Position Paper
Originally written: May 18, 2009
Lightly edited to conform it to the style of the blog.
Also, I cannot find, for the life of me, the Bibliography page to go with the parenthetical quotations. I'll update whenever I do find it! - gomer
Biblical Fundamentalism: Introduction
Many Christians view the use of scientific methods in the interpretation of Scripture with hesitation or even hostility because they see such criticism undermining the traditional authority of the Bible. Rejecting the scientific methods altogether, some turn to biblical fundamentalism in order to safeguard their understanding of the Bible as inspired and inerrant. This post addresses the claims of biblical fundamentalism, what it is and why is it inconsistent with the Catholic approach to the Bible itself and to biblical interpretation.
This post deals first with a brief treatment of the fundamentalist ideology, followed by their conception of inspiration and inerrancy. The reader will understand how the fundamentalist, operating within their ideological world view, must reject diachronic methods of interpretation. Finally, the paper will treat the Catholic vision of the Bible and its interpretation in order to show biblical fundamentalism is inconsistent with the Church’s model of exegesis.
Fundamentalist Ideology: Origin and Method
Biblical fundamentalism is not so much a method of interpretation of Scripture as it is an ideology that has specific attitudes towards the Bible. It is rooted in reaction and rejection: in reaction to the heterodox conclusions of the liberal Protestant exegetes utilizing the historical critical methods and, therefore, a rejection of those very methods. As an ideology, biblical fundamentalism originated as a specifically Protestant phenomena. Their understanding of the Bible and its interpretation follows the sixteenth century Reformation concept of sola Scriptura as the doctrinal foundation of divine revelation and authority. This meant that all authority, whether tradition, hierarchy, philosophy or theology, was submissive to the one, true authority, which is Scripture.
As Scripture is the sole authority in life, the Church as the official interpreter was rejected for the individual believer guided by the Holy Spirit as the true interpreter. “The principle of sola Scriptura meant that all the eggs were in one basket, and Protestantism had to be very careful about what happened to that basket” (Leinhard: 77). As the next few centuries unfolded into the Enlightenment, the forces of rationalism and historicism attacked that one basket in the forming of liberal Protestantism. In its wake, human reason (rationalism) became the sole authority, judging even the Scriptures, finding defects, contradictions, faults and errors throughout and radically questioning its validity as authoritative and inerrant.
A conservative reaction to this perceived corrupting of the sacred texts eventually would manifest in the form of biblical fundamentalism in the beginning of the twentieth century. Their desire to return to the “obvious meaning” of the literal words of Scripture, together with their understanding of the doctrines of inspiration and inerrancy, form the framework of what we can call “biblical fundamentalism.” They take the Bible seriously in their affirmation of its inspiration and inerrancy, but such fundamentalism views science, and not just scientific criticism, with hostility, seeing in it the enemy of faith. This is made evident in such controversies as the creationism versus evolution debates, where fundamentalists hold to the literal six, twenty-four hour days of Creation recorded in Genesis 1 as the historical truth about the origins of the universe, rejecting evolution as an enemy to the revealed word of God.
It is from this brief introductory understanding of fundamentalism that we must now turn to three main issues in order to better grasp biblical fundamentalism- inspiration, inerrancy, and the literalistic meaning of the text.
Fundamentalism: Divine Inspiration
The essential characteristic of biblical fundamentalism lies in the ahistorical character of their understanding of the origin and use of Sacred Scripture. The fundamentalist must reject historical criticism because of their conception of divine inspiration. Inspiration is defined as “verbal inspiration,” regarded as the direct dictation of each word to the human author (Leinhard: 79). They believe that the sacred human author of each book of the Bible was the copyist of divine dictation, holding that God guarantees each word’s truth, for if “God is truthful, and Scripture is God’s revelation, then Scripture must be true in all of its parts” (Leinhard: 80).
Thus, according to this understanding of revelation, they do not view the human authors as true authors, as one who engages divine revelation in their freedom, with their own style and limitations, and as true theologians who write from their own contemplation on the life and words of Jesus Christ. For the fundamentalist the words of the Bible are identified wholly as the Word of God directly and without error; that is to say, all of the words of Scripture correspond to the literal, historical fact “including incidental points of history and science” (Leinhard: 80). Thus, through this inspiration the Bible takes on an ahistorical essence as the direct Word of God, “timeless, out of time and valid for all time” (Frein: 13).
Fundamentalism: Total Inerrancy
Flowing out of this understanding of inspiration as direct verbal dictation is the central fundamentalist claim of “total inerrancy” (Leinhard: 79). Their understanding of the inerrancy of the Bible is their most central doctrine upon which the exegete builds his work. Each word being directly inspired, it is the task of the exegete to analyze the passage or book to discover the original meaning of the author, which is the only valid meaning (Frein: 13). Each statement of Scripture is, then, a statement of factual and historical accuracy, for it is not just an author’s limited understanding, but God’s truth.
Herein lies one of their most devastating errors, especially when interpreting the gospels. The fundamentalist necessarily confuses the final written form of a gospel with the actual words and deeds of Jesus, thinking them to be one and the same (IBC: 74). When confronted with specific examples of inconsistencies between two texts that seemingly record the same event in conflicting ways, the fundamentalist, who cannot allow for development of tradition by the author or the author’s Christian community, will posit multiple events. This approach allows such an exegete to harmonize inconsistencies by seeing different events described, not the same event described intentionally in different ways. For the fundamentalist, then, “the interpretation of individual passages and books proceeds synthetically from whole to part” (Frein: 14).
The four gospels record events, words, and deeds exactly as they happened and any discrepancy is due to the reader’s misunderstanding of the text, not the human author’s intentional reshaping of their presentation of the events, words, and/or deeds of Jesus. The exegete interprets every detail of the Bible as factually true and so a major preoccupation, then, with fundamentalist thinkers is the task of apologetics dealing with inerrancy. All statements pointing out inconsistencies, errors or contradictions within the Bible are deemed as attacks against its inerrancy and its divinely revealed character.
“For many proponents of strict verbal inspiration, the defense of Scripture can become more important than Scripture itself. The theology that they insist is the clear and obvious teaching of the Bible is often nineteenth-century conservative Protestant doctrine” (Leinhard: 80-81).
Fundamentalism: Biblical Interpretation
From the above understanding of the ahistorical character of revelation, the methods that the fundamentalist takes with Scripture is based largely on genre criticism, structure of the text, its themes and plot development. They take the Sacred Page as it is in its original autograph, believing each word to be directly dictated by God, and interpret it according to a very strict literalism. The intended meaning of each text is “single, definite and fixed” by the Holy Spirit and this literal meaning must be discovered by the reader (Frein: 13).
If the human authors recorded word-for-word what God wanted through strict verbal inspiration, then the notion of a historic process or development of any text- whole or part- has to be rejected outright, as does any diachronic methods of criticism. For the Holy Spirit does not need redaction and any criticism that posits multiple redactors, and thus progressing versions of those texts, would be operating on wholly unjustified grounds, corrupting the literal meaning of its author.
A Catholic Response to Biblical Fundamentalism
According to the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s document, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, this is:
“a naively literalist interpretation, one, that is to say, which excludes every effort at understanding the Bible that takes account of its historical origins and development” (IBC: 72).
Biblical fundamentalism fails the Catholic Church’s vision of Scripture and exegesis because it is anti-science, anti-authorship and ahistorical. As an ideology, fundamentalism rejects any science as a force undermining the Christian faith. The natural sciences refute the ancient cosmology and Creation stories, while historical criticism demonstrates the development of the inspired text, denying their strict verbal inspiration, and consequently, total inerrancy. And so, despite its ability to bear good exegetical fruit, it is rejected from root to tip from the available tools for the biblical fundamentalist.
The Catholic Church, on the other hand, has never rejected the ability of human reason to know truth, affirming reason and faith, being neither rationalist nor fideist. Within this appreciation of human reason, comes the legitimization of the sciences: natural, social, and literary. Historical criticism was rejected initially by the Church in Pope Leo’s encyclical Providentissimus Deus, because it was attached to a “much too intrusively dogmatic liberalism” that was buttressed by rationalism and modernism (IBC: 28). Through Catholic exegetes making careful use of these critical methods, the Church, in freeing the methods from unacceptable presuppositions, fifty years later allowed her exegetes to make use of this criticism wisely in the papal encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu. In her cautious approach to ‘higher criticism’, she was able to avoid many of the abuses of liberal Protestant exegetes that the fundamentalists reacted against so strongly.
Catholicism: On Inspiration
In the Catholic understanding of inspiration, the Bible is the Word of God in human language, possessing a two-fold nature: human and divine, analogous to the Incarnation. The fundamentalist does not fully accept human authorship of the Bible and as such “it makes itself incapable of accepting the full truth of the incarnation itself. As regards relationships with God, fundamentalism seeks to escape any closeness of the divine and the human”(IBC: 73). The Bible is revealed through the limitations of human writing and language, just as Jesus took on the limitations of human nature to communicate his divinity (Williamson: 30). Pope John Paul II addressed the Pontifical Biblical Commission, stating fundamentalists
“tend to believe that, since God is the absolute Being, each of his words has an absolute value, independent of all the conditions of human language... [God] does not give each expression a uniform value, but uses its possible nuances with extreme flexibility and likewise its limitations” (IBC: 18).
However, the Biblical Commission has distinguished here at least three characteristics of the human activity in the writing of the Bible:
“(1) the literary role of the authors and editors in the composition of the Scriptural books,
(2) the historical nature of the process, and
(3) the human limitations of the authors and editors” (Williamson: 35).
In affirming both the freedom and the limitations of human authorship, the Church necessarily rejects the fundamentalist claim to strict verbal inspiration and their literalistic interpretation of the Bible in all its details.
Catholicism: On Interpretation
Continuing with the Catholic doctrine of the two-fold nature of the Bible, the Church cannot find biblical fundamentalism acceptable in their refusal to acknowledge the legitimate historical development of the biblical texts. While the Church and fundamentalists agree that the Bible concerns history, they differ in that Catholic interpretation acknowledges different literary forms within a text, “the historical conditioning in the biblical word, and is not preoccupied with the accuracy of the narrative details” (Williamson: 62). The fundamentalist obsession with this narrative accuracy is the attempt to force the text to say something that it was not intended to say, such as make authoritative comments on science or history.
Furthermore, it is through historical development within the local Christian communities and in the universal Church that the final written form of the inspired text came together. This communal development of the sacred texts is rejected by the fundamentalist, who is decidedly anti-ecclesial in his or her theory of strict verbal inspiration. There is simply no need for a Church or historic community of believers in which God reveals Himself. There is only the individual human copyist receiving a direct word-for-word revelation.
Conclusion
This post sought to present an understanding biblical fundamentalism, its ideology, doctrines and methods, as incompatible with Catholic teaching on the inspiration, inerrancy, historical quality of divine revelation. Though it desires to safeguard revelation, fundamentalism ultimately weakens exegesis by its reaction against human reason and the sciences and their contribution to understanding the written Word of God and by their absolutizing of nineteenth century conservative Protestant doctrine.
Through the various Church documents and scholars, my position was that such an approach cannot satisfy what the Church asks of her exegetes, to interpret the Bible as the Word of God in human language. The Bible can be better grasped, though not completely, through the scientific methods of criticism and this is why the Church today not only recommends them, but requires them of her exegetes.
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