[Dialogue] Spong--More on fundamentalism

[KroegerD at aol.com]

March 14, 2007 
The Rise of Fundamentalism,  Part II  

One of the things we need to embrace in order to understand the conflicts  
being waged in most of the main line churches today is that throughout most of  
human history, the average man or woman could neither read nor write. That is  
why the Church used art forms, like the Stations of the Cross, or music, like 
 the various spirituals developed in the black church telling a story in 
song, to  inform the people about the nature of the Christian faith. This fact 
also meant  that when a challenge to perceived truth occurred, very few people 
ever heard  about it or were disturbed by it. Therefore in the 16th century when 
a  revolutionary view of the universe was developed by Copernicus, suggesting 
that  the planet earth was not the center of creation, it was not a great 
problem for  the Church since few people ever heard about it. A century later, 
however, when  Galileo, who was a far more public figure, embraced the thought 
of Copernicus  and began to discuss and write about his thinking publicly, he 
paid for his  notoriety in a trial, which forced him to end his life as a 
heretic under house  arrest. Why was this cosmological insight so upsetting? The 
answer to that was  quite simple. If heaven is not just above the sky, then much 
of the content of  the Bible, from the Tower of Babel to the story of Jesus' 
ascension becomes  nonsensical. With the rise of an educated class in the 
great universities of  Europe the Church's ability to control truth and to define 
the limits of the  debate began to fade. In the 17th century Isaac Newton 
brought natural law into  western consciousness and consequently contributed to 
the shrinking of the  realms in which both miracle and magic were believed to 
occur. Charles Darwin,  once he made his trip to the Galapagos Islands in the 
19th century, proceeded to  challenge the Church's understanding of human 
origins and correspondingly the  accuracy of the creation story from the Book of 
Genesis. If human beings were  not fallen from a pristine position of having been 
fashioned in God's image,  then the divine rescue that Jesus was said to have 
effected with his redemptive  act of suffering and dying on the cross was a 
solution to an incorrect  diagnosis. In the early years of the 20th century 
when Sigmund Freud began to  analyze the infantile elements in Christianity, the 
view of God as a heavenly  parent figure was destabilized and much that was 
once called holy now appeared  to be only neurotic. As a result organized 
religion in the western world went  into a tailspin. Later in the middle years of 
that same 20th century, Albert  Einstein confronted the world with the idea that 
both time and space were  relative categories, and that since all people live 
inside time and space, every  human articulation of truth was itself relative 
and not absolute. This meant  that Christianity's absolutist claims for 
infallible popes and inerrant Bibles  could no longer be seriously entertained.  
As each of these now largely undisputed insights began to enter, first the  
universities and, in time, the lowest levels of the public schools, their  
unavoidable truth was seen to challenge the presuppositions of the Christian  
faith and to set up a mighty struggle between religion and contemporary  
knowledge. We are still aware of some of the flash points of that struggle in  the 
United States. There was the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925 when  a 
young biology teacher named John Scopes was put on trial for violating a state  
statute forbidding the teaching of "godless evolution" to Tennessee children,  
since it was deemed to be contrary to "The Word of God." The trial attracted  
national attention since it brought into that small town courtroom two very 
well  known public figures: Williams Jennings Bryan, a three-time Democratic 
Party  nominee for President (1896, 1900 and 1908) to defend the literal Bible 
and  renowned trial lawyer and atheist, Clarence Darrow, to defend the young 
school  teacher. Such semi-religious propositions as "creation science" and 
"intelligent  design" are today the lingering residue of that battle. The current 
searing  conflicts inside Christianity over the place of the Bible in 
determining what is  to be the role and status of women and the place of homosexuals 
in both church  and society are nothing more than one final gasp of this age 
old conflict. Not  to see this is simply to be blind to history.  
There is a second source of knowledge that also feeds this current dispute.  
This one arises from within specifically Christian circles and reflects the 
last  200 years of critical biblical scholarship. In the 18th century Christian  
leaders began to probe the Bible with the new tools of scholarship that were  
available to them. In the process most of the old assumptions about the Bible 
 were quickly obliterated. Beginning in Germany, the idea that God dictated 
the  Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) was brought 
into  question and quickly dismissed. A group of scholars in what came to be 
known as  the Graf-Welhausen School identified a minimum of four distinct sources 
 underlying the Torah. None of these sources were as old as Moses, who died  
around 1250 B.C.E. and whose life is shrouded in mystery. The earliest source 
of  the Torah was written some 300 years after the death of Moses. It reflects 
the  values of what came to be called the land of Judah with its holy city of 
 Jerusalem, its temple and temple priesthood and the established monarchy of 
the  descendants of King David, whose memory was regarded as the golden age of 
the  Jews. The second source was written in the Northern Kingdom called 
Israel after  a successful revolution against Judah led by a military captain named 
Jeroboam.  This version extolled the revolution, justified rebelling against 
those kings  who violated the people's trust, and sought to build up Northern 
shrines at  Bethel and Beersheba to compete with Jerusalem. It also treated 
Joseph, the  presumed ancestor of the people of the Northern Kingdom, as Jacob's 
favorite  son, the child by his favorite wife and made his half-brother 
Judah, the  patriarch of the South, into a villain. When the Assyrians conquered 
the  Northern Kingdom in 721 B.C.E. refugees bearing their version of the sacred 
 story escaped the carnage in Samaria and came to Jerusalem. Later, scribes  
pasted these two sacred stories together, sometimes rather crudely, allowing  
contradictions to stand side by side as the sacred Torah began to come into  
view.  
This ongoing story was later impacted in 625 B.C.E. under the reign of the  
boy King Josiah when a sacred scroll was found in the walls of the Temple 
during  renovations. It claimed to be the work of Moses and came to be called the 
second  (deutero) giving of the law (nomos). It is substantially our book of 
Deuteronomy  today. Deuteronomy was then added to the new combined version of 
the Torah and  the whole work was edited in light of Deuteronomy in the third 
stage of its  development. Finally, when Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians, 
first in 596  B.C.E. and later in 586 B.C.E., the Jewish people were carried into 
exile. In  that captivity, led by a group of priestly writers, a final massive 
editing of  their sacred story was carried out. The Torah was expanded to 
twice its size and  it now emphasized faithful worship apart from Jerusalem and 
it encouraged those  marks of Judaism, like Sabbath Day observance, kosher 
dietary rules and physical  circumcision, which were designed to keep Jews 
separate from non-Jews and to  insure their survival as a people separated from their 
homeland. With that final  revision the Torah generally assumed its present 
form. It was then adopted as  the law of God in a renewal of the covenant 
ceremony under the leadership of the  priest Ezra when the exile finally ended. It 
was this discovery of the way the  sacred text came to be formed over some 500 
years that rendered the claim that  the Bible was the inerrant Word of God 
largely unbelievable.  
In time the same critical analysis would be applied to the New Testament.  
Scholars discovered first the primacy of Mark and then recognized that both  
Matthew and Luke had copied great chunks of Mark into their gospels. In the  
process, they had edited Mark, added to Mark, deleted from Mark and changed  Mark. 
Neither Matthew nor Luke seemed to believe that Mark's text was the 'Word  of 
God.' Next the contradictions in the New Testament between the gospels and  
the writings of Paul were noticed. We began to see, by looking at the books of  
the New Testament, how the story grew and developed, when the new traditions  
entered and when the supernatural elements got heightened. Assumptions of  
divinely-inspired inerrancy died.  
By and large this knowledge of and debate about the Bible remained within the 
 confines of the academies of Christian Europe until the year 1834 when a 
young  New Testament scholar named David Friedrich Strauss, a professor at the  
University of Tubingen, wrote a monumental book entitled "Leben Jesu" or in  
English, "The Life of Jesus Critically Examined." With this book, New Testament  
scholarship broke out into the public and Christianity began its move into 
two  camps. Those open and willing to engage the new insights became the 
modernists,  characterized as "liberals", "secular humanists" and as "non-believers" 
by their  traditionalist critics, and those who insisted that the Bible was 
still the  literal, inerrant word of God. In the early 1900's these 
traditionalists  produced a series of pamphlets designed to defend the literal accuracy of 
the  Bible. Written and edited primarily by R. A. Torrey and A. C. Dixon, 
they  articulated what they called "The Fundamentals" of Christianity. With the  
support of money from Lyman Stewart, the founder of Union Oil Co. of 
California,  now called Unocal, these pamphlets were first mailed to 300,000 Christian  
workers across the world and were later published in twelve volumes of 
essays.  Those who held to these fundamentals of Christianity then came to be called 
 'Fundamentalists.' That is how this word came into our vocabulary...  
Next week, I will examine these tracts and what came to be called "The Five  
Fundamentals" that were said to form the irreducible bedrock of Christianity.  
Then we will look week by week at each of these fundamentals. Surprises await 
 us, but with those surprises will come a greater illumination of the current 
 debates that threaten to tear main line churches apart.  
John Shelby Spong 



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