gary@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP (gary w buchholz) (06/15/85)
> is N. L. Tinkham >> MODERATE BAPTISTS MAY BE READY TO DUMP >> STANLEY >> >>"The election in Dallas next week will climax a fierce campaign >>launched by moderates who claim Stanley, pastor of First Baptist >>Church in Atlanta, is leading a conservative effort to force its >>ideology - THAT EVERY WORD in the Bible must be interpreted LITER- >ALLY - on all Southern Baptist agencies and seminaries." >The "moderate" >position claims a stronger human influence on the writing of the Bible, >stating that since imperfect human beings, living in an imperfect human >culture, with incomplete knowledge, wrote the Bible, some of the biases >and mistaken notions held by these authors and their cultures may have >found their way into Biblical writings. Nevertheless, the moderates would >say, the Bible was written by men of God and records, as accurately as >possible given the limitations of human knowledge, their experiences >of God. > It is incorrect to describe conservatives as insisting upon the literal >interpretation of every word in the Bible; any reasonable approach to >reading the Bible will recognize the use of metaphors, figures of speech, >and so forth. > > (For the record, although I am not a Baptist now, I grew up in a Southern >Baptist church and family, and I have been following the moderate-conservatve >feud fairly closely. My own views are close to the "moderate" position >as described above.) > > N. L. Tinkham (duke!nlt) I am also very interested in this debate within the Baptist church as regards this moderate-conservative family feud. I would hope that you would keep us (or at least me) up to date on the outcome and ramifications of the election. It would seem that this "campaign" launched by Stanley and the conservatives is really an experiment in the legitimation and preservation of a particular religious ideology.... James Barr (Oxford University) in his book: Fundamentalism .. puts it like this.... "Contrary to general belief, the core of fundamentalism resides not in the Bible but in a particular kind of religion. Fundamentalists indeed suppose that this kind of religion is theirs because it follows as a necessary consequence from the acceptance of biblical authority. But here we have to disagree and say that the reverse is true; a particular type of religious experience, which indeed in the past was believed to arise from the Bible, has come to be itself dominant. This religious tradition on the one hand controls the interpretation of the Bible within the fundamentalist circles; on the other hand it entails, not as its source but as its symbol and as an apparently necessary condition of its own self-preservation, the fundamentalist doctrine of the Bible. In other words, fundamentalism is based on a particular kind of religious tradition, and uses the form, rather than the reality, of biblical authority to provide a shield for this tradition. This analysis will be basic to the argument of this book." " ... Thus we have a reciprocal relation between the Bible and the religious tradition. On the one hand the religious tradition is an ultimate value for the fundamentalists. They do not use the Bible to question the and re-check this tradition, they just accept that this tradition is the true interpretation of the Bible. The fundamentalist position about the infallibility and inerrancy of the Bible is an attempt to prevent this tradition from being damaged through modes of interpretation that might make the Bible mean something else." "... What fundamentalists do pursue is a completely unprincipled- in the strict sense unprincipled, because guided by no principle of interpretation- approach, in which the only guiding criterion is that the Bible should, by the sorts of truth that fundamentalists respect and follow, be true and not in any sort of error." "... clear that fundamentalist interpretation does not take the Bible literally, but varies between taking it literally and taking it non-literally. This variation is made necessary by the real guiding principle .. namely, that one must ensure that the Bible is inerrant, without error. Inerrancy is maintained only by constantly altering the mode of interpretation, and in particular by abandoning the literal sense as soon as it would be an embarrassment to the view of inerrancy held." -------------------------------------------- The gist of Barrs book is to show that the fundamentalist religious ideology is the real authority and not the Bible. What is inerrant is the socio-political entity that interprets the Bible and the symbol of the inerrancy of the bible stands in the place of the unjustifiable inerrancy of the tradition that seeks it own preservation and legitimation as a divinely sanctioned institution. I would have to say that on the pragmatic level your "moderate position" is fraught with difficulties as regards its political success. How could your "moderate" church justify itself (as can Stanleys) to be "the church of Christ" in any non-ideological way when you write something like this...... >The "moderate" >position claims a stronger human influence on the writing of the Bible, >stating that since imperfect human beings, living in an imperfect human >culture, with incomplete knowledge, wrote the Bible, some of the biases >and mistaken notions held by these authors and their cultures may have >found their way into Biblical writings. Nevertheless, the moderates would >say, the Bible was written by men of God and records, as accurately as >possible given the limitations of human knowledge, their experiences >of God. To say these things seems to be self-defeating in the sense that if the task is pursued systematically and rigorously then what you end up with is what historically came be to known as theological liberalism. In this sense you are a latent liberal, a liberal waiting to be, if you were only to work out the implications. It is probably the case that you have not worked out the implications of the view of the bible that you espouse. Stanley has, and that is why he rejects it (this argument is well rehearsed in fundamentalist literature), he rejects it as "unsuccessful" (- to the maintenance of his particular ideology). But what is really at stake here ? Is ideology as ideology really so bad when ideology (narrative- story ordered worlds) forms the primary locus of human habitation. Can we say that the human world is de-formed by scientific rationality and on the basis of this relegate it to secondary status giving primacy to those stories that assist us with our imperious engagement with actuality as *experienced* (in the true sense of the word) and extent our domain of ontological action. If it is true that stories(myths) form the paradigmatic foundation for all significant human activities(Mircea Eliade) then, on the basis of this, would one be justified in lifting the requirement of ostensive reference of the biblical stories to history in the service of story as story in its primary function and capacity to "alchemize" a meaning-full world fit for human habitation and thereby, with this achieved, intellectually validate Stanleys radical fundamentalist position in terms of more existential/ontological criteria and goals ? Gary