This is from their letter Q&A April 28, 2022.*
Q: By Larry
Why do fundamentalist believers take every word of the Bible as totally correct, when no one, to my observation, has an answer to the exact quotes of Jesus, Moses, Samuel, etc. Do you remember the game where a conversation was started about a subject, and then passed on to others until it came full circle and related back to the originator. Usually, not the same. I think the Bible accounts such as the creation story exemplifies that game!
Let's take this piece by piece. I give the real answer, before taking apart the fake one.
Why do fundamentalist believers take every word of the Bible as totally correct,
Totally correct as to doctrine or as to fact. Not necessarily as to verbatim quote, by today's standard of exactitude.
when no one, to my observation, has an answer to the exact quotes of Jesus, Moses, Samuel, etc.
Convention : giving a quote as verbatim does not necessarily mean back in these days that no iot or tittle of the spoken words could have been changed before the writing down. The words of Caesar on that Ides of March have been given as "et tu fili" and as "et tu Brute" or "και συ Βρουτε" - it is referring to the same sentence, whether in Latin or in Greek, whether Brutus was adressed with his name or as "son" ... similarily, one word on the Cross is given in two different Gospels as "Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani?" and as "Eloi, Eloi, lamma sabacthani?" according to two different languages, Hebrew of the Psalm and Aramaic of the Targum, I suppose. In either case, Our Lord cried out in a Semitic language (the mockers would not have pretended to hear Him "calling on Elijah" otherwise) and in either case, Our Lord said the beginning words of a psalm (which was not very flattering for the mockers, since it called them bulls of Bashan, but which was hope-carrying to the faithful who stood by, the Holy Mother and the Beloved Disciple, as Christ also said hereby "I will declare thy name to my brethren: in the midst of the church will I praise thee." A thing that Christ does in each valid Eucharist). So, this verbatim exactitude is not necessary for the doctrinal infallibility and factual inerrancy to be there in the text.
In the case of some purely human speaker, the hagiographer is not "distorting" (with memory lapse) the notional content of the words, and in case of the speaker being God, before incarnation (as in "God spoke to Moses and said" passages) or after (as in "Jesus said") the doctrinal infallibility and factual inerrancy applies both to what was orally heard and what was put down.
Do you remember the game where a conversation was started about a subject, and then passed on to others until it came full circle and related back to the originator. Usually, not the same. I think the Bible accounts such as the creation story exemplifies that game!
This presupposes a nice and nifty invention of progressive Christianity, of which the club Progressing Spirit is a subset, a long series of transition orally before the writing down.
Now, there are passages in Genesis (but not all most later books) which arguably were transmitted orally for centuries before the writing down - but the creation account is not among these, since it's Moses' account of a vision he had on Sinai. Creation of Eve account, Fall account, Cain's murder account, yes, you would have transmission.
Now there is a very big difference between transmission over generations and the game described (though I seem to recall different rules, the game might be a different one). Transmit one text quickly, "say it only once" and retransmit without taking time to think, distortions are much more prone to happen than if you allow the learner to lear it slowly and repeat until he has mastered it, one sentence at a time and the sentences put down together as well. That very much other game some Anglicans and Lutherans may also know, it is used when learning the Our Father or the Creed, and Catholics do it too, and so do, I suppose, the Orthodox. Between the one teaching and the ones learning, there is not much room for a discrepancy of the text, and those who would make a mistake would not be the ones whom God chose for the transmitting.
Adam and Eve could tell about the Genesis 3 event to Seth, to Enos, and a few more, but if Cainan (the first Cainan, if there was a second one) had a brother who made a mistake when learning it, it was Cainan who was chosen to be the father of Malaleel, and if Jared had a brother who learnt it wrong, it was Jared who was chosen to be father of Henoch, who will probably be companion to the Second forerunner. It's not common to hear someone say "Our Mother" or "Our Parent" instead of "Our Father" and some have pretended, those who do are not doing so by lack of learning abilities, but by ideology, feminism or inclusive speech. While Genesis 3 is longer than an Our Father and even than a Nicene Creed, it is not by very much.
Now for the answer given
by Brian D. McLaren,
I will only deal with relevant phrases, and not quote all. First, is he qualified?
"I grew up in a strict fundamentalist sect of Christianity, so I’m in a pretty good position to try to answer it."
He'd perhaps be in an excellent position to answer how fundamentalists motivate inerrancy of quotes, and many of them probably the way I did above. But the answers he will give is what he now considers the "real reasons" behind that, and having grown up among people who didn't quite accept or even know these supposedly "real reasons" is not an excellent qualification for knowing them to be true.
"I think there are at least three answers: historical, psychological, and social. ... For now, it makes sense to begin with history."
Fundamentalist sects among often Baptist Protestants are not excellent at Church history anyway, that also goes for those who remain in them, see my article with links to articles about CMI not being excellent Church historians, it is a page on the top space of this blog:
Weakness of CMI : Church History
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/p/weakness-of-cmi-church-history.html
And in fact, McLaren will not give an excellent Church history now that he has left this sect either.
"In the 1400’s the Christian countries of Europe found themselves in a series of wars with Islam. ... So here’s what he did: he gave the kings of Europe a carte blanche or blank check to colonize the world, to enslave all non Christian nations and expropriate their wealth."
I am sorry ... what exact document is he talking about?
First, "enslave a non Christian nation" may be taken two ways : enslave its nationhood as in abolishing the sovereignty (as Allies did to Germany in 1945) and to enslave its individual citizens, abolishing their statuses as free citizens (as the Allies did not do to the Germans, apart from war criminal suspects).
There is in fact one document or a close series of them that gives exactly one Christian nation, the Portuguese, the right to actually take slaves, namely in Africa. Romanus pontifex, one of some papal bulls of Pope Nicolas V, Portugal, 8 January 1455. This was as retaliation for Africans taking Christian slaves, up in the North where they were Muslims. Abusively, this was applied further South as well, when the people taken as slaves hadn't been doing piracy to take Christian ones. As this document is a document to one country, not to Spain, it is not infallible, and there was error in supposing Africans in what is now Angola or Moçambique could be taken as slaves by retaliation for Moorish piracy against Christians in the Mediterranean. But it is not doctrinally erroneous that if you prosper on taking Christian slaves or on your neighbours doing so, you have deserved even death penalty (Exodus 21:16) and therefore also penal slavery. There is still penal slavery for slave hunting today, just that these penal slaves are not likely to call someone "Massa" they are likelier to assemble toys behind bars or work on roads in orange uniforms - they have a prison system rather than an owner or master telling them what to do. In either case, the Catholic view of it is, a slave who has deserved slavery as penalty for a crime is only slave about some things and remains free about other thing. You can ask such a man to clean the toilets, you can deprive him of comforts for not cleaning the toilets, but you can't use him for medical experiments. You can't take away his balls or any other body part. The Portuguese were not running the evil sterilisation programs of South Carolina or Alabama (which were anyway started after the at least nominal end of black slavery in 1865).
Second, no other document than those of Nicolas V involves reducing "their persons" to slavery, but one can reduce states to non-sovereignty (as the Allies agreed in 1945), for instance Alexander VI in a preparatory division of new discoveries between Spain and Portugal, leading up to the actually secular ....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tordesillas
And third, this has not much bearing on literalism in Bible exegesis. St. Augustine didn't wait for the Treaty of Tordesillas to state that the Ark had to be taken both literally and symbolically (last chapter of book 15 of City of God).
"But for the Reformation to work, it needed to justify its existence apart from the Catholic hierarchy. It did so by appealing to the Bible. The Bible alone (sola scriptura) became the rallying cry of the Reformers."
The Reformation starting in Germany under Luther:
- involved a country with no overseas possessions or back then even ambitions : Saxony is very landlocked, and as for secularised Teutonic order possessions, the takeovers in the Baltic had started way before the Treaty, hence no envy at Spain and Portugal involved, not to mention that quite a few Catholic countries felt perfectly free to dismiss Papal orders about secular and contingent political matters, even without any Reformation;
- and this Reformation (like the twin one in Switzerland?) didn't rely all that much on sola scriptura, as formal principle, erroneous as it is. For once that Luther stated that, he stated sola fide as material principle about individual salvation 60 times (it can be counted and has been counted, I take the reckon from a former Lutheran convert to Catholicism).
N o t to m e n t i o n ... sola scriptura and literal inerrancy are not the same. The latter being found in plenty of Church Fathers and Scholastics well before the Reformation.
Historia fundamentum est, cujus tres sunt species: annalis, kalendaria, ephimera . Allegoria paries superinnitens, quae per factum aliud factum figurat. Tropologia, doma culmini superpositum, quae per id quod factum est quid a nobis sit faciendum insinuat . Prima planior, secunda acutior, tertia suavior: sumitur allegoria quandoque a persona, ut Isaac significat Christum; etiam David quandoque hoc modo significat Christum. ... Tropologia est sermo conversivus, pertinens ad mores animi; et magis movet quam allegoria, quae pertinet ad Ecclesiam militantem, anagoge ad triumphantem et ad Domini trinitatem.
History is the foundation, of which there are three kinds : annals, kalendars, ephemeral [whatever this distinction means]. Allegory is the wall supported above it, which by one fact figures another fact. Tropology is the roof superposed on top, which by what has been done insinuates what is to be done by us. The first is planer, the second more subtle, the third sweeter: allegory is sometimes taken from a person, like Isaac signifies Christ; even David sometimes signifies Christ. ... Tropology is a sermon for converting, pertaining to the habits of the mood; and moves more than allegory, which pertains to the Church militant, [while] anagogue to the Church triumphant and to the Trinity of the Lord.
Is this Doctor Martin of Wittenberg? No. Is the author involved in the Treaty of Tordesillas? No. Peter the Eater (Petrus Comestor) died 22 October 1178. And he called Biblical history ... history, and said that this is the plain, not the subtle reading. I quoted the intro to his Historia scholastica.
"The leaders of the Enlightenment realized that people quoting the Bible could do a lot of harm — burning witches, launching wars, and the like. ... Suddenly, the Protestants were left vulnerable. Since they had used the Bible to legitimize their break from Rome, many of them doubled down on the Bible when they were threatened by the Enlightenment rationalists. This tradition, of doubling down on the Bible as a sole source of authority, is the lineage of fundamentalism today."
It is perhaps the lineage of Protestant fundamentalism today, but it is not the lineage of inerrancy. If I enjoy inerrancy in the lineage of Peter the Eater, it is not cut off from that lineage by a Protestant reaction against the Enlightenment, sound as it is, much sounder than their erstwhile Reformation reaction against Catholicism anyway.
"When Charles Darwin and Karl Marx raised uncomfortable scientific and economic questions in the 19 Century, they answered them by doubling down on the Bible even more. When Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein raised uncomfortable questions of psychology and physics in the 20th Century, they did the same."
It seems McLaren at least never answered Freud by saying "how do you know?" Which is how CSL answered him in for instance The Pilgrim's Regress. Because the formula "X raises an incomfortable question, Y answers by Z" is Freudian gobbledigook for dismissing Y stating Z by pretending to know the why, why Y stated Z, and to put it down to the discomfort of a question, not to a rational approach to it, as if answering it were like scratching an itch, not like solving a problem.
This is obviously THE ultimate ad hominem.
"When Walter Rauschenbusch and Martin Luther King, Jr. raised uncomfortable questions about poverty and race, they did the same."
Here McLaren is lumping together all fundamentalists, Protestant and other, world wide, with some US Protestants (not necessarily even fundamentalists outside certain issues of race) who opposed Martin Luther King, Jr. His actual assassin was raised a Catholic and had lived a wild life (which is how some would characterise mine, like those who pretend I'm simply out of work, and prefer to ignore my writing).
Did I state Bulverism (Freudian approach applied outside strict analysis context) as THE ultimate ad hominem? Well something like reductio ad Hitlerum or as in this case ad racialistam is also a good tool for hatchet jobs.
"In my upcoming book, Do I Stay Christian?, I describe this use of the Bible not simply as anti-intellectualism, but as constricted intellectualism, an engagement of the intellect in the service of confirmation bias (and related biases)."
Thank you for constricted intellectualism, that's what we are encouraged to. Neither a constriction without intellect, nor a wildly roaming intellectualism open to apostasy. And confirmation bias, up to a degree, is simply another name for common sense. But some push confirmation bias beyond that in defense of rejecting a literal reading of the Bible (hint, could a Larry and especially a Brian here cited be concerned?)
But when it comes to intellectual genealogies, I have my fair share of studies, so Brian D. McLaren's wannabe Father Baskerville discourse in Name of the Rose doesn't just fall flat on me, it also is somewhat traceable ... to post 1950. Candidates for inventing "fundamentalism comes from Protestant sola scriptura" being:
- a 1960's Jesuit who wrote a book on "allegory" (as defined by Peter the Eater) where he also put modernist Bible scholarship (you know, Creation days as rehash of Enuma Elish, flood account as literary borrowing from Gilgamesh, all that stuff) into the mix as an excuse for (unlike Peter the Eater) throwing out literal historic truth;
- some 1970's Soviet Russian Orthodox bishops.
It can for instance NOT be traced to the Reformation times themselves, when there was a controversy between St. Robert Bellarmine and (I think) King James VI and I, since St. Bob didn't tell King Jim "you just believe in the Bible's literal truth, because you want an excuse to persecute Irish and English Catholics" nor to the Council of Cologne in 1860's - or to Cardinal Oddi (if it wasn't Ottaviani) who took measures (subverted by the rejection of the preparatory schemata) to get Biblical creation dogmatised at Vatican II council (but only partly so, since § 3 of Dei Verbum gives a fairly clear Young Earth Creationist scenario).
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Lewis Mary Grignon de Montfort
28.IV.2022
* https://progressingspirit.com/2022/04/28/do-you-create-or-do-you-destroy-evil-at-our-doors/
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