Fundamentalisms

Threats and Ideologies in the Modern World

James D. G. Dunn, James D. G. Dunn

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857739094
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

What is fundamentalism and what does it really amount to? How do uncompromising counter-cultural movements make ordinary people behave in extraordinary ways? Arguing that an adherence to scriptural literalism and biblical inerrancy is at root a reaction to modernism, these are among the key questions with which this timely book grapples. But it goes further. Other studies have concentrated above all on Christian and Islamic fundamentalism. This volume, while exploring the origins and articulations of the fundamentalist mindset, addresses the subject from the comparative perspective of different religions, including Judaism and Hinduism. It is innovative in yet another respect. Contending that notions of certainty and infallibility are not just a religious phenomenon, the book argues that fundamentalism can be detected also in science when scientists use scientific authority to pronounce on areas outside their competence. With contributors who include Karen Armstrong, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Malise Ruthven and Ed Husain, this is a bold and incisive assessment of a crucial yet often oversimplified topic.

PART I

WHAT IS FUNDAMENTALISM?

CHAPTER 1

THE ROOTS OF CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM IN AMERICAN PROTESTANTISM

James D. G. Dunn

In this chapter I describe the beginnings of Protestant fundamentalism, and go on to analyse its central characteristics, also drawing attention to its continuing influence on Christianity today and on the national politics of the United States of America.¹

We should begin, however, by at least noting some problems in any conceptualisation of ‘fundamentalism’. An initial problem is that the term ‘fundamentalism’ may be too much of an abstraction from what is actually a wide range of traditionalist views in diverse ideological and religious systems. Is ‘fundamentalism’ a universal phenomenon, or should we only speak of a diverse set of fundamentalisms?² Should we even speak of ‘Protestant fundamentalism’ as though it was a single, coherent phenomenon?³ Again, it is arguable that what we now refer to as a ‘fundamentalist’ attitude or mind-set can be found in earlier centuries.⁴ But if fundamentalism is defined as a reaction against modernism, then it is itself a modern phenomenon.⁵ A third problem is that ‘fundamentalist’ has become a pejorative term in most public discourse, ‘a synonym for bigotry, intellectual immaturity, fanaticism, and sometimes violence’, ‘an intolerant epithet for those we regard as intolerant […] a label that immediately delegitimates’.⁶ So is the discussion loaded against ‘fundamentalism’ from the start? Should we try using another term, like ‘foundationalism’,⁷ to describe the view that any system, religious or otherwise, needs some firm or fixed foundational truths on which to build?

In fact, the actual origin of the term ‘fundamentalism’ can be dated with some precision. As is generally agreed, the origin lies in the publication of a series of 12 small matching books, almost large pamphlets, entitled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, edited initially by A. C. Dixon, and subsequently by R. A. Torrey, and published by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles from 1910 to 1915. Each volume was made up of between five and 11 essays, the authors including well-known conservative Protestant scholars of the day. The authors were mainly Americans, notably the famous B. B. Warfield, Professor of Theology at Princeton Seminary, and the equally famous revivalist, R. A. Torrey. But they also included several eminent British names: for example, the highly regarded Presbyterian apologist James Orr, Professor at the Free Church College in Glasgow; G. Campbell Morgan, a noted British evangelist and minister of Westminster Chapel, London; H. C. G. Moule, an admired commentator on the New Testament and Bishop of Durham; and W. H. Griffith Thomas, formerly Principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. Three million copies of the 12 volumes were dispatched free of charge to every pastor, professor and student of theology in America.⁸

The motivation behind the volumes is clear: the editors and authors perceived that their faith, what they would have regarded as the orthodox beliefs of Protestantism, indeed of Christianity, were under attack. The attacks were seen to be multiple and all the more threatening for that reason. It was a first order priority that these attacks should be withstood and opposed.⁹ One was the influence of liberal theology, which spread from Germany in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. This was perceived as undermining fundamental doctrines of Christianity. Hence the first two essays in the first volume of The Fundamentals are on ‘The Virgin Birth of Christ’, by Orr, and ‘The Deity of Christ’, by Warfield; and there is a later essay on ‘The Certainty and Importance of the Bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the Dead’, by Torrey.¹⁰

Here it is not unimportant to recognise that The Fundamentals were a Protestant equivalent to the Roman Catholic condemnation of ‘modernism’ in Pius X's encyclical of 1907. For modernism was expressive of the same Liberalism which sought to adapt Catholic faith to the intellectual Zeitgeist. In the Catholic hierarchy's view, modernism was just another name for liberal Protestantism.¹¹ Ironically The Fundamentals riposted by asking ‘Is Romanism Christianity?’ and depicting Rome as ‘The Antagonist of the Nation’. As a point more worthy of note, however, it is this sense that ‘liberalism’ inevitably involves a slackening of what should, or must be, regarded as firm and incontrovertible truths, which gives the term ‘liberal’ such negative, and indeed threatening overtones in conservative Christian circles to this day.

The Fundamentals also contained attacks on socialism and modern philosophy, all seen as threatening to undermine divinely revealed truths. But one of the most dangerous threats was perceived to be the spreading influence of Darwin's theory of evolution, undermining a biblical view of the cosmos as divinely created and of the human species as specially created by God. Hence essays in The Fundamentals on ‘The Passing of Evolution’, by the geologist G. F. Wright, and on the ‘Decadence of Darwinism’. For the contributors to The Fundamentals it was not just the answers that were the problem; even to ask the questions, or to think that it was appropriate to subject fundamental matters of faith to questioning, was unacceptable. The most famous or notorious early clash between fundamentalists and modernists was the so-called ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ in 1925, when a high school teacher, John Scopes, was accused of violating a Tennessee legal act that made it unlawful to teach evolution in any state-funded school.¹² The still on-going issue as to whether ‘creationism’ or ‘intelligent design’ should have a place in the school curriculum marks the current phase of the same debate.

However, the key threat perceived was the threat to the Bible and to its authority. In this case the great bogey was ‘higher criticism’, that is the subjection of the Bible to critical question. Here again it was German theological scholarship that was seen as most to be blamed. The Enlightenment had encouraged the application of scientific method to the study of the Bible, its historical claims subjected to scientific historical scrutiny. But ‘scientific criticism’ had undermined the fundamental concepts of revelation and miracle. The influence of Baruch Spinoza and David Hume was seen as destructive of faith in the supernatural.¹³ To question whether Moses was the author of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, or whether there was more than one Isaiah, or whether all the letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament had actually been written by Paul himself – such questions were intolerable. Accordingly we find essays in The Fundamentals on the ‘History of the Higher Criticism’ and ‘Fallacies of the Higher Criticism’, and on such subjects as the ‘Inspiration of the Bible’ and ‘The Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch’.

This brings us to the heart of Protestant fundamentalism – the central role of the Bible as the infallible authority of Christian faith. As James Barr notes, in his devastating critique of fundamentalism, ‘the question of scriptural authority is the one question of theology, that takes precedence over all others’.¹⁴ Again we note the parallel with Roman Catholicism, in its similarly instinctive conviction that for faith to be sure, for faith to be certain, the authority underpinning it must be infallible. The Catholic dogma on Papal infallibility, when the Pope speaks ex cathedra,¹⁵ mirrors the Protestant insistence on the infallibility of the Bible, while at the same time the distinction between Pope and Bible indicates the deep divide which conservative Protestantism sees between itself and Catholicism.

As the heart of Protestant fundamentalism this feature deserves more analysis. Its central importance is indicated by the fact that, for instance, the term ‘infallibility’ is soon seen to be inadequate. It can become a weasel word, taken as referring simply or more to the impact made by the Bible rather than to its creation.¹⁶ Likewise the term ‘inspiration’ can be taken as equivalent to ‘inspiring’, describing the Bible's effect rather than how it came about. A stronger word is needed, and that is ‘inerrancy’. One can have complete certainty in what the Bible teaches, because it is without error, inerrant. ‘If the Bible contains errors it is not God's Word itself, however reliable it may be […] God's character demands inerrancy.’¹⁷ The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978) includes Article XII – ‘We affirm that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit.’¹⁸ Again the parallel with the Catholic dogma is worth noting, since in the case of Papal infallibility too, ‘infallibility means more than exemption from actual error; it means exemption from the possibility of error’.¹⁹

In Protestant fundamentalism, the assumption of and focus on inerrancy leads, naturally, to read the Bible literally,²⁰ to take literally the Reformation's insistence on the primacy of the ‘plain sense’, the sensus literalis.²¹ The Reformation's insistence on the plain sense, of course, was in reaction to the mediaeval Church's assumption that the literal was only one of the four senses that may be read from scripture – the allegorical, the moral and the anagogical being the others. Martin Luther had strongly insisted on the plain or literal sense and dismissed mediaeval allegorising as so much rubbish.²² But in Protestant reaction to Darwin's evolutionary hypothesis, the ‘plain sense’ meant that when Genesis says the world was created in six days, that must mean six 24-hour periods of time. Or when one Gospel says that Jesus healed a blind man when he entered Jericho, and another that he healed a blind man when exiting from Jericho, and a third that he healed two blind men when leaving Jericho,²³ the only acceptable solution is that Jesus must have done all the healings, one on the way in, another on the way out, and another two on the way out – not one, or two, but four.

Here we see a basic flaw in Protestant fundamentalism, indicated also in the assumption that to maintain or to demonstrate the Bible's inspiration is all that is needed. For the fundamentalist there is no distinction between inspiration and revelation.²⁴ But to focus attention on inspiration fails to see the larger problem of interpretation: how to understand what has been written.²⁵ Ironically, this was an issue that the mediaeval Church had seen all too clearly in its use of allegorical interpretation to explain difficult passages in the Bible, an issue that the insistence on ‘plain sense’ and on meaning without error had obscured. But for a fundamentalist, a ‘plain sense’ reading of the text is not in fact an interpretation.²⁶ This unwillingness to take seriously the issue of interpretation includes the unwillingness to press the question of whether the Bible has different genres. Fundamentalists would certainly bridle at any suggestion that the poetic imagery in Isaiah's talk of the mountains bursting into song and the trees clapping their hands (Isa. 55.12) should be read literally.²⁷ Nevertheless, the claim that the Bible teaches inerrant truth covers everything that the Bible teaches, whether doctrine, or history, or science, or geography, or geology or any other disciplines.²⁸ And many fundamentalists find it necessary to insist that the opening chapters of Genesis be read as straightforward history. Here the introduction of the term ‘myth’, to denote a different kind of literature, immediately ...