BIBLICAL FUNDAMENTALISM

Notes

From a review by Martin Gardner of Jim Bakker’s I Was Wrong (Thomas Nelson, 1997):

In one of his later chapters, Bakker reveals, with no hint of humor, that when he reread the gospels in prison he was dumbfounded to discover that Jesus hated the rich. “To my surprise, after months of studying Jesus, I concluded that He did not have one good thing to say about money.” Bakker ticks off the relevant passages: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth…” (Matthew 6:19). “But woe unto you that are rich…” (Luke 6:24). Jesus advises a wealthy young man to sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor. He said it was harder for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. Bakker writes that for years he taught that there was a low arch in Jerusalem called the “camel’s eye.” Camels had to kneel to pass under it, suggesting it was difficult but not impossible for the rich to be saved. Jim consulted references and found “not a shred” of reputable evidence for this conjecture. What about John 3:2? [“Beloved, I wish all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.” This passage is supposed to have convinced Oral Roberts that the gospel preached prosperity as a fundamental good.] Bakker checked the original Greek. He was amazed to learn that the word translated as “prosper” had no reference to wealth. “I had to face the awful truth that I had been preaching false doctrine for years and hadn’t even known it!”

Characteristics of Fundamentalism from “A World on Fire With Faith,” summarized from a review by Rosemary Radford Ruether of Fundamentalisms Observed (Volume I, edited by Martin E. Mary and R. Scott Appleby; Chicago: U of Chicago P). The review appeared in The New York Times Book Review (26 January 1992: 10):

Fundamentalism is a reaction to secularism and pluralism. These aspects of modern life pose threats to certainty and to the loss of the familial support networks of small-town societies. Social change threatens loss of identity, meaning, and secure social structures. Fundamentalists yearn for a return to an ideal time in the past as a model for life today. The model is found in holy books, in charismatic leaders/teachers. The original “time” is seen as a time of absolute truth, impervious to historical change, when scripture was seen to be without error, and teachers were infallible. One was saved by unquestioning submission to prescribed teaching. Fundamentalists need to separate the good from the evil. They use traditional dress, rigid modes of daily life, separate neighborhoods, communal societies to do so. Fundamentalist are zealous: They want to convert society, make theirs the national religion, use the power of the state to enforce the holy life, make true believers the only patriots. They organize large institutional empires, use the media, create mass organizations based on local cells with a hierarchical central authority. They give a sense of grassroots membership in a large movement to overcome the alienation of the welfare state. Variations: Most fundamentalists are nationalist. They are loyal to a particular nation or ethnic group; some, however, are universalist, seeing believers as a community scattered among nations. Lifestyle: some are against luxury; others, especially in Japan and America, consider religion a means to worldly success.

Fundamentalism is rooted in the human need for certainty:

It is deeply opposed to some very basic human realities which are seen in the Bible: (a) The Bible shows belief as a struggle. Belief is an act of personal freedom; no one can escape the need to determine the truth for oneself. (b) The Bible, especially Job and the Prophets, show that everyone must struggle for meaning in the face of life’s perplexities, death and suffering, and not insist that meaning be simple and straightforward, handed out on a silver platter and received without question. (c) The Bible shows that the world has always been full of a bewildering number of beliefs. Some of the prophets suggest that it is arrogant to say that all beliefs but one’s own are evil. (d) There has always been social and cultural change. In earlier times this change took place so slowly that it was hardly recognized as change. Social change is much faster in our time, as any young person knows who feels that what her parents tells her is out of date. Human technology, not the devil, is the driving force behind most of it. The Bible itself is a record of vast social changes in the Jewish understanding of God. These changes can be studied, dug out of their historical context. The Bible cannot be read as if it were simple, straightforward newspaper reporting that anybody can understand without the need of study.

Robert Alter, The World of Biblical Literature

“The Hebrew Bible is animated by an untiring, shrewdly perceptive fascination with the theater of human behavior in the textual foreground, seen against a background of forces that can be neither grasped nor controlled by humankind. . . . The Bible has invited endless exegesis not only because of the drastic economy of its means of expression but also because it conceives of the world as a place full of things to understand in which the things of ultimate importance defy human understanding.” (22) For instance: The Bible presents us with two contradictory visions of creation: The Book of Genesis tells us that God created an orderly world, a world is “good,” that is, on our side. The book of Job, on the other hand, teaches that it is a chaotic world, an “unjust” world that we cannot understand and should not question.

An introduction to Michael D. Coogan, “The Great Gulf Between Scholars and the Pew,” Bible Review, June 1994: 44-48, 55:

Imagine someone from the time of Moses who has been lifted out of his time and set down in ours. Now you tell him the earth is a ball in space, the sun is a star around which the earth spins, the mountains and hills are not eternal, but the product of the shifting of the earth’s surface, the lifting and folding of great hunks of the earth’s crust. He will tell you you are crazy. The sun comes up and goes down and the mountais obviously don’t move. He is sure of himself because he has not been through the long conversation of scientists and others about these things. Why should he believe such outrageous contradictions of common sense?

The scientists who have studied these things, because they have participated in a centuries-long conversation about them, have been forced to confront facts and arrive at conclusions. To them must the man from the past is an outrageous denier of common sense. They are, of course, right. The man from the time of Moses is outrageous because his mind has not been brought along by the culture-wide conversation of scientists in which they have been forced to acknowledge certain undeniable facts and accept certain overwhelming conclusions.

The rest of us, the non-scientists, have been brought along, too. We did not participate in the scientific conversation; we usually do not know the evidence as evidence; we may not even have been able to follow the argument. But all our perceptions have been attuned to its conclusions. Those conclusions are so taken for granted around us, that they have become common sense to us. Besides, there are large and obvious material consequences which affirm the correctness of scientific conclusions: circumnavigation of the globe makes it hard to hold on to a flat-earth theory. Similarly with satellites and moon-landings.

Unfortunately, the long and serious conversation about the Bible does not produce dramatic revisions of the way we see the world. It has not so effectively entered into the common cultural consciousness. As a result, it is much easier to reject the conclusions of the long and very serious conversation that scholars have been having for centuries about the Bible. This conversation, of course, has worked its effects on its participants. Just like the scientists, they have been up against real facts about the Bible. They have been forced either to reconcile or to recognize that the Bible is full of contradictions. And in the course of doing this they have learned things about reading, about language, about changes in society that change the way we understand the world. And those are the things that produce their conclusions.

But the people who come into the pew to listen to what they have to say have not been a party to that long conversation. Nothing has forced them to come up against facts the scholars have had to confront, the contradictions, the reality of historical change. They are like the man from the time of Moses who has not been through the history of scientific discovery and who insists that the earth is flat.

Another motive for this wholesale rejection of Biblical scholarship is that for many of the people who reject it, the Bible is an all enwrapping garment. It is their only book, that is, the only book they take seriously as saying something real about the meaning of life. They don’t read books very much, or if they do, they don’t really take them seriously. One of the distinguishing effects of a real education is the discovery that all human beings from all times and all cultures have been seeking answers to serious questions about the meaning of life. The people in the pew don’t seem to believe that about human beings. To the people in the pew, human beings are just ordinary folk who spend their whole life trying to survive, put food on the table.

They find it blasphemous to be told that books besides the Bible are serious, too, the books of fiction they were assigned in school, for instance. No, the Bible is the only truly serious book. It is hard for them to imagine that Hawthorne, writing The Scarlet Letter, was wrestling with difficult and very important insights into what it is to be human, to live at a particular moment in time, to be a woman with a child. No, they will smile condescendingly, he was just making money, writing for a market. You can’t tell them that novelists are anything more than writers. They make their money that way; other people make theirs in another way. And, of course, they are right. Writing is a way of making money.

A biblical scholar has had to learn that the pursuit of meaning is a process engaged in by human beings throughout history. It is still going on. Lots of books are written to try to address the problem of human meaning. These books have been written by people of all cultures at all times. The people in the pew don’t believe human beings pursue meaning. No, rather, while they were making money, surviving, putting food on the table, God came down at a certain moment in the past, interrupted them for a moment, and handed them the Bible, saying, this is the meaning of life. Some human beings just went on making money and ignored him. The others said, “Oh. Thanks.” Then they went on about their business; only now they have a book that God gave them telling them what the meaning of life is. They would never have thought to ask the meaning of life themselves, or try to answer for themselves. They don’t have time. But now that God has told them, they are glad. The idea that the struggle to understand is common to us all, all cultures, of all times–they don’t seem to take that notion very seriously. The only effort to make sense of life that has ever been made is the Bible, and that effort was made by God, not by man. On the other hand, what biblical scholars take seriously is the age long human struggle to understand, a struggle which is still going on, and of which the Bible is only a part, perhaps even the most important part, but still only a part. So what hope is there that they will accept the results of biblical scholarship when the Bible is all they’ve got?

Now, read the article.

from http://alpha.fdu.edu/~jbecker/bible/fundamentalism.html