There’s a bit in Paul, I think, that says you can eat unclean food, because hey, it’s really clean. But there’s nothing that says you can tattoo, or have sex with a woman who has menstruated within the past week, or mix linen and wool in your fabric, or… There are hundreds of rather explicit laws laid out in the Bible that most Christians ignore.
And if “fulfilling the law” means “you can completely ignore the law, now”, then I have no idea what literalism means, because that would be some really weird translation.
But it’s not. I thank you for linking to the Chicago statement, though I admit I haven’t read it yet - it’s 4200 words after all. Skimming, it looks like a pretty solid link - I liked the fact that it dated to 1978, the high water mark of that peculiarly modern development known as Biblical inerrancy. That was about the time that Southern Baptists set aside their older beliefs in parish independence and began to drum out of the seminaries all those who joined faith, rationalism and open eyes. Cite.
The fact remains though that fundamentalists do argue about the Bible’s value of pi -a fundi website discussing the issue was linked upthread after all. They deny the study of nature and through that deny God Himself. Now I can sympathize with them to some extent. Conventional interpretation of the good book threatened many of these folk, so they took refuge in the belief that the Bible was a book of scientific and historical content as well as a circumscribed and pre-selected set of commands that wouldn’t prove too challenging. But a metaphorical story like the Good Samaritan? Forget about it: they see it in historical terms. Fundamentalists argue about whether a Samaritan would have really been on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho: they say of course he could have and furthermore he was: the Bible says so. Yes. They do this. About a parable. Really.
Mainline Christians read the story differently: consider the take of Martin Luther King: [INDENT] Now you know, we use our imagination a great deal to try to determine why the priest and the Levite didn’t stop. At times we say they were busy going to a church meeting, an ecclesiastical gathering, and they had to get on down to Jerusalem so they wouldn’t be late for their meeting. At other times we would speculate that there was a religious law that “One who was engaged in religious ceremonials was not to touch a human body twenty-four hours before the ceremony.” And every now and then we begin to wonder whether maybe they were not going down to Jerusalem – or down to Jericho, rather to organize a “Jericho Road Improvement Association.” That’s a possibility. Maybe they felt that it was better to deal with the problem from the causal root, rather than to get bogged down with an individual effect.
But I’m going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It’s possible that those men were afraid. You see, the Jericho road is a dangerous road. I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, “I can see why Jesus used this as the setting for his parable.” It’s a winding, meandering road. It’s really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about 1200 miles – or rather 1200 feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you’re about 2200 feet below sea level. That’s a dangerous road. In the days of Jesus it came to be known as the “Bloody Pass.” And you know, it’s possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it’s possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the priest asked – the first question that the Levite asked was, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
That’s the question before you tonight. Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job. Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?” The question is not, “If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?” The question is, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” That’s the question.[/INDENT] Emphasis added. Imagine what a Southerner or even an elderly midwesterner during the late 1970s would think of such a framework. That’s a radical interpretation. That’s a mainline and conventional interpretation. That interpretation is unacceptable for both pastor and laity. Jesus’ commands to love one’s neighbor and to reach out to the troubled, Christian kindness, Christian decency: speak not of them. Instead, speak of abortion, Darwin – speak of anything whether it’s in the gospels or not – but don’t speak of New Testament justice and the challenging demands of Jesus. Speak of His forgiveness: speak of how believers are special.
That’s why we have fundamentalism. It appeals to the insular.
I believe all Christians make up the body of Christ. And folks will pursue different gifts. Prophesy attracts some. Marquee lighting attracts others. Some may go in for snake handling; others may speak in tongues. But let me tell you of a better way.
There were once 2 adjoining villages; their names were Antioch and Bethlehem. (In reality, Antioch and Bethlehem are cities hundreds of miles apart, but in this story they are next to one another.) Two rabbis traveled along a road; a white horse carried one to Antioch, while the other walked barefoot to Bethlehem, the city of His birth. Their names were Fundi Jesus and Mainline Jesus.
Fundi Jesus appeared in a pavilion, in front of a crowd of tens of thousands of pastors and apostles. It happened this way. And Fundi Jesus said, “My friends. My friends: I have returned from the desert.”
Enormous cheers erupted from the audience, carrying across the entire village. Women held their babies aloft so they could get a glimpse of this great man.
“I have returned from the desert. So what have I learned? I lived there for 40 days and 40 nights, sharing a waterhole with sheep and wolf and subsisting on meager provision. Towards the end, when I was hungriest and thirstiest I prayed to my Father, ‘Lord, why must I suffer so? Please, show me a sign’”.
“And Lo, what should appear before me but 3 loaves of bread, a sack of wine and a side of roast beast. I rushed them to my hidden cave, ate, and found myself refreshed. The Lord is bounteous. Amen.”
“Amen”, said the crowd.
“It happened that way.”
“Yes it did”, said the crowd.
“And I climbed upon a mountain, a great mountain, and looked upon the valleys, North and South, East and West and saw in my mind’s eye all the empires of the world and their splendor. And I said to myself, ‘Yes!’, I said. ‘I shall build the greatest empire the world has ever seen!’ All those who are with me now bow down!”
And the multitudes dropped to their knees for he was their Lord and everything he said was true.
“And I wondered, how shall I spread this good news for I am far in the desert. Then I remembered where the Lord had provided and traveling there I found a proud steed and I flew.”
“Praise Him!”, said the crowd.
“Indeed”, said Fundi Jesus. “And in conclusion, the State of the Union is strong. God bless Antioch and God bless the people of Antioch.”
The crowd raptured.
In the other village, at the edge of the town square of Bethlehem, Mainline Jesus appeared.
“My friends.
Show me your tired. I shall wake them.
Bring me your sick. I will lay hands and their faith shall heal them.
Show me your weak of heart. I shall uplift them.
Show me your meek. They shall find their strength.”
A righteous merchant then said, “I have faith, oh Lord: I have faith!”
Mainline Jesus smiled. He was pleased. “Your faith indeed shall set you free. But a brother of Mine once said, ‘You have faith and I have works. Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. You believe that God is one; you do well. But even the demons believe—and shudder!’”
And the righteous merchant said, “Thus it is so. But what can I do? I am but one man.”
Mainline Jesus said, “Be an infant in evil, but in thinking be an adult.”
And so the righteous merchant would go on to build a shelter for the sick, the troubled, and those too young to fend for themselves. He called this place a Universal Church.
And so with a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.
Mainline Jesus may lack the flash and glitz of Fundi Jesus. But He gets the job done.
Yeah, this schtick gets real annoying real fast. I remember in a thread on the bible on a different forum, I brought up the stuff about Judas. First, I brought up his death, and some fundie claimed that what happened was that Judas hung himself, and then his corpse rotted and his guts spilled on the ground, or something like that. This is absolutely an Argumentum ex Culo. Nothing in the bible even begins to indicate that. In fact, it indicates quite strongly in the passage about Judas spilling his guts that Judas was alive, and then he fell and spilled his guts on the ground, and then he was dead. What’s more, one book paints the picture of Judas as repentant; the other simply doesn’t.
But okay, fine, now how do you resolve the contradiction of why the field was named “the blood field” - was it named that because Judas bought it with the 30 shekels and then died there, or because it was bought by the Rabbis with the 30 shekels Judas had donated to them out of guilt and they considered it blood money?
…And then he stopped responding.
Assuming that the bible is inerrant is like assuming that the God described therein is morally perfect. It’s an unjustified, unjustifiable presumption that leads to defending the indefensible. You twist logic and reason to try to make your beliefs make sense, and it just doesn’t work, because no matter how you twist, you can’t have someone both spend 30 shekels on a field and donate it to someone else.
Let’s put it another way: did “J” (or whoever wrote the creation story in the Book of Genesis) believe that what he was writing was literally true? Would “J” have called you a blasphemer if you’d questioned whether God actually made the universe in a period of six 24-hour days?
The answer is, almost certainly not. “J” would probably have told you “I’m not God, I wasn’t around when he created the Earth, and I have no idea when or how he did it.” The story was meant only to explain that there IS a God, that He created everything, and that He loved and cared for His creation.
Did “J” believe Adam and Eve were real people whose sin led to the fall of Man? Again, I doubt it. “J” was trying to explain, via a story, why we don’t live in a perfect world. The story is both similar to AND significant different from that of Pandora’s Box. The story explains that the world is flawed because humans have the knowledge of both good and evil.
Educated Jews 2,000 years ago were far more likely to regard these stories as allegories than modern fundamentalist Christians are.
So Catholics (the upper-case C is intentional) aren’t Christians? Or Methodists or Congregationalists or Orthodox Christians or members of any other denomination that doesn’t profess a belief in biblical literalism?
We don’t know how cynical J was. It is pretty certain that he didn’t make up the stories, but incorporated the stories that his readers thought to be true. So he wouldn’t say that he was there, but he might say that he was writing down accepted history. Remember, much of Genesis is explanations of things in their culture, like the Sabbath, and things in the world, like death, the need to work, snakes and childbirth pain. It is very different from what Christians get out of Genesis.
He was also writing in a world with many accepted gods, some of which seemed demonstrably more powerful than his God, given that Judea just got its ass kicked. It is also clear that at least some of the story was in support of the Temple and the priesthood and their desire for a religion based in Jerusalem.
J was not a literalist. It is hard to be a literalist when you are writing the damn book. Remember - those who create the canon can let Gredo shoot first.
I’m alleging that you are likely to miss the underlying meanings if you focus all your attention on how it’s really really true. “The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed: ok then! I’ll be sure to put that on my hot dog!”
Judging from Jack Chick, yes the argument is that lame: “Only members of my squirrelly denomination are true Christians”.
Forget the Fall business, which was not all that important back then. Did J think God created man in his own image? Almost certainly. Were Adam and Eve the first people? Probably. Did Abraham exist and was he the father of all Jews? Almost certainly. He may or may not have believed all the Abraham stories, but I’d bet anything he believed in Abraham’s existence. I got taught that in Hebrew School as history, and we weren’t even Orthodox. We were not taught that Adam and Eve were historical.
Not being a literalist is not the same as believing that the whole Bible is a metaphor.
There’s at least one major denomination that believes, pretty much, in Biblical literalism… I was raised in it, though I’m not a member now. I’m speaking of The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.
I went through some of the docrinal statements, and responses to frequently asked questions, and there was this about the age of the earth:
If you scroll up and down from this link there are LOTS of other issues addressed as well.
I’m an Episcopalian now. I liked what the rector said to our class, before joining up. “Being Episcopalian means you don’t have to check your brains at the door.”
Measure for Measure, I get the strong impression that you have little actual day-to-day experience with the people who identify themselves as evangelical/fundamentalists/inerrantists: they are an “other” that you’ve studied at a distance.
Let me explain where I’m coming from: I’m the son, brother and nephew of Southern Baptist preachers. The inerrancy wars of the 80s were literally dinnertable conversation in my house. I studied theology at PCB and graduated from Moody, probably the two most important and influential of all the fundamentalist Bible Colleges. I drifted somewhat away from it in my 20s, and have never really found a solid home since (the most recent church I attended was PCA, before that Episocopal) but I’ve got several thousand sermons, Sunday school lessons, missions trips, conferences, seminars and theology classes in me, not about evangelicals and fundamentalists, but from them. I’ll get some more when I go home for Christmas.
My point is: I feel pretty comfortable in saying I have a broad understanding of what most of those who believe in inerrancy mean by the term, and pretty comfortable saying that, with all due respect, you simply don’t.
Let me first start by defining a few terms, so what I’m saying is clear:
Evangelicals are a group that includes roughly 30-40% of all Americans. Billy Graham.
Fundamentalists are subset of that group, maybe 2-10% of Americans, depending on how you define it. Jerry Falwell, Bob Jones.
Inerrancy which is what the OP of the thread asked about is a doctrine held by all fundamentalists, but also nearly all Evangelicals.
Literalism is most often used by others to criticize evangelicals/fundamentalists, frequently as a dismissive pejorative. You don’t often see it used by evangelicals/fundamentalists themselves, because the term is so vague as to be useless without clarification. For an explanation of this, see the (fundamentalist) Norman Geisler’s explanation in Wikipedia.
To quote from Wikipedia, and add emphasis: "It emphasizes the referential aspect of the words in the text without denying the relevance of literary aspects, genre, or figures of speech within the text (e.g., parable, allegory, simile, or metaphor)"
If there’s a link in the thread where someone is saying “Pi is not 3.14,” I’m not seeing it; pleae point it out. I do see other people claiming that fundamentalists think it, or saying fundamentalists should think it. ** Flyer** appears to be a living, breathing fundamentalist, right here in your presence, and he’s not saying that.
It’s a very old urban legend, rooted in an 1897 incident that didn’t have anything to do with religion.
You can probably google up some random nutjob on the internet saying that, but then I think the Timecube guy cites scripture, too. Lyndon LaRouche is a registered Democrat. It’s misleading to impute the ideas of the lunatic fringe to the larger whole.
I’m sorry, but this is utter bollocks. This is the kind of thing that makes it plain that you’ve never actually, well, sat inside of a fundamentalist church listening to a sermon about the Good Samaritan. Or just asked a fundamentalist “what is the point of the Good Samaritan story?”
Of course it’s a moral fable. That’s what a parable is defined as, by everyone including inerrantists and literalists. It doesn’t mean that you think every time Jesus says “There once was a man … ” that he’s recounting a historical event with no intended meaning for his listeners. Again: look at the wikipedia definition: " without denying the relevance of literary aspects, genre, or figures of speech within the text."
The point of inerrancy is to reject the idea – common in the Higher Criticism that Fundamentalism was a response to – that we can say (as Jefferson did, and the Jesus Seminar does today) that this story was told by Jesus, but that one was added later, or that we can analyze the text(s) and pick out what parts of the story Jesus really said, and what the written documents got wrong. (The other major movement it was a response to was NeoOrthodoxy, which was in essence a reader-response theory, that said that the divine revelation comes through the text, but is only apprehended in the mind of the reader). The point of inerrancy is just to assert that if the Bible says Jesus told a story, he did indeed tell that story just the way it’s written down.
It was especially meant to reject the idea – again, common in the liberal and anti-supernatural theology fundamentalism was a response to – that miracles in the Bible, including the resurrection, should be read as metaphors. Inerrancy insists that if the text claims a supernatural event really happened, then a supernatural event really happened. Again: 5,000, 5001, doesn’t matter. It was written as an approximation and should be read as such. But, they would argue, the part about feeding people is written as if it referred to physical food and thus must also be read accordingly.
And obviously, as Wikipedia says “It does not necessarily lead to complete agreement upon one single interpretation of any given passage.”
There are plenty of people who hold to inerrancy quite strongly, but that think the entire Book of Job was not a historical event – that it’s a story, much like Jesus’ parables. There are professors that teach that at Moody, which is historically speaking pretty much the flagship of American fundamentalism. I’m not saying that’s the majority view, just that the two are not irreconcilable, and it’s not beyond the pale. There are others (fewer) that hold the same about Noah. I think even some claim to believe in inerrancy and say the account of creation is not intended to be taken literally, though that last likely gets your key to the faculty lounge taken away.
This is both arrogant and ignorant.
I have all kinds of differences with Fundamentalists, including but not limited to abortion, Darwin, hermenuetics, and God knows what else. And I’ve met some that I’d happily classify as intolerant assholes. But I’ve also known many that are kind, caring people that care deeply about others, give time and money to charity. Certainly, in the hundreds of fundamentalist sermons I’ve sat under, there’s been way more talk of love, redemption, forgiveness, and the Gospel than there is about politics or the rest of that crap. I don’t think I ever heard a sermon that was centered on evolution or homosexality. I think I’ve heard sermons centered on abortion maybe once or twice.
Footloose* was not a documentary.
I don’t doubt you believe that, but you don’t evidence any love, respect or even understanding of the people you claim are part of a body with you.
They are “insular.” They “deny God Himself.” Yours is the “better way.” :dubious:
Dude, there is a really, really big log in your eye.
So in seeking to describe what a given group thinks, we should ignore the written statements of their chosen leaderhip, and go with what “everyone knows” they really believe instead?
Do we apply that logic to Muslims? Democrats?
There’s often a gap between the pulpit and the pews, but looking at doctinal statements from the leadership is the only logical place to start, and there’s not much daylight between the Chicago Statement and the formal doctrinal positions of the Southern Baptists, Dallas Seminary (the top fundamentalist seminary), and so on.
While the Bible DID say that construction workers in the Temple believed the circumference of a circle was equal to three times the diameter, that does NOT mean that “the Bible says pi = 3” or that God decreed the value of pit to be 3."
All it means is that, even before mathematicians came up with the current commonly used value of pi (22 divided by 7), it was widely known that the circumference of a circle had a constant relationship to the length of the diameter, and that this relationship was roughly 3. And that value of “pi” was close enough for government work.
Because it’s a technically not-inaccurate description but really misleading one. It doesn’t actually mean he has expertise in the sociology of religion or in Biblical studies or, indeed, any particular area. It just means he eventually published a dissertation somewhat related to religion through a sociology department.
Having read his (terrible) dissertation - that lacks any primary research - and with my personal familiarity with the departments at UCSB where and when he did his classes, I see no reason to conclude that his credential qualifies him for anything other than the professorship of creative writing that he holds.
I feel obliged to point out that pi is not exactly 22/7, any more than it is exactly 3. It is an irrational number, so that any value the Bible might have given or implied for pi is going to be, at best, inexact. Not to mention that all real-world measurements have some degree of imprecision to them.
That’s actually a more accurate example of how literalism works. Man is not necessarily wrong, but the Bible never can be. If you can find a way that man and the Bible can both be right, that’s even better. You only say man is wrong if you can’t find a way to make the Bible literally correct.
This is why I’ve personally been pushing the version of homosexual acceptance where the Greek words are not translated correctly. I think this is much more likely to convince the literalists than all these appeals to love and acceptance and being born that way and all that stuff. Give them a way they can accept gay people and the Bible still winds up being true, and they will take it.
As for Old Testament stuff–that’s already been dealt with. It’s not just that Jesus fulfilled the law. It’s that Paul said that we are no longer under the law. He rewrote the meaning of the law to be to point out sin, rather than to be something you had to actually follow. So there’s a built-in out for anything that’s only in the Old Testament.
Basically, if even one verse gives you an out for something you don’t like, you jump on that loophole. It’s legalism at its finest.