Protestant Fundamentalism and Biblical Inerrancy

Del Tackett, head of The Truth Project affiliated with the Christian Right Focus on the Family group in a blog post called The Roots of Moral Authority (Truth Observed blog 09/25/2011) argues, The only real basis for ethical standards must reside in that which is transcendent. Its a lightweight argument, meant more to reinforce the assumptions of his main fundamentalist audience than to articulate a Christian theological point.1 But how do Christian fundamentalists access that which is transcendent? They would say that it based on the infallible, inerrant Holy Scriptures of the Protestant Bible. Karl Keating described that approach well in Catholicism and Fundamentalism: The Attack on Romanism by Bible Christians (1988). Keatings book is a conservative Catholic explanation of Protestant fundamentalism, written for a popular audience. Keating writes: But the Bible itself says it is the sole rule of faith! insist fundamentalists. They quote John 5:39 [which Tackett cites in his post], in which it is said, search the scriptures, but they do not take the phrase in context. They imagine it to be a command to the reader: Get your Bible and verify that all Christian truths can be discovered in the plain sense of the text. Fisher Humphreys and Philip Wise in their book Fundamentalism (2004) also explain how fundamentalists understand that notion. They trace the historical development of American fundamentalism, of which a key part was the five points of Christian doctrine of the 1910 General Assembly of the Northern Presbyterian Church, one of which was the inerrancy of the original manuscripts of the Bible. (Humphreys and Wise) They explain the meaning of that formulation, which is a classic example of the pseudoscholarly doubletalk that we often find in Christian fundamentalism: Fundamentalists treat biblical inerrancy as the fundamental that supports the other fundamentals. Although biblical inerrancy has been defined in a variety of ways and continues to be nuanced by its advocates in response to criticisms of the theory, there is widespread agreement that biblical inerrancy means that the original manuscripts of the Bible were free from all error. The original manuscripts are known as autographs, that is, the writings themselves. Virtually everyone agrees that the autographs were written on scrolls in Hebrew and Greek, were never collected at one place, and were lost centuries ago. Biblical inerrantists believe the autographs were free of

As with many Christian Right operations, the roles of leaders are often fuzzy. The description of Tacketts role at the post linked says he is the author, architect and teacher for Focus on the Family's The Truth Project. His bio at the Truth Project site calls him as the chief spokesperson for Focus on the Familys The Truth Project.

errors not only in theology and ethics but also in all other disciplines including history and science. [my emphasis in bold] On the face of it, it gives fundamentalists some wiggle-room on the technical matter of translations and the best sources for the text. I.e., we dont have the original texts themselves, so we have to rely on later copies. One could argue that since scholarship has to be applied in some way to reach the best approximation of the original text, it also makes sense to use scholarship to understand those writings in the context of the knowledge and assumptions of the time in the fields we now know as history and science. But thats not what fundamentalists claim. On the contrary, as Humphreys and Wise explain, a main function of the inerrancy-in-the-original-autographs business has been just the opposite: because they no longer existed, biblical critics could not show that there were errors in them. In practice, that meant that the English-language Bibles used in the fundamentalists churches, of which the King James version has been the favorite historically, was taken as free of errors not only in theology and ethics but also in all other disciplines including history and science. As Humphreys and Wise say, sophisticated biblical inerrantists claim neither more nor less than what the church has traditionally claimed, namely, that the Bible is Gods inspired Word and the written authority for the faith and life of the church. In practice, even that sophisticated version often comes down to defending some form of anti-science know-nothingism. Anti-science in this case includes not only the biological theory of evolution, but even more the Biblical scholarship of the last 2 centuries or so. But its one of the characteristics of fundamentalist Biblical literalism that it actually takes considerable imagination and creativity to twist a reading of the Christian Scriptures into a form suitable for use by 21st century conservative Protestants. When you get into the wilder End of Days scenarios or Pentecostal demonology, thats especially true. But for polemical purposes, the original-autographs fallback serves mealy-mouthed arguments well. Humphreys and Wise show more generosity than my version in that last sentenced when describing a debate in which one of the authors (Humphreys) participated in 1987 at a Conference on Biblical Inerrancy.: one defender of biblical inerrancy said that he had no idea that anyone today believed that the Bible we have today, as opposed to an original manuscript, is literally Gods Word. They show a perhaps unwarranted Christian charity in describing that position as disturbing, rather than the plain dishonest doubletalk that it almost certainly was. Some fundamentalists even argue that the King James Bible itself is a divinely inspired translation.

Keating describes how the fundamentalist notion of inerrancy fits into the larger Protestant concept of the priesthood of the believer, a concept emphasized by Martin Luther. Sola scriptura means the concept of only Scripture as the basis of the Christian faith: The notion of sola scriptura arose when the [Protestant] Reformers rejected the papacy. In doing that they also rejected the teaching authority of the [Catholic] Church. They looked elsewhere for the rule of faith and thought they found it in the Bible. Really, they had no place else to look. By default, the interpretation of the Bible would be left to the individual, as guided by the Holy Spirit. In theory this may sound fine, but it has not worked well in practice, and that argues against the truth of the theory. Actually, both reason and experience tell us the Bible could not have been intended as each man's private guide to the truth. If individual guidance by the Holy Spirit were a reality, each Christian would understand the same thing from any particular verse since God cannot teach error. Yet Christians have understood contradictory things from Scripture--even Christians whose "born-again" experiences cannot be doubted. Indeed, fundamentalists often differ among themselves on what the Bible means. They may agree on most major points, but the frequency and vehemence of their squabbles on lesser matters, which should be just as clear if the Holy Spirit is enlightening them, prove the sacred text cannot explain itself. [my emphasis in bold] Keating doesnt make it explicit in that quoted passage. But in fact, all Christians, fundamentalists and Pentecostals included, interpret the Scriptures within a context of the church teachings with which they are familiar. And those ecclesiastical teachings themselves take place in a larger context of social, legal, political and scientific assumptions. People tell inspirational anecdotes of opening the Bible and finding a verse of Scripture that gives them just the message they need for the moment. And I dont begrudge anyone their fortuitous moments of useful or comforting inspiration. But how a person processes those moments of fortuitous inspiration is also shaped by the larger context of the persons faith and understanding of the Bible. The broader problem presented by the notion of the priesthood of the individual believer manifested itself early on in the Protestant Reformation. The Lutheran Church received a considerable body of sophisticated theology and Biblical interpretation from their founder. But the Reform tradition of Jean Calvin and the alternative Protestant trend represented by Ulrich Zwingli quickly emerged to offer their own Protestant interpretations, rituals and institutions, including their own supplements to the mindbending disputations over the nature of the Host in the Catholic Mass and its Protestant parallels. The Anabaptists and practitioners of the priesthood of the believer like Thomas

Mntzer of Peasant War fame presented even wilder variations of Christian doctrines that were less easily assimilated into the feudal order of 16th century Europe. American Protestantism has been a fertile garden for denominations, sects and splits. Thus, the movement and stealth denomination of Peter Wagner and other Apostles and Prophets of the neo-Pentecostal New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), an ascendant force among the Christian Right in American politics and religion, see in their fellow Protestant denominations nothing less than the kind of demonic domination also to be found in the Catholic Church and the Democratic Party, in their own interpretation of the inerrant Protestant Bible. For fundamentalists (including Pentecostals, who largely share the fundamentalist view of the inerrancy of the Bible), there is an additional complication deriving from the Pietistic tradition. Although that tradition was historically particularly identified with Puritans and Methodists, its emphasis on the subjective, individual experience of salvation and a personal relationship of the believer to God is also found in the bornagain concept of Christian salvation in particular and in the Pentecostal ritual of prophecy. This essentially mystical, pietistic sense of the validity of subjective personal experiences of the divine offers a wide opening for interpretations of the Christian Scriptures that depart from reason, tradition, scholarship or just plain good sense. But here again, these experiences and interpretations of Christian doctrine derived from them are also understood in the context of the religious teachings with which individuals are familiar, as well as the organizational context of churches and the charismatic qualities of particular leaders. Biblical literalism in practice is often anything but literal. The fundamentalist notion of Christian orthodoxy can be radically different than centuries of Christian tradition, as with a relatively recent phenomenon like Christian Zionism. And the historical project of fundamentalism emerged in a real-life conflict with scientific and religious trends that emerged strongly in the Christian world of the 19th century. Bruce Miller 10/08/2011