No free will then? I thought that was more of a fundamentalist thing.
Demonstrate? No, of course not. But many people hold very odd beliefs and are still able to be contributing members of society.
I cannot tell what a person’s motivations or intentions are, all I can see are their actions and the results of those actions. In daily interactions a person’s beliefs are irrelevant - it makes do difference if the bus driver puts a bowl of cream out for the Brownies every night.
Jesus doesn’t spend too much time commenting on the OT stories, those writing on behalf of Jesus have their own whoppers to tell, but he mentions Jonah and the whale (or great fish) briefly, and spends a bit of time on Moses. I got the impression that he believed that Jonah did stay in the whale’s belly for three days and three nights, and that he would stay in the heart of earth for three days and three nights too. If a liberal Christian can accept that this didn’t happen, did any of Jesus’ miracle stories really happen? Are liberal Christians willing to draw the line anywhere, and say, enough is enough, I know for a fact that at least the Resurrection really did happen and was an actual historical event?
I’m sure there were various types of believers throughout Christianity’s history. Augustine wasn’t always allegorical and symbolic in interpretation. He also had some humdingers of his own. And he spent quite a bit of time on original sin. IIRC, the council of Trent made it clear that Catholics were required to believe that Adam was the father of the human race, and that original sin is passed down from generations to the entire human race topic. But today, I’m sure there are many Catholics and Protestants that doubt Adam was a real historical person, and also doubt original sin.
I recently read a Catholic blog that says various forms of inerrants have been around since the early church fathers, but even that word “inerrant” has many different meanings to various people. It sure waters it the hell down. But setting aside inerrancy, could it be that more and more Christians taking these stories non-literally is actually the most recent phenomenon? It seems that the majority of Christians rather than the minority throughout history took the main stories and the people in them as real, and the stories as actually happening. Some earlier church fathers (some more than others) would often take a more allegorical and symbolic approach, but the best I recall still took much of the major stories as actual events and real people being portrayed.
As the OP points out in the article, earlier editions of Britannica in the 1700’s supported the Noah and flood story. Darwin was a big believer in a literal Genesis as well before his discoveries. It’s been more than 150 years since Darwin’s “The Origin of Species”, so why the uproar if they didn’t take the bible literally, and if fundamentalism is some recent event of the last 130 years? They might not have called it by such a name hundreds of years ago, but those kind of Christians seem to have been around for a lot longer and in larger numbers than the non-literalists Christians of today, who, as time goes on, takes less and less of the stories as seriously, and want to interpret it more and more of it as allegoric, metaphoric, symbolic, myth, etc. About the only thing they cling too now, is believing as Paul did, that the Resurrection was an actual event, but I’m sure there are liberal Christians they don’t accept that either these days.
Personally I believe there were always fundamentalists/literalists, and the internet has recently exposed more of them.
I think the first followers of the disciples should be cited:
As time passed, it was easier to distort the major concepts and doctrines. Hence we have the Greek Septuagint vs. the later Latin Vulgate, with the latter having several differences. There weren’t 100 Bible versions and denominations in 32 AD, they gradually emerged with time.
I actually don’t understand the question in the OP. Inerrancy might be a recent phenomenon - the Talmud and Mishna are all about the understanding that the Bible is not so simple that you can just read it and understand totally what is being said. The Catholic prohibition on the laity having vernacular translations also comes from recognizing this, if seen in a good light. If however the question is whether people believed that the stories like Eden and the Flood happened, then this is certainly true, and the oft-repeated Augustine quote does not contradict it. Much of Christianity is built on the Fall, after all. It is only recently that the Catholic Church gave it up, which puts them ahead of a lot of others.
To me, the Fall is a prime example of the limits of literalism. If what happened is that Eve and Adam ate a literal piece of fruit, I don’t see how that could cause their “fall,” loss of innocence, or mortal nature, let alone that of future generations. If I am to have any hope of making sense of or accepting the doctrine of the Fall, I can only do so by supposing that what is described in Genesis 3 is metaphorical or symbolic of something else going on.
Like maybe having sex or something? I don’t think that would qualify for sin and blame passed down through the generations. Nor would anything else I could think of.
The only thing that really makes sense to me is it is just a silly old superstition made up by some guys with great imaginations, and it caught on, and that it there were no gods involved whatsoever.
Certainly not anything as simple or easily stated as that—if so, what would be the need for symbol or metaphor to say what was going on? Plus, as you note, that doesn’t really fit. (“Growing up” fits better, though not completely.)
That doesn’t work for me, because it doesn’t account for the fascination that the story has had for people (including myself) throughout the centuries, nor for the feeling I get that It Means Something.
Growing up? Like Peter Pan? Is that even a sin? Is that the best you got?
I think that feeling you all have is the feeling indoctrination gives you. You got a better hypothesis?
Sure. Start with “Life sucks. I deserve better than this.”
From there move to “In a fair world, my life would be better. No, my life would be perfect!”
Then go to “Why *isn’t *the world fair? Did somebody piss off the Thunder God?” (Remember, this was far before anyone ever questioned the concept that every bird, tree, river and funny rock in the area had a spirit of some sort.)
As people got better with story-telling it became a metaphor for the sense of imperfection people feel when they realize they are not living up to their own moral code or conscience.
I suppose that’s as good a wild guess as any. The problem is when people start thinking the metaphor really happened and/or thunder god is real, and start basing decisions on how they think the thunder god wants them to act.
If their idea of the Thunder God’s wishes match with mine (“treat everyone as if they were your equal”), or otherwise do not conflict with mine (“we are not allowed to eat sweet potatoes”), then there is no problem. I had said earlier, a person’s motivations are irrelevant as I can only see and respond to their actions.
If they disagree with mine (such as believing the Thunder God wants them to hold up rude signs at funerals) then I will do my best to drive them before me, raze their villages, and hear the lamentations of their women.
Most of your cites come from the mid-19th century (the earliest looks to be 1771). This is generally considered to be within the time period called “Modernity” by most cultural scholars. (Modernity being taken to begin with the end of the Enlightment and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (and the industrialization of mass culture, starting to displace folk culture).)
Post-modernity is generally taken to begin with the advent of television, which accelerated the dominance of mass culture.
Essays and Reviews, a leading critique of literalism that originated within the Church of England and which accepted higher criticism, is today over 150 years old.
So, in short, you’ve not caught them in an inaccuracy, it’s just that modernity is actually kind of old.
James Ussher (sometimes spelled Usher, 4 January 1581 – 21 March 1656)
Literalists often point to Jesus citing Jonah in the belly of the fish or Moses lifting his staff as evidence that Jesus was validating the historicity of those events. But that’s certainly not the case: I can compare myself to Huckleberry Finn or refer to the voyages of Gulliver without anyone concluding that I believe those stories to be historical events.
As I’ve said in another thread, I’m less interested in whether or not the miracles “actually happened” than I am in the truth that the myths represent. Whether or not Mary was literally virgin is not as important as the story of the Virgin Birth is.
I know who he is. Do you think the Rev’d Mr. Ussher was some sort of cultural touchstone? When we talk about sociocultural facts, you can’t disprove them by saying “Yeah, but this one crank thought this one thing.”
The literalism debate (I guess it’s not really a debate as much as it is a concept) is less about whether anybody ever added up the years given in the genealogies given in Matthew and Luke and cross-referenced them with Genesis. It is more concerned with whether treating the Old Testament accounts as a journalistic or scientific narrative, as is done by some moderns, is appropriate.
My take on the OP is it is asking when higher critics say, as they do say, that literalism is a modern phenomenon, is it true. Now the higher critics are making the point that it almost has to be, as journalism (certainly) and even science was not within the ordinary ambit of most pre-modern individuals.
So it really is of a piece with a question like, did most pre-modern Britons believe that the Arthurian cycle was a journalistic, strictly-literal account of early England?
Our evidence is that pre-moderns didn’t really have this expectation in their historical writing (just read Herodatus, for instance).
So, Ussher’s work, perversely, sort of pre-figures the advent of a new kind of historical narrative. This isn’t suprising, as he was pretty well-educated and well-financed, and these are the sorts of folks who are exposed to the vanguard of intellectual shifts.
In short, I’m not sure pointing out that one well-educated rich guy, relatively late in the history of Christianity, got involved in a topice that would become one of the polestars of modern Christian theological dispute actually rebuts the claim.
Further to that point, he calculated his chronology for reasons not in the service of defending Creationism with a capital C. Creationism, as an intellectual beachhead to be defended, would have been entirely foreign to him.
As Stephen Jay Gould put it: “I shall be defending Ussher’s chronology as an honourable effort for its time and arguing that our usual ridicule only records a lamentable small-mindedness based on mistaken use of present criteria to judge a distant and different past . . . Ussher represented the best of scholarship in his time. He was part of a substantial research tradition, a large community of intellectuals working toward a common goal under an accepted methodology.”
In other words, Ussher was practicing historical research, as historians of his time accepted historical methods. To cast him as an anti-research figure is a gross distortion of what he was doing.
No I was just showing you that you were wrong with regards the timeframe of my earliest reference.
That’s a nice way of saying "should we treat the OT accounts as true or not. True as in having really happened.
I think “higher critics” think it’s myth with a lot of mistakes and nothing supernatural is in there. It’s “Christian critics” that end up tripping all over themselves.
Yeah, Ussher could read and add.
Who was casting him that way? I like Ussher’s methods. If we are to take the Bible as factual, he’s pretty close to right. He’s evidence that people were taking the Bible as factual a lot earlier than the new age liberal Christians would have us believe.
Well, this is a very modern way of thinking about what makes a narrative “true” and what historical narratives are supposed to be doing. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance, is a narrative that purports to communicate truths about slavery, but the events therein described did not occur. It would be a mistake to say UTC accurately reports, in a journalistic fashion, actual events that occurred in the ante-bellum South. This is a lot different from saying, “Nobody should believe in UTC, because it’s all made up.”
Yeah, I think that’s as good a quick-and-dirty summary as any. I’d object to distinguishing them from “Christian critics,” as many higher critics are Christian clergy and scholars, and I don’t think they (and I agree with them on this) find their espousal of higher criticism as inconsistent with their identification as Christian believers. (Where I say “is it true,” I meant the proposition “Biblical literalism is a modern development in Christian history”, not the proposition that the Bible truthfully recounts in a journalistic fashion the events it describes. Perhaps that was unclear.)
Sure and you can also reference yourself to Jesus without believing he was really the creator of the universe or that he rose from the dead. That would be the rational thing to do.
What truth are you suggesting those myths represent?