The Future of Faith

by Harvey Cox

  The friction between the Calvinist and Wesleyan wings of American fundamentalism has persisted since the movement’s inception. Calvinists are often wary of “experience” and more adamant about right doctrine. Wesleyans, on the other hand, assert that an emphasis on doctrinal correctness is useless without a deep personal encounter with God. This old argument surfaced in an ugly way during the first decades of the twentieth century in a wrangle between doctrinal fundamentalists and Pentecostals, who, although they hold to some of the “fundamental” doctrines, put a much bigger emphasis on a direct experience of the Spirit of God. The fundamentalists recoiled from what they saw in Pentecostalism as excessive emotionalism with not enough sound belief. They suspected Pentecostals of mental disease or exhibitionism or both. Jerry Falwell, a strictly Calvinist fundamentalist, once remarked that when Pentecostals shout, groan, and speak in tongues, it is probably because they have eaten some badly cooked fish. The antagonism has never been resolved.2

  There was little evidence of this tension within the Penn Christian Fellowship. Still, over the next months I drifted away, although I continued to be friends with many of its members. But I have never harbored the animosity toward the group that some ex-members of “cults” often do. It was not a cult. No one ever misled or deceived me. The motives of those who had invited me were genuine and unselfish. Rather, the Penn Christian Fellowship and the larger InterVarsity Christian Fellowship were authentic expressions of a certain strand within the wider fundamentalist movement. I learned a lot while I was with them and still appreciate it. I have moved far away from the tight parameters of their worldview, but I understand what motivates them better than those who have never profited from that exposure. Ever since those college years I have followed the twists and turns of the fundamentalist movement with keen interest, often with disappointment and sometimes with anger, but never without a degree of sympathy.

  One issue on which I have come to disagree most emphatically with a particular strain of fundamentalism is its destructive and self-serving view of the “end time.” The belief that Christ will come again soon has woven a jagged course throughout Christian history, but it surfaced with a vengeance in the nineteenth century in America and the United Kingdom as anxious people wrenched isolated verses out of their contexts in Ezekiel, Thessalonians, and Revelation in order to contrive an exact schedule of the “signs of the end,” the events preceding the return of Christ and the Last Judgment.

  An Irish Anglican, John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), invented a particularly precise version of this scheduling called “dispensationalism,” which held that all history was divided into seven dispensations, of which the present one was the last. He and his followers also added that true believers need not fear the awful times of tribulation that were coming because, before the worst of it, they would be “raptured,” taken to heaven without dying. The Left Behind series of novels, with their horrific descriptions of the “rapture,” the “great tribulation,” and the bloody battle of Armageddon, are based on this dubious theological scheme.3

  One of the worst features of dispensational fundamentalism is the foreshortened time it assigns the earth before the end comes, which makes any concern for the health of the planet’s oceans and air and forests superfluous. Another is the belief that Christ will not come until a titanic battle is fought in Palestine between Christ and the Antichrist. This fatalistic conviction undercuts efforts to arrive at a peaceful solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Fortunately, not all fundamentalists hold these extreme views, but enough do to jeopardize the ecological and peacemaking efforts of other Christians and other concerned people.

  Fundamentalism had roots elsewhere, but it was born in America. When it first appeared in the early decades of the twentieth century, it was generated by people who believed both the church and the society were heading for catastrophe, because Christians were losing, indeed squandering, their faith. Their fears were not entirely groundless. In 1910 Charles Eliot (1834–1926), then a professor emeritus at Harvard, delivered an address entitled “The Future of Religion.” He advocated a new version of Christianity that would have only one commandment. It would require simply the love of God expressed in service to others. There was no further need for theology, churches, scriptures, or worship. Eliot’s ideas—and he was not alone in propounding them—horrified almost all Christians, but the fundamentalists fought back in a particularly forceful and organized way.

  Starting in 1910, they opposed this “modernism” by publishing a series of twelve widely circulated booklets called The Fundamentals, which asserted that many people who called themselves Christians had slipped so far into accommodating Christianity to modern culture that they had lost its essentials. These core “fundamentals” constituted the nonnegotiable beliefs one must absolutely hold to in order to be a Christian. There were five. The first and most prominent “fundamental” was the divine inspiration and total inerrancy of the Bible. This conviction was the cornerstone on which everything else was built. Second, they listed the Virgin Birth of Christ as a testimony to his divinity. Next, they included the “substitutionary atonement” of Christ on the cross for the sins of the world, and his bodily resurrection from the dead. Finally, they asserted that belief in the imminent second coming of Christ “in glory” was in no way optional, but just as “fundamental” as the other beliefs in their creed.

  At first glance the choice of these five beliefs seems arbitrary, even peculiar. Notice that there is no reference to the life of Jesus. His feeding the hungry and healing the sick are not mentioned. The parables and the Sermon on the Mount are missing. His opposition to the political and religious elites of the day—undoubtedly the reason for his arrest and crucifixion—does not appear. Why did the fundamentalists pick out the five doctrines they did as the indispensable nucleus of Christianity and not others?

  Given the cultural and religious atmosphere of America in the early twentieth century, however, it is not hard to see why they chose these five “fundamentals.” Inflexibility on the inerrancy of the Bible was intended to counteract the growing application of historical methods to the study of scripture, which had already resulted in doubts about whether Moses had really written the Pentateuch and the authorship of some of the letters attributed to Paul. Emphasizing the Virgin Birth and the atonement was directed against understanding Jesus simply as a great spiritual teacher or an ethical exemplar. Highlighting the imminent Second Coming, to be initiated according to this view by plagues, famines, and a steep degeneration of conditions around the world, was intended to undercut any idea of progress, however gradual, toward the Kingdom of God. Things would get worse, much worse, before the end.

  Financed by conservative businessmen, the Fundamentals pamphlets were widely distributed free to Protestant ministers and lay leaders across the country. In 1920, an article in the Baptist Standard suggested that the courageous Christians who defended these focal principles should be called “fundamentalists.” The label stuck. Even though it is now widely and loosely applied to radically conservative movements in many different religious groupings, including Islam and Judaism, and often carries a pejorative overtone, it was American Protestants who invented it and proudly applied it to themselves.

  Fundamentalists have always regarded their beliefs as under attack, and therefore have engaged in counterattack, on two fronts. First, they believed the whole world, but America in particular, was caught in a downward spiral of decadence, depravity, and heterodoxy. They ridiculed the idea of any “social gospel” as a futile effort to refurbish a fatally punctured liner that was already sinking. As the great revivalist Dwight Moody (1837–99) put it, “The Lord told me, “Moody, just get as many into the lifeboat as you can.’”4 But they also fought against an even more dangerous enemy within, namely, those current theological trends that seemed to them a rank betrayal of Christianity by “modernists” in their vain effort to adjust a timeless message to the shifting sands of a fallen world. Leadin
g fundamentalist preachers often lashed out against the loose morals of the Babylon around them, but they reserved their most vivid polemics for other preachers who were selling the faith for a “mess of pottage”.

  Contrary to the image they have had, fundamentalists were not mostly rural; nor were they an uneducated or semiliterate gaggle. They boasted within their ranks several prominent scholars, and one of their principal arguments was that modernists and liberals were intellectual slouches who were just not thinking with enough rigor and clarity. In this debate, the authority of the infallible Bible became the touchstone. The highly respected Princeton Greek and New Testament scholar J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937), in his Christianity and Liberalism (1923), firmly maintained that only belief in a totally inerrant Bible could save Christianity from sliding into an abyss of emotional confusion. The Bible, he argued, was authoritative not only in matters of faith, but also in moral standards, history, and cosmology. He also contended that the Bible, as the grid through which everything else is interpreted, needs no interpretation itself. It is clear and sufficient. It says what it says, and that is what it means. Interpretation, he asserted, would lead to disagreements about what it says and inevitably to the weakening of its authority. He flatly dismissed the emphasis on “religious experience” that he found among modernists—and even among many evangelicals—as vague and anti-intellectual. Experience was a slender reed, a vagrant and unreliable basis for authority. Only the Word of God was constant and unchanging.

  Their willingness to do battle not only against the barbarians at the gates, but also against the Trojan horse within quickly gained leaders of the movement the designation “fighting fundamentalists,” a title most of them relished. From its launching, American fundamentalism was an aggressive and argumentative affair. There was, indeed, so much to be against. But their argumentativeness often spilled over toward each other. Fighting fundamentalists fought other fighting fundamentalists over how the fight against the enemy should be waged. Some took the scriptural admonition to “come out and be separate” (2 Cor. 6:17) literally and seceded from the denominations they belonged to. Others opted to stay and carry on the fight within the halls of the modernists. But then those who left had to decide whether to continue in fellowship with those who stayed, and then the pull-outers argued with those who stayed in about that.

  On the eschatological front, some held to one or another timetable for the “last days” they believed were already ushering in the Second Coming. Others were skeptical about any such schedules. Even the question of what inerrancy means did not escape dispute. What was inerrant—the words, the ideas the words expressed, or the content of an entire letter or gospel taken as a whole? Some fundamentalists even dared to suggest that the original context of a scriptural text might in fact be relevant. After all, Paul had specifically written to the Romans or the Galatians, not to Chicagoans or Clevelanders. Shouldn’t understanding that help us grasp what he was saying to them (and therefore presumably to us)? But others saw in this strategy as inviting the emergence of the specter of endless disputes over interpretation, with a consequent loss of confidence in “what the Bible plainly says.”

  These disagreements may sound puny or precious to some people today, but fundamentalists fought each other savagely over them, frequently “separating” from those with whom they did not agree. One result of this internal bloodletting was that it undermined the primary objective of the whole fundamentalist movement, which had been to quell the slide toward doctrinal cacophony by insisting on one unquestionable source of authority, the Word of God.

  Despite its continuing internal fractiousness, as the twenty-first century begins, Protestant fundamentalism, though declining, has not yet disappeared. And although there are important differences between the original meaning of the word and the various, disparate movements to which the label is applied today, they all evidence a kind of “family resemblance.” Each engages in a highly selective retrieval of texts, rites, practices, and sometimes organizational patterns from the past and then deploys them in a current battle. Those some now call “radical Islamists” refuse to be called “fundamentalists,” viewing it as yet another attempt to impose on them a foreign, Western category. But they do attempt to revive the earliest period in Muslim history, that of the “rightly guided caliphs,” as a model for reforming modern society. Those Jews who stake their claim to all of Palestine on a literal reading of the “promised land” passages in the Bible are sometimes called “land fundamentalists.” There is a similar tendency among those Catholics who call themselves “traditionalists” They seize upon the declining use of the Latin Mass as the main symbol of what has gone wrong with their church.

  Each of these movements combats an outside threat, but is much more concerned with the “fifth column” within. Radical Islamists oppose the West largely because of its support of what they believe are counterfeit and illegitimate so-called Muslim regimes in many of their countries.5 The “land fundamentalists” of the Jewish settler movement lash out with particular ferocity, and some with violence, against fellow Jews who do not share their religiously based claim to Palestine.6 Catholic traditionalists waste little energy criticizing Protestants, but pile their passionate polemics on the current leadership of their church, sometimes including the pope.7

  Having once experienced at least a hint of the vigor that drives Christian fundamentalists, I am always fascinated by their movements and still feel a touch of empathy with them. I cannot help but admire their commitment and drive. I still find myself at times humming the soaring hymns I learned with them. Still, I also know how much effort it requires to be a fundamentalist. It can get tiring. You must constantly fight not only the skepticism of those around you, but the doubts that arise within yourself. Mainly fundamentalists evoke from me a sense of sadness. Their pathos is that they expend such energy on such a losing cause.

  CHAPTER 11

  Meet Rocky, Maggie, and Barry

  Which Bible Do the Bible Believers Believe?

  When the late Jerry Falwell introduced Ronald Reagan to a group of his fellow pastors, he told the president, with a radiant smile, that they were all “Bible-believing preachers.” Reagan looked pleased. Protestant fundamentalists like to call themselves “Bible-believing Christians.”

  During the last decades of the nineteenth century especially in America, “believing the Bible” began to become a kind of litmus test of whether one was a “real Christian.” Given all the upheavals and uncertainties of the times, it is understandable that some people felt they needed an absolutely dependable, indeed infallible, authority. The declaration of papal infallibility in 1870 had responded to the same yen among some Catholics. References to the fundamentalist view of the Bible as a “paper pope” are historically quite apt. However, the result in both cases has been ruinous, degrading faith into a kind of credulity.

  It might be impolitic to ask such “Bible believers” which Bible they believe, but the question is a useful one to understand the appropriate place of the Bible in a community of faith. The answer must begin by recognizing that there is no such thing as the Bible. There are number of different ones. What Jews, Catholics, and Protestants call “the Bible” are different books. The Jewish one, called the Tanakh and first written in Hebrew, incorporates the five “Books of Moses” (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), the Prophets, and the Writings. The Protestant “Bible” includes all of these, though arranged in a different order, plus what Christians refer to as the “New Testament,” originally written in Greek. The Catholic Bible has all of the above plus the “Apocrypha,” which incorporates such books as Judith, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), 1 and 2 Maccabees, and several other, shorter books. Protestants excised this whole section during the Reformation, when—it is reliably reported—Luther would like to have torn the Letter of James out of the New Testament as well. It does say, after all, that “faith without works is dead,” so the testy Wittenberg theses-nailer called it a “stra
w epistle.” A champion of salvation by grace, he feared that the Letter of James might mislead people into thinking it might be gained by good works.1

  Since what we mean by “the Bible” has been changing from century to century, with various books being included and excluded depending on the theological climate, it would be useful for “Bible-believing” Christians to engage in an imaginary experiment. What if they were Bible-believing Christians in the second century CE? At that time the only Bible Christians had was the Old Testament. The New Testament had not yet been compiled. What if they lived at a time when books like First Clement and the Apocalypse of Peter were still being read in many congregations along with the various letters of Paul? Many Christians at that time wanted to include them in the New Testament, but eventually they were not. What if our Bible believers lived in the fifteenth century when the “apocryphal” books that Protestants excluded a few decades later were still considered to be Holy Scripture and still read in the churches (as they are in Catholic churches today)? The idea that “the Bible” has always been the same book year in and year out and you either believed it or you did not may be comforting, but it has no basis in reality.