[Dialogue] Fundie Part 3

[KroegerD at aol.com]

 The Rise of Fundamentalism,  Part III: The Five Fundamentals  

I remember well an experience I had as a young lad in the late 1930's in the  
South's Bible Belt when I first heard about evolution. A neighbor was 
visiting  my mother and they were sharing "a dope" (the colloquial name for Coca-Cola 
in  that day, a carry-over from the days when that soft drink contained both  
caffeine and cocaine). This lady said in her homespun, non-sophisticated way, 
"I  am not descended from no monkey." This conversation took place just 79 
years  after the publication of Charles Darwin's 1859 masterpiece, "The Origin 
of  Species through Natural Selection." So in the space of just 79 years his 
thought  had trickled down to the rural, working class poor in North Carolina. 
In the  intellectual community Darwin's thought was engaged much earlier. Less 
than a  year after Darwin's book came out, Anglican Bishop Samuel Wilberforce 
met Darwin  defender T. H. Huxley in public debate in the Oxford University 
Museum of  Natural History on June 30th, 1860. Wilberforce, feeling that Darwin 
was  attacking both the inerrant Bible and God, employed ridicule that night. 
He  inquired of Mr. Huxley as to whether it was on his mother's side or his 
father's  side that he was descended from an ape. Ridicule is, however, never an 
effective  weapon against truth and the primary result of this debate was to 
give Darwin's  thought a huge boost in the public arena, guaranteeing that his 
ideas would  inevitably trickle down into the common mind. Trickle down they 
did.  
By 1909 Protestant clergy associated with the ultra-conservative Princeton  
Theological Seminary had taken up the cudgel against Darwin in defense of what  
they called "traditional Christianity." To them Darwin was only the latest in 
a  long line of challenges that these devout, but not deeply learned men, 
felt was  eroding "Christian Truth." They also felt a need to refute the rising 
tide of  biblical criticism about which I wrote last week, that had begun to 
infiltrate  America from Europe. It included the New Testament work of David 
Frederick  Strauss in 1834 that challenged the idea that all the details of the 
gospels  were historical and the later Old Testament scholarship of Karl Graf 
and Julius  Wellhausen that obliterated the traditional claim for the Mosaic 
authorship of  the Torah. These Princeton clergy also felt the threat to the 
dominant  Protestant faith in America from the rising tide of Roman Catholic 
immigrants  from Ireland and southern Europe, which began to temper the 
overwhelmingly  Protestant nature of America's religious life. This newly arriving 
Catholic  population also diminished the power of this nation's aristocracy as the 
labor  movement placed a new emphasis on building a just society for working 
people.  These clergy interpreted all of these changes as secular and 
humanistic and  therefore anti-Christian. New religious groups were also arising in 
America like  Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science movement and the Mormonism of 
Joseph Smith,  which they viewed with great suspicion, calling them "cults," 
and regarding each  with fear and even disgust.  
Mainline Christian theologians, however, who taught in the great academic  
centers of this nation like Union Theological Seminary in New York, Harvard  
Divinity School in Cambridge, Yale Divinity School in New Haven and the Divinity  
School of the University of Chicago, busied themselves with the task of  
incorporating these new learnings into Christianity. In the process they gained  
for themselves the reputation of being "religious liberals who were no longer  
bound by core Christian principles." As a direct counter point these  
conservative leaders became even more aggressive in defending the literal truth  of 
the Bible and especially those claims made for the literal accuracy of such  
biblical accounts as the Virgin Birth, the miracle stories and the physical  
resuscitation of Jesus' body as the only allowable understanding of the  
resurrection. In their minds they were engaged in a fight for God against the  
infidels. Dubbing themselves the defenders of "Orthodoxy," these self-appointed  
gendarmes for the Lord organized to fight this growing menace to "revealed  truth." 
Their weapon employed in this war was the publication of a series of  tracts 
designed to spell out in clear detail the irreducible core beliefs of  
"Orthodox Christianity." Their seemingly quixotic fight caught the attention of  
conservative, wealthy oil executives in California, who bankrolled this effort.  
For years 300,000 tracts were mailed each week to church workers in America and 
 around the world. Later the company for which these oil executives worked, 
the  Union Oil Company of California (or Unocal today) financed the further  
publication of these tracts into permanent books to maximize their impact. It  
worked.  
During the 1920's with pressure arising from this huge public relations  
campaign, the decision-making bodies of America's main line churches were forced  
to deal with a growing tension between those supporting this tractarian  
movement, who came to be called "fundamentalists," and those opposed who came to  
be called "modernists." At the center of these debates was the issue of the  
inerrancy of scripture. Clergy scholars in the early 20th century like Harry  
Emerson Fosdick were vigorously attacked as heretics for denying scriptural  
inerrancy. Fundamentalist clergy, who at that time constituted the majority of  
the leadership of the Christian Church, also opposed such liberalizing 
political  measures as giving the ballot to women and women's emancipation. They also, 
 interestingly enough, defended segregation, capital punishment and 
"traditional  morality" (which did not include "flappers" doing the "Charleston"). 
Their  authority in each confrontation was the literal Bible, "the word of God."  
Great battles were fought between these two perspectives in the major  
Christian denominations in the first three decades of the 20th century. Finally  the 
'modernists,' who dominated the faculties in the centers of Christian  
learning, slowly but surely were successful in wresting control from the  
fundamentalists in most of the mainline churches, but that victory would prove  to be 
very costly. In my Church the battle ebbed and flowed. In 1924 the Rt.  Rev. 
William M. Brown, retired Bishop of Arkansas, became the only Episcopal  bishop 
ever to be tried and convicted for heresy. His crime was that he embraced  
evolution, but people whispered that he was also a communist. At the same time,  
the Episcopal Church led by such stalwart scholars as Walter Russell Bowie, who 
 served as editor of an influential journal, "The Southern Churchman," 
defeated  attempts to require belief in a literal interpretation of the creeds on 
pain of  excommunication. Other churches experienced similar stress and made 
similar  decisions.  
Driven by these defeats, fundamentalism retreated from mainline churches into 
 rural and small town America, especially but not exclusively in the South, 
and  developed denominations that featured congregational control with little 
loyalty  to a national headquarters. Building their own seminaries the more 
sophisticated  of them sought to escape the image of fundamentalism, which was in 
some circles  identified with closed-minded ignorance, by calling themselves 
'evangelicals.'  Evangelical Christianity thrived in this relatively 
unchallenged rural or  Southern atmosphere and began to dominate those regions. They 
built seminaries  committed to teaching "fundamental Christian truth" 
unencumbered by either the  intellectual revolution of the last 500 years or the rise in 
critical biblical  scholarship during the last 200 years. As the main line 
churches became more  open to new interpretations and therefore, "fuzzier" on 
core doctrines, the  fundamentalist movement grew more isolated, more strident 
in its proclamations  and even more anti-intellectual. This division was hidden 
politically for years,  in part because at least in the South the tensions 
over the civil war and issues  of race had made the South staunchly Democratic. 
After all the Republican Party  was identified with Abraham Lincoln, Civil War 
defeat and "carpet baggers."  That, however, began to change when the 
Democrats nominated a northern Roman  Catholic as its presidential candidate in 1928. 
Later Harry Truman desegregated  the armed forces and defeated the southern 
wing of his party, led by Strom  Thurmond, in the election of 1948. Next the 
Supreme Court, filled with  appointees from the Democratic Roosevelt-Truman era, 
forced the desegregation of  public schools in the 1950's, and then Democrat 
Lyndon Johnson cajoled Congress  into passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 
Racism has always been an ally of  fundamentalism. Yesterday's victims of the 
literal Bible were blacks, while  today's victims are homosexuals. 
Fundamentalism always has a victim.  
The foundation of this Southern-based right wing, fundamentalist Protestant  
religion had been laid out between 1909 and 1915 in those Unocal distributed  
tracts. In time these core principles were reduced to five in number and they  
came to be called "The Fundamentals."  
    1.  The Bible is the literal, inerrant Word of God.  
    2.  Jesus was literally born of a virgin.  
    3.  Substitutionary atonement is the meaning of Jesus' death on the 
cross.  
    4.  The miracles of the New Testament are real. They literally happened.  
    5.  Jesus rose physically from the grave, ascended literally into the sky 
and  would return someday in the "second coming." 
The wording of these  "fundamentals" varied slightly from document to 
document, but the battle lines  were clear. The Northern Presbyterian Church adopted 
these fundamentals as  defining what was required to call oneself a Christian 
at a national gathering  as early as 1910. That vote did not end the debate, 
however, for this church had  to reaffirm them again in 1916 and in 1923.  
One cannot understand present day church tensions without being aware of  
these roots. Every major church dispute today rises out of a conflict created  
when new learning calls traditional religious convictions into question.  
Evolution vs. Intelligent Design; birth control, abortion and women's equality;  
homosexuality and the Bible, all finally come down to a battle in the churches  
between expanding knowledge and these five core principles. Critics of every 
new  church initiative claim that in their opposition to "modernism" they are  
supporting "the clear teaching of the Word of God" or fighting a "godless  
humanism." It is time to expose those fundamentals for what they are. I will do  
just than in this column over the next few weeks, so stay tuned.  
John Shelby Spong  
_Note  from the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
bookstores  everywhere and by clicking here!_ 
(http://astore.amazon.com/bishopspong-20/detail/0060762071/104-6221748-5882304)   
A message from Bisphop Spong  
Dear Friends and Subscribers,  
I wish to apologize for a mistake in the question and answer feature of last  
week's column.  
I referred to George Carey as the Bishop of Bath and Wales when he was  
appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. The correct designation was Bath and Wells.  
This mistake grieves me for two reasons: First, I have on two occasions done  
lectures for the Clergy in that Diocese that were held in the Wells Cathedral  
and I know that area very well. A former Bishop of that Diocese was my good  
friend, Jim Thompson. Secondly my wife is English (from Worthing, Sussex) and  
she is my primary proof reader and this mistake was missed by us both.  
Furthermore we have also been to Wales on any number of occasions and know  
and appreciate that part of the United Kingdom very much. Wells and Wales are  
both lovely and do not need to be confused. Especially to my English readers 
may  I say that I regret this error. It has now been changed on the Master Copy 
so  that if you wish to read it online again you will find it corrected.  
John Shelby Spong  
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
David Stegall of Birmingham, Alabama, writes:  
I can find countless numbers of biblical commentaries that hold a very  
conservative, fundamentalist, evangelical, literal and archaic world view. I  
cannot find one biblical commentary with a post-modern (or is it post-post  now?), 
pluralistic, scholastically valid, metaphorically interpretive  contemporary 
world view.  
I have read most of your books, many of your essays; listened to your tapes  
(can I get more? Where?) And I have read most of Marcus Borg's books, some of  
John Hick's books and essays. All of you relate alternative (to literalist) 
and  astute interpretations of biblical stories but where can I get a complete  
volume? I know they exist somewhere. An excellent example of this is your  
interpretation of the Book of Job.  
Can you help me with this? I want to help create a new Christianity for a new 
 world but I need a way to teach not only educated adults but also lesser  
educated adults and children. If we could start out teaching children in a  
loving and compassionate, rational way, we would not have to re-program them to  a 
new cosmology, etc. when they grow up and start realizing that certain things 
 they were taught in Sunday School and church do not make sense.  
Dear David,  
I get the sense that you are looking for a one-volume commentary on the  
Bible. If I have understood you correctly, they are mostly written by  literalists 
because those who are not literalists would know how impossible that  task 
is. The Bible is made up of 66 books, written over a period of about 1000  
years, two to three thousand years ago. It is written by Middle Eastern people  who 
have a Middle Eastern world view during the period of history from 1000  
B.C.E. to 135 C.E. The books are written in Greek and Hebrew. There are many  fine 
commentaries on individual books of the Bible. There are even entire Bible  
commentary volumes that literally line the shelves of many pastors, like the  
Interpreter's Bible, popular a generation ago or the Anchor Bible series put 
out  by Doubleday a bit more recently. These volumes are, however, not uniform 
in  content, with some authors better than others. Many of these volumes are in 
fact  never opened. Few clergy want to spend much time on I and II Chronicles 
or the  prophet Haggai, for example. It is far more fruitful to seek out a 
major writer  who has dedicated his or her study life to a single book or group 
of books in  the biblical text. I still regard Gerhard Von Rad's "Genesis" as 
the best  commentary on that biblical book and on Old Testament theological 
issues. St.  John's gospel has many great commentaries with the most recent one 
being Raymond  Brown's two-volume work in the Anchor Bible series, which is 
still probably at  the top of the list for understanding John. The work of C.H. 
Dodd and even  William Temple on this Fourth Gospel, although two or three 
generations old, are  still treasured by me. I rank Michael Donald Goulders' 
two-volume work on Luke  as my favorite. It is entitled, "Luke: A New Paradigm."  
Among the great names in biblical scholarship are David Friedrich Strauss,  
whose 1834 book, "The Life of Jesus Critically Reviewed," first brought 
biblical  scholarship out of the academy and into the public. Rudolf Bultmann is 
probably  the most quoted and defining New Testament scholar of the 20th century. 
Ernst  Haencken's work on the Book of Acts has not, in my mind, been topped 
since its  publication almost forty years ago. Outstanding Pauline scholars 
range from  Martin Luther to John Dominic Crossan.  
One way of separating the literalists from the scholars is to look at the  
publishing company. The big publishers, McGraw-Hill, Harper-Collins or Doubleday 
 will not as a rule publish unlearned Protestant or Catholic propaganda  
masquerading as biblical commentaries, but small evangelical or Roman Catholic  
publishing houses do. Eerdman's, for example, is one publisher I generally  
dismiss without much further study.  
Finally, if you want to read a book about the Bible as a whole, I recommend  
Marcus Borg's, "Reading the Bible again for the First Time" or my book,  
"Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism." Both are introductory studies from a  
modern non-literal perspective.  
I'm sorry I cannot give you a simple answer to your profound inquiry. It just 
 really isn't that easy.  
John Shelby Spong  
P.S. Audio and video tapes of lectures I have given around the country are  
available through Harper-Collins. 



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