The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  4. There are few more vivid reactions to modern biblical criticism than that of Dr. Arno C. Gaebelein, editor of Our Hope, a journal held in high esteem by many fundamentalists and evangelicals. In his article, “The Most Dangerous Infidelity,” published in his journal in December 1919, Gaebelein writes:

  “That the modern criticism of the Bible, so-called and falsely called ‘higher criticism,’ is the most subtle and dangerous infidelity aiming at the foundation of our faith, has often been demonstrated. This wicked criticism is denying most of the facts of God’s revelation in His own Word. Well has it been said, ‘Criticism, this child of the spirit, that always negates, takes everything from us, but gives us nothing.’ Revelation? No. Inspiration of the Bible? No. Miracles? No. Prophecy? No. Christ, God? No. Resurrection and judgment? No. What do all these negations profit me? What shall I do with them? It causes one to stand on the path of life like a freezing wanderer, totally bereft, clad only in a thin shirt of morality, and not knowing whither to direct his steps. Instead of the ‘it is written’ with which our Lord and Master [Jesus Christ] conquered the mightiest opponent, we ask: Is it written? Where? Who wrote it? Is the passage genuine? Who will prove it? The foundations under us totter, and from bogs and swamps there rise up mists that hide from us the view of the eternal peaks, clad in radiant white. A malarial atmosphere of doubts and uncertainty envelops our spiritual life, forces its way into our schools, churches and poisons our Christian literature; we and our children breathe it wherever we are, and it makes us wavering and defenseless outwardly, and sick and languid inwardly.” (David A. Rausch, Fundamentalists, Evangelicals, and Anti-Semitism [Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1993], pp. 74, 223, 224.)

  5. See Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Irving, Texas: Word, 1993), pp. 37–38.

  6. Moises Silva in “Contemporary Theories of Biblical Interpretation,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon, 1995), Vol. I. Quoted in ibid., p. 364.

  7. See John Huxtable, The Bible Says (London: SCM Press, 1962), p. 29. Huxtable cites one of the standard pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic biblical commentaries, Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture by W. Leonard and B. Orchard. The tendentious view of Protestantism, untempered by the rising winds of the ecumenical movement, reflects the then prevailing Roman view of the heirs of the Reformation as “Separated Brethren.”

  8. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (New York: Morrow, 1993), p. 125. Humpty-Dumpty’s hermeneutic has been thought by some to represent the tottering logic of nineteenth-century Anglican theology in the face of the querulous logic of a persistent Alice, the spirit of the age of rational sensibility. That may be too much of a stretch, as well as an unwarranted imposition on Lewis Carroll, but Humpty-Dumpty is the patron saint of those who make words work for them as they please.

  Chapter 3: The Bible in America

  1. Harold Bloom is by no means the first to observe that the intimacy religion and the American culture have long enjoyed is paradoxically as much a sign of cultural anxiety as it is of cultural strength. The anxiety has to do with the perception that the culture and those things it values are under constant threat. The Puritan theology of seventeenth-century New England and its theocratic ideals were beset by the fear of subversion from beyond and within. The saints were not only in a state of constant warfare with the aborigines, they also feared the consequences of their own “success,” which might weaken group loyalty and identity and eventually wean the younger generation from the faith of their fathers and mothers. The pre-Revolutionary transition from Puritan to Yankee, and the shift of the center of civic gravity from the meetinghouse to the countinghouse, is perhaps the first chapter in the ongoing saga of the American secularization process.

  The ongoing tension in American religion is not necessarily between those who believe and those who do not believe. The tension is really between the desire to profit from the material gains and power of the culture without at the same time losing one’s religious purity and submitting the comforts and privileges of that culture to the judgment of one’s faith. That paradox, uniquely American, which combines the appearance of godliness with the substance of godlessness, does not mirror an accommodation between the secular and the sacred, as might easily be supposed at the level of appearances, but creates a profound anxiety and dis-ease, which, when easily provoked by the inevitable tensions of a growing pluralist and secular culture, produces what Richard Hofstader once called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”

  In an essay with this title in the November 1964 Harper’s, at the height of the Goldwater revival of American conservatism, Hofstader argued in essence that the fuel that drove America’s cultural conservatism was a sense of conspiracy and persecution, that the culture, the “American way,” was under siege from both Communism without and a wasting disease from within represented by attacks on fundamental American values. He agreed with sociologist Daniel Bell in arguing that “the modern right wing…feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialist and communist schemers…. Their predecessors discovered foreign conspiracies; the modern radical right finds that conspiracy also embraces betrayal at home.” (The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays [New York: Knopf, 1964], p. 24.)

  Thirty years later it might very well be argued that the conspiracy theories that first found their modern political home in the Goldwater campaign of 1964 and whose antecedents are as old as the republic itself, the “paranoid style,” have found their contemporary expression in the 1990s “cultural wars,” their fears of moral subversion, and the political response to these anxieties in the form of that loose but powerful coalition known as the Religious Right. As an icon of a culture under attack, the Bible read through the lenses of this paranoia becomes a critical means to restore the vision and the power of those who feel themselves dispossesed and disrespected. When we think of the Bible, then, as an “American book,” which much of the predominant American religious culture is tempted to do, we must understand this context within which the Bible is so often read and interpreted.

  Ralph Reed, the director of the Christian Coalition and no mean student of American culture, understands this perfectly, and his new book, Active Faith: How Christians Are Changing the Soul of American Politics, is but the most recent expression of that understanding at work. In his “Observer” column in The New York Times, in “God’s Angry Land: A New National Habit,” Russell Baker addresses the contemporary (and to his mind irrational) response to this paranoia: anger. Martin E. Marty’s study Modern American Religion: Under God, Indivisible, 1941–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), particularly Chapter 18, “A Civic Religion of the American Way of Life,” is an excellent analysis of the debate on the role and nature of religion in American public life. Also worth consulting concerning the relationship among American fundamentalism, the interpretation of the Bible, and the American culture is Kathleen C. Boone’s The Bible Tells Them So: The Discourse of Protestant Fundamentalism, published in 1989 by the University of New York Press, Albany.

  Chapter 4: Hard Texts and Changing Times

  1. Much of the discussion of the history of the temperance movement in this chapter is taken from John L. Merrill’s article “The Bible and the American Temperance Movement: Text, Context, and Pretext,” which appeared in the Harvard Theological Review 81:2 (1988) pp. 145–170. It is a contemporary cultural convention to dismiss the American temperance movement as “odd and misplaced,” an aberration. To many, temperance is a casualty of the failure of the Great Experiment of Prohibition, and Prohibition itself is seen as something of a last stand of the American Protestant establishment. The repeal
of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution in 1933 marked the end not only of Prohibition but of the unchallenged dominance of white Protestant Christianity in American cultural affairs. Merrill argues, however, that this attitude does not “do justice to its [temperance’s] widespread support and distinction as the longest continuous reform movement in American history.” (p. 145)

  Another useful historical study of temperance, the Bible, and American religion is “Temperance and the Evangelical Churches” by Othniel A. Pendleton, Jr., which is a chapter from his doctoral dissertation and is printed in the Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society, Vol XXV, No. 1 March 1947, pp.14–45. It is to Pendleton that I owe the discovery of Hunt’s “Cold Water Anthem,” which, according to Pendleton, even he recognized as bad poetry: “I did not feel,” Hunt says, “that I was a Burns or a Byron, but I did feel that I had made a poem that would have done Burns or Byron great good.” (p. 42)

  2. Roland H. Bainton was one of the most distinguished church historians of his generation and his influence extended well beyond Yale Divinity School, where he was much beloved. His essay, “Total Abstinence and Biblical Principles,” was published in Christianity Today, July 7, 1958.

  In 1964, Christianity Today would adopt Bainton’s principle as its own when in an editorial, “Abstinence Makes Sense,” in the issue of April 24, 1964, the editors reasoned, “Surely the time has come for a careful, persistent, and persuasive presentation of the fact that abstinence makes sense. Regardless of differing religious traditions and varying interpretations of what scripture says about drinking, youth today…have the right to hear the plain case for abstinence.” The Bible’s precedents were not definitive for the editors. “In other periods, such as Bible times, the problems about alcohol were different from today. But these are not Bible times. The stresses of living in this space age make the human organism more susceptible to the perils of alcohol than in ancient Palestine…. God expects of us the adjustment of maturity to current problems.…” The emphasis is mine but the point is theirs.

  Another perspective, this time from Canada, and equally relevant to the relationship between biblical precedent and social practice, is provided by Doris I. Miller in her article “Unfermented Wine on the Lord’s Table: Origins and Implementation in Nineteenth-Century Canadian Methodism,” in Methodist History 29:1 (October 1990), pp. 3–13.

  No scholarly source cites it, but the aphorism having to do with the Southern Baptist Convention’s long-standing position of total abstinence ought not to be ignored. It is said that when the Southern Baptist Convention comes to town for its annual meeting, the bars dry up and room service flourishes.

  Chapter 5: The Bible and Race

  1. Despite the fact that it is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, the Southern Baptist Convention usually does not make front-page news in the secular press, but when it passed its resolution of repentance over slavery at its annual meeting in June 1995, it made headlines and the evening news. According to New York Times religion reporter Gustav Niebuhr’s account in the issue of June 21, “Passage of the resolution was a dramatic move for the denomination, whose staunchly conservative leaders have turned sharply to the right both politically and theologically in recent years, taking increasingly tough lines against abortion, homosexuality, and the ordination of women as church pastors.” The resolution stated, “We lament and repudiate historic acts of evil such as slavery from which we continue to reap a bitter harvest, and we recognize that the racism which yet plagues our culture today is inextricably tied to the past.” The resolution also asked for forgiveness “from our African-American brothers and sisters, acknowledging that our own healing is at stake.”

  2. It took the Southern Baptists one hundred and fifty years to repent of the sin upon which their convention was founded. This should be compared with the public acts of contrition made by the Germans on the fortieth and fiftieth anniversaries of the end of World War II. On May 8, 1985, the fortieth anniversary to the day of the end of the war, Richard von Weizsäcker, president of the West German Republic, said in a speech of commemoration in the Plenary Room of the Bundestag, “Remembering means recalling an occurrence honestly and undistortedly so that it becomes a part of our very beings. This places high demands on our truthfulness.” And in his litany of those to be commemorated, to whom apologies were owed, and from whom forgiveness was sought, the German president included of course the six million Jews who were murdered in the concentration camps and the people of Poland and the Soviet Union who suffered at the hands of the German army. And he included “the Sonti and Romany gypsies, the homosexuals and the mentally ill who were killed, as well as the people who had to die for their religious or political beliefs. We commemorate the hostages who were executed.” (“Remembrance, Sorrow and Reconciliation: Speeches and Declarations in Connection with the 40th Anniversary of the End of the Second World War in Europe,” Press and Information Office of the Government of the federal Republic of Germany, 1985), pp. 59–60.

  3. The Iberian conquests in the New World and the Christian ambitions that surrounded the economic and imperial enterprise are discussed by L. S. Stavrianos in his text The World Since 1500: A Global History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1966), pp. 87–117.

  4. James Boswell’s views on slavery are cited by Stavrianos, op. cit., p. 372.

  5. I am indebted to my friend and colleague Professor Stephen A. Marini for his discussion of “Slavery and the Bible” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, edited by Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 701–702. Marini credits the internal Christian debate about slavery with the disestablishment of biblical authority in America. “One of the chief ironies of the conflict over slavery,” he writes, “was the confrontation of America’s largest Protestant denominations with the hitherto unthinkable idea that the Bible could be divided against itself. But divided it had been by intractable theological, political, and economic forces. Never again would the Bible completely recover its traditional authority in American culture.”

  6. Rufus B. Spain’s At Ease in Zion: Social History of Southern Baptists, 1865–1900 (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967) makes chilling reading about Southern Baptist convictions on race and the Bible following the collapse of the Confederacy in 1865. Until 1865, Southern Baptists felt that they could hold together their major assumptions, which to others appeared to be in conflict, namely, that slavery was sanctioned in scripture, that despite their defeat in the Civil War they and God were still on the same side, and that their understanding of the Bible and themselves remained unchanged despite these changed circumstances. Spain cites an editorial in the Richmond Religious Herald of February 22, 1866, in which it was argued that it was not God who freed the slaves but Satan: “…But I cannot, I will not believe it…. It was Satan that ruled the hour [i.e., the freeing of the slaves.]” (p. 19) For many Southern Baptists, the defeat of the Confederacy was not a judgment against slavery, and certainly not divine approbation of the North; it was a judgment upon the sins (of which slavery was not one) of the Southern people. (p. 17)

  7. The Southern Baptist Review and Expositor 53 (1956), p. 200.

  8. In the same issue of Christianity Today in which Billy Graham tells evangelical Christians that “racial and ethnic hostility is the foremost social problem facing our world today,” J. Deotis Roberts, professor of philosophical theology at Eastern Baptist Seminary, and an African American serving as president of the American Theological Society, observed that the word evangelical is a turnoff for most African-American Christians. Part of the reason is the association of that particular tradition in America with a long history of indifference to racial injustice and a racism that prefers sentimental love without “real considerations for social justice.” He went on to say, “Black Christians love the Bible, but it is their interpretation that differs from white evangelicals’. African Americans know the Bible as a means of oppression as well a
s a source of liberation. We cannot assume that all Christians get the same message from reading the Bible.” In reply to the question of whether there ever could be genuine reconciliation between African-American Christians and white evangelicals, Roberts concludes, “There can be no genuine reconciliation without liberation and social transformation.” Christianity Today, October 4, 1993.

  Chapter 6: The Bible and Anti-Semitism

  1. Dr. Bailey Smith’s words, “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew,” predictably caused a furor in the Jewish community and within liberal theological circles, but they also generated a storm of controversy within his own Southern Baptist Convention, which itself was in the midst of a continuing internal struggle for ideological control between liberal and conservative forces in the Convention. Many Southern Baptists were embarrassed by their president’s remark, not so much because it displayed anti-Semitism but because it revealed a profound ignorance masquerading as candor. Few believed that Smith was himself a garden-variety anti-Semite. Smith himself affirmed his devotion to Israel, and in a hand-written addendum to his press release of November 14, 1980, in which he responded to charges of anti-Semitism in a story in the Dallas Morning News, he said, “No one is more pro-Israel than I am.” (“Bailey Smith Papers” in The Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee) Glenn Igleheart, director of interfaith witness at the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board, said Smith’s remarks, “instead of furthering understanding, actually impedes it.” (Biblical Recorder, October 18, 1980, p. 6) One pastor in a letter to the Biblical Recorder of October 11 notes in embarrassed disagreement, “I think it is a little presumptuous of Mr. Smith to indicate he knows the mind of God so well that he knows even God’s conversations!” (p. 9) E. Glenn Hinson, a professor at Southern Seminary, also took exception and noted that Smith “may have disenfranchised Jesus’ prayer,” reminding Smith that Jesus was born, lived, and died a Jew. (Biblical Recorder, October 11, 1980, p. 13) In a unanimous vote of the faculty of Southern Baptist-related Meredith College, Smith’s views were repudiated.