Dr. Ruckman began in his, “Introduction,” to Bible Babel an attack on noteworthy
fundamentalists who upheld modern Bibles based on the Westcott and Hort Greek
text that resulted in the Anglican revision of the AV completed in 1881. His diatribe against prestigious
fundamentalist schools such as Bob Jones University, Tennessee Temple, and
Hyles-Anderson was written, not in a scholarly fashion, but in a manner
designed to appeal to and be understood by the average church-going Independent
Baptist. The central focus of Ruckman’s books was his anger at traditional
fundamentalism’s perceived contempt for the Bible whose authority he accepted
without question.
Let’s
talk a little about the beginnings of American fundamentalism. In the late 1800s, a series of
meetings of conservative Protestant Christians in America began, some of which,
being held at Niagara, New York, resulted in them being referred to as the
Niagara Conference. The clergy and laymen that attended these meetings are
referred to as, “the founding fathers of fundamentalism.”[1] The label,
“fundamentalists,” was not coined until 1920 to describe conservative
Protestants of varying denominations who were actively militant in defending
the basics of what they perceived was orthodox Christian belief.[2] The
term came from a series of essays published in the first decade of the
twentieth century as The Fundamentals, provided
free to the Christian public.[3]
Noteworthy evangelical R.A. Torrey figured prominently among the authors.
Fundamentalists rose
to national prominence in their involvement in a judicial proceeding in the
mid-1920s that is popularly known as, “The Scopes Monkey Trial,” over the
teaching of evolution in the public schools. Although it was a legal win for
those opposed to evolution being taught, the resultant negative publicity drove
fundamentalists further from mainstream America. It resulted in the development
of fundamentalist universities such as Bob Jones University, whose faithfulness
to the critical text of Westcott and Hort and the inerrancy of the unseen
original autographs figured prominently as a cause of the King James-only movement which was a reaction against it.[4]
After the 1920s, fundamentalism ceased to be a powerful political movement and
retreated from engagement with the majority of the public who did not share its
views. By the 1960s virtually all fundamentalist churches were Baptist.[5] The movement rose to prominence again in the
1970s with Jerry Falwell’s, “Moral Majority,” and the courting of the movement
by the 1980 Ronald Reagan presidential effort.[6]
Fundamentalism, as a
movement within conservative Protestant churches, was ultimately made possible
by the doctrines set forth early in the Reformation by Martin Luther. Luther’s
exchange of the authority to access and interpret Biblical texts from the organization
of the Roman Catholic Church to the individual Christian ultimately allowed for
the existence and justification of modern Protestant fundamentalism.[7]
Luther expressed a new line of thought in opposition generally accepted
Christian belief, that took access to Biblical texts and interpretation of them
from the priest or an elite consisting of the educated and gave this to the
individual Christian. For Luther, every man was a theologian.[8]
What is the traditional fundamentalist view of the Bible?
The foundational importance of the Bible in
Protestantism was expressed very clearly in the seventeenth century by Anglican
divine, William Chillingworth, when he declared emphatically, “The Bible, I
say, the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants!”[9] In the nineteenth century,
Presbyterian theologian Charles Hodge, in his three volume work Systematic
Theology, stated in 1873, quoting Martin Luther’s 1537 Smallcald Articles,
that, “All Protestants agree in teaching that ‘the word of God, as contained in
the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is the only infallible rule of
faith and practice.’”[10]
Again, this view was affirmed by Baptist
theologians in the twentieth century as fundamentalism was moving away from a
cross section of conservative Christian denominations and was focused more and
more in the Baptist faith tradition. This traditional view of the Bible’s
importance in fundamentalism was expressed in an even more extreme manner by
Henry Clarence Thiessen in his Introductory
Lectures in Systematic Theology: “It [what he called the true Church] bases
its view on the belief that the Bible is the embodiment of a divine revelation,
and that the records which contain that revelation are genuine, credible,
canonical, and supernaturally inspired.” [11]
The fundamentalist view of the divine
inspiration of the Bible had its origins in the Princeton Seminary, in the
nineteenth century. In 1879, a doctrine was expressed that insisted that the
original autographs of the presumed Bible writers, and those writings only,
were inspired by God, inerrant and infallible.[12] All subsequent translations attained to
varying degrees of reliability and trustworthiness. This allowed a fallback
position from the assault on the truth of the Bible narrative by German
Biblical criticism and the acceptance of Darwin’s version of the theory of
evolution to a Bible that didn’t actually exist in reality, as the original
autographs were never in one Bible, and were themselves not extant so they
could not be questioned. The mark of fundamentalism in America was a
conservative, literal approach to scriptural interpretation and a belief in the
divine inspiration of the original autographs with translations being
trustworthy but not perfect. It reduced divine inspiration to mere transmission
from God to writing on a single occasion.[13] Presbyterian Pastor
Archibald Alexander Hodge, son of Princeton Seminary theologian Charles Hodge,
wrote in 1863 that what the Bible calls, “given by inspiration,” is revelation, while inspiration referred
only to the process of writing an infallible and inerrant document.[14]
That this did not include any translation is apparent. American Baptist
minister and author Dr. Wayland Hoyt, speaking at a conference held on Biblical
inspiration in Philadelphia in 1887, said, “But neither for version nor for
manuscripts is Inspiration to be claimed. Inspiration is only to be claimed for
the primal sacred autographs …We affirm Inspiration and authority of the original Scriptures, the sacred autographs, but not of the copies
or versions.”[15]
[1] Ernest Sandeen, “Toward an
Historical Interpretation of the Origins of Fundamentalism,” Church History 36, no. 1 (March 1967):
72.
[2] James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamental
Baptist Church (New York:
Random House, 2004), 372.
[4] Elijah G. Dann, Leaving Fundamentalism: Personal Stories (Waterloo, Ontario:
Wilfrid
Laurier University Press, 2008) 7.
[5] George Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and
Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids,
MI.:Wm. B. Erdmans Publishing, 1991), 3.
[6]
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh:
Life in a Fundamental Baptist Church (New York:
Random House, 2004),1
& 6 .
[7]
Robert Glenn Howard, "The Double Bind of the
Protestant Reformation: The Birth of Fundamentalism and the Necessity of
Pluralism," Journal Of Church & State 47, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 96.
[8] Ibid.
[9]
William Chillingworth, The Religion of
Protestants: A Safe Way to Salvation (1638,
repr.,London: Henry G. Bohn,
1846), 463 .
[10]
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (1873,
repr., Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1940),
Kindle edition, ch. 6.
[11]
Henry Clarence Thiessen, Introductory
Lectures in Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids,
MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1949), 79.
[12]
Sandeen, 74.
[13]
Kern Robert Trembath, Evangelical
Theories of Divine Inspiration: A Review and Proposal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987),
15.
[14]
A.A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New
York: Robert Carter & Bros, 1863), 68.
No comments:
Post a Comment