modern geology is practiced under Catastrophism now– and no one treats the geological column as something that actually exists. It’s a simplified teaching tool, nothing more.

These attitudes have led to the outright dismissal of science. Oh, they won’t say this– they’ll argue that they believe that science and the Bible don’t contradict, it’s the Bible and Neo-Darwinian Macro-Evolutionary Theory that contradict. However, in conversations with literal six-day young earth Creationists (which fundamentalists usually are, with few exceptions), after a long and extensive discussion, they’ll usually admit to something along the lines of “the Bible is true, and we just have to accept that we don’t really understand science well enough. One day, we’ll understand science enough to see how it goes perfectly with the Bible.”

Which, honestly, isn’t very intellectually rigorous, and has a pretty basic problem: this statement assumes that it’s science that will change, and not their interpretation of the Bible. Historically speaking, this is NOT the case (Galileo? Copernicus? Newton?). Science has usually been what altered our perception of the Bible, not the other way around. Fundamentalists who are truly being honest are usually terrified of this fact– and I’ll get to why in a bit.

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Culture & Economics

Now we come to the Industrial Revolution and the Social Gospel. Honestly, I’m not exactly sure how to sum up what I’ve found in a way that doesn’t over-simplify too horribly. From what I can tell, one of the first people in Christianity to make a move in this direction was Washington Gladden, who wrote Working People and their Employers— which was basically a treatise on why Labor Unions were A Good Idea (also, he helped found the NAACP, so there’s that). There was also Walter Rauschenbusch, who wrote Christianity and the Social Crisis. In his book, Rauschenbusch articulated this idea:

Whoever uncouples the religious and the social life has not understood Jesus. Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over the social relations and institutions of men, to that extent denies the faith of the Master.

The Social Gospel can be summed up in the idea that Christians should endeavor to bring the Kingdom of God to earth– they believed in practicing “God’s will be done in earth as it is in heaven.” They encouraged Christians to work in their communities– to help the poor, to feed the hungry, to heal the sick. In more modern terms, they focused on redeeming the physical world.

Parallel to the rise of the Social Gospel was the rise of the Fundamentalists– Charles Finney and Billy Sunday being two early examples. I chose these two men because they are representational of how Fundamentalists slowly began opposing proponents of the Social Gospel– they were evangelists, and were a part of the Second Great Awakening. They were Revivalists, and their focus was much different. Instead of reaching out to the world in a physical way, they sought to heal the world through a spiritual redemption– and their focus became spiritual redemption to the exclusion of social or physical redemption. They began to see people like Rauschenbusch, who downplayed the substitutionary atonement, and Gladden who was a Congregationalist minister, not as colleagues, but as just another form of the enemy.

You can see these things echoing down to today– fundamentalist attitudes toward things like the NAACP, labor unions, socialism, charity organizations, welfare, The New Deal, and the ACLU are usually extraordinarily bleak, if not outright hostile. Although, to be fair, the conservative evangelical and Republican attitudes toward the aforementioned are not really any better, although fundamentalists get more heated about it.

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Philosophy & Academia

Here is where we get to the crux of the matter: German higher criticism. To reiterate my earlier post, German higher criticism was a lot of different things, but the fact that it is also known as “historical criticism” reveals a primary focus: it took a historical, anti-supernatural, naturalistic approach to the Bible. This created some problems for Christianity, because all of a sudden they had to deal with people questioning the validity of the Bible. Scholars and critics began treating it simply as a religious document from the Bronze and Iron Ages, no more deserving of our time and attention than Homer or The Epic of Gilgamesh. Not that they dismissed the Bible’s literary or cultural importance– and not every single German critic was hell-bent on destroying religion. They just started treating the Bible like any other book.

Here is when we first start seeing the terms inerrancy and infallibility. And here is where the beating heart of fundamentalism lies– and it deserves its own post.

April 10, 2013 by
Theology

definitions and a history lesson, part one

definition

One of my good friends in undergrad was a pre-law major, so part of my “friend duties” (although I did not mind at all) was going to his Debates for moral support. I enjoyed most of them, since the topics they were discussing were all very interesting to me, and I was fascinated by the formality and discipline of their arguments. I’m not very good at hearing logical fallacies– I can see them when I’m reading, but I’m one of those trusting folks that like to listen to people talk in good faith. This has caused me no bit of trouble, in the past. But, the students participating in the debate were sharp, and articulate.

One of the things that I always enjoyed about formal debates was that both parties had an agreed-upon set of definitions regarding their topic, and if one of them introduced a new term they had to define it– and then stick to their definition.

This is . . . well, important. Especially when we’re talking about theology and religion, because there are so many terms floating around in Christian-ese, and these terms have fluid definitions depending on context and denomination. I can bandy around words like sacramental and incarnation— but these words have next to no importance for many Baptists, but they are integral to a Catholic understanding of the world.

One of the terms I use a lot around here is fundamentalist. Specifically, Christian fundamentalists. I know almost nothing about any other kind of fundamentalism, except what pop culture tells me, and I don’t exactly trust that.

Christian fundamentalism is something I’m intimately familiar with, although I will be honest and say that most of my exposure comes from Baptist fundamentalists, but other types of fundamentalists exist. I’ve interacted with Pentecostal fundamentalists and Methodist fundamentalists, and while there are nuances, as far as I can tell there’s not too much difference. For that reason, I’m comfortable with using the larger umbrella of “Christian fundamentalism.”

Many of my friends consider themselves fundamentalists. These people are incredibly important to me, and I value their friendship and their companionship deeply. However, the reason why I care about their friendship and work to maintain my relationship with them is that these people are also open-minded– they are willing to engage with differing points of view, even when we disagree about something. This is a character trait that I value extremely highly– in fact, if you demonstrate stubborn close-mindedness consistently in our conversations, we’re probably not going to be friends very long; either because I’ll piss you off, or because I find having a relationship with you frustrating.

I also need to make something extremely clear: there is a monumental, foundational difference between orthodoxy or theological conservatism and Christian fundamentalism.

I identify as an orthodox Protestant. I believe in the values of non-denominationalism. I find the rich heritage found in Catholicism deeply profound and beautiful, although I don’t agree with concepts like the magisterium or sola ecclesia (more modernly referred to as dual-source theory). I appreciate liturgy– and more spontaneous service structures. I enjoy exegetical, expository, and topical preaching, and believe that you need a balance of these. I believe in a fairly orthodox understanding of inspiration and inerrancy, although my intellectual understanding of these things is slightly more progressive than is traditionally considered orthodox.

In short, I live by in essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity.

And I think the world would be a better place if we lived by that mott0. It’s a theological Golden Rule, if you will.

For that reason, I can appreciate certain aspects of Christian fundamentalism– the ones that are in common with theological Protestant orthodoxy.

My appreciation ends there.

I believe in finding common ground with everyone, and I do have common ground with fundamentalists– I believe in the importance of the regula fidei, which is Latin for “rule of faith.” A simple definition of this would be that the regula fidei are “representational of the essential doctrinal and moral elements of the faith contained in Scripture.” The regula fidei are the early church’s summary of basic doctrines. These things are found in elements like the Apostle’s Creed. These, to me, are the essentials— the “fundamentals” of our faith, if you will.
However, what fundamentalists have traditionally defined as “fundamental” go so far outside these basic Gospel principles that they are almost inherently dangerous. To understand that, we need a history lesson.

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It’s the turn of the 19th century in America, and there’s a few big things starting to happen. There’s the Industrial Revolution, the philosophical beginnings of post-modernism, and German higher criticism.

The Industrial Revolution, as nearly anyone can tell you, was pretty dang awful. Child labor, the cotton mills, North England, the Civil War, mechanization . . . not very much good came out of it. Hence why we have books like Oliver Twist and North and South and The Jungle. The Lord of the Rings has some fantastic imagery– I don’t think there’s a more epically awesome scene in all of literature than the Last March of the Ents.

Christians living through this time were aware of many of the societal horrors that were caused by industrialization, and so they started trying to help. This is the time when we start hearing about ideas like social justice and the social gospel. The YMCA and the YWCA both came out of a Christian desire to physically meet the needs of people suffering from the upheaval and chaos that occurred during this transitory period.

Modernism, and in about another 20 years, post-modernism, is really starting to appear at this point, too– it’s disseminating outside of academia and philosophy, and slowly starting to make its way into popular literature. Post-modernism defies definition, but, a reductionist and overly simplified definition could be that post-modernism is based on the “breakdown” of communication– post-modernism recognizes that their is an arbitrary relationship between words and what those words represent (known as signifier and the signified), and that the arbitrary nature of this relationship causes problems.

Lastly, you’ve got German Higher Criticism. On a very basic level, the “higher critics” took a strictly historical approach to the Bible– and they took issue with things like miracles and the Resurrection of Christ. Understandably, this led to some problems in Christianity. They’d never really had to face anyone raising serious objections to the Bible before– at least not like what they were hearing from the German critics.

There’s also things like Karl Marx and Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud. They are important to this discussion, but if you aren’t familiar with these three… uhm . . . yeah, go read Origin of Species and Notes on James Mill and The Interpretation of Dreams and then come back.

Hopefully that lays some basic groundwork.

Now, out of all of these things (and many others, history is INSANELY COMPLEX), we have the birth of Christian Fundamentalism as a movement, and it all started with The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth. This was a multi-volume set written in response to socialism, Darwinian evolutionary theory, German higher criticism, and other things. It’s basically a systematic theology written by almost a hundred different writers– many of whom I respect and admire greatly. On the whole, it’s not a bad thing to have around or read. With caution. This was, however, only the beginning.

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I’d really like to make this a three-part series, with a breakdown of modern Christian fundamentalism to follow this one. For part three, I’d really like to have an “open thread” post– and I want to hear from you. I want to hear about your perspectives, your response. Do you come from a background of fundamentalism? Do you consider yourself a fundamentalist now? It would be incredible to hear what your thoughts are on fundamentalism. What do you think are basic elements and patterns in modern fundamentalism? If you’re not comfortable sharing your thoughts in comment form, you can e-mail me at:

forgedimagination@gmail.com

In your e-mail, let me know if you mind if I quote you, and whether or not you want to remain completely anonymous or use a pseudonym.

April 9, 2013 by