by Bruce Bawer
The profound effect of evolution and of the Higher Criticism on many American Protestants can be summarized in one word: panic. Literal-minded believers were terrified by an intimidatingly recondite set of scientific and scholarly propositions that implicitly denied the literal truth of much of scripture and seemed to threaten to topple the old-time religion. These believers sought a refuge, a bulwark against the dangerous new learning—and they found the perfect one in dispensationalism. Why perfect? Because dispensationalist theology consisted of a set of theological assertions as complex and recondite as those advanced by Darwin or the Higher Critics; the difference was that dispensationalism proffered blessed assurance of the Bible's literal truth.
Indeed, though dispensationalism is utterly unscientific, in that it was formulated without the slightest regard for scientific method, Darby's theology exhibits a rigor, complexity, and internal consistency that can make it look quite scientific to people who don't know any better. Marsden notes that C. I. Scofield, whose 1909 Scofield Reference Bible codified and advanced the cause of dispensationalism, "contrasted his work to previous 'unscientific systems'" and that the dispensationalist Reuben Torrey saw himself as a kind of scientist whose job it was, in Torrey's words, to apply "the methods of modern science ... to Bible study." These men and others like them helped shape an American fundamentalist mentality that, to this day, as Marsden notes, reads "the Bible virtually as though it were a scientific treatise" and views Christianity as a system of knowledge that has "no loose ends, ambiguities, or historical developments."
Dispensationalism never had many adherents in the British Isles. But in nineteenth-century America, which seems never to have seen an apocalyptic creed it didn't like, Darby's teachings spread widely among modestly educated rural Americans, thanks largely to panic over evolution and the Higher Criticism. So widely did dispensationalism spread that by the year 1882, which saw the deaths of both Darby and Darwin, it had virtually supplanted traditional Christian belief in many nonmainline Protestant churches. The extraordinary extent of this displacement would be hard to exaggerate. Thanks to Darby, as the sociologist Nancy Tatom Ammerman has noted, millions of American Protestants had begun "to read the scripture as if it were a puzzle containing clues to God's historical timetable." They also began to look at Christianity in an aggressively horizontal way, seeing it as centered not on the individual's spiritual experience but on total assent to a highly specific and ahistorical set of theological propositions. For dispensa-tionalists, salvation is dependent not only on one's acceptance of Jesus Christ as savior but on one's acceptance of the truth of the entire dispensational historical schema. Those who declare their belief in the dispensations, the Rapture, and so forth will be saved; those who don't will endure the pains of hell. Period.
Where does love fit into this picture? Nowhere. In dispensational theology, the kingdom that Jesus described in the Gospels as something that exists already in our midst and that can be attained through love for God and one's neighbor was thoroughly banished from the picture and replaced by an exclusively future kingdom to which one can gain entry in only one way: by subscribing to dispensationalist theology. What's love got to do with it? Absolutely nothing.
More than any other nineteenth-century figure, Darby laid the foundations of legalistic Protestant belief in America today. Few men or women of his century exerted more influence on twentieth-century American culture. Yet the only thing as staggering as the breadth of his influence is the fact that he remains virtually unknown among mainstream Americans—including mainline Protestant clergy. Indeed, many standard works of religious and historical reference that treat far less influential persons at length do not even mention Darby's name.
Darby was not alone in effecting radical changes in American religion during the nineteenth century—or, for that matter, in promoting apocalyptic theology, which had figured importantly in American religion since about 1820. Though many people today think of previous centuries as eras when American Christianity remained firmly moored in tradition, Christianity in America has in fact always been exceedingly volatile. Among the new theologies to appear on the nineteenth-century American landscape were those of William Miller, whose disciple Ellen White founded the Seventh-day Adventists in 1863, and Charles Taze Russell, a sometime Adventist who organized the Jehovah's Witnesses in 1878. Like Darby's followers, the members of these movements were premillennialists—but not dispensationalists—who expected the imminent personal return of Christ. (Adventists still commemorate "The Great Disappointment" of October 22, 1844, when the Millerites, heeding a prediction by their leader, packed their bags and waited for Jesus to raise them to heaven.) Also founded in the nineteenth century were Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science (1879) and Joseph Smith's Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons (1830), now one of the world's fastest-growing religious groups.
These new sects varied widely in doctrine, but most of them had something significant in common: If the original Protestant Reformation and the later Baptist and Methodist movements had been born out of longings for a Church of Love and not of Law, these nineteenth-century sects tended to be founded by legalists who, offended by the decrease in legalism among the mainline Protestant churches and terrified by evolution, the Higher Criticism, and other manifestations of modern life and modern science, sought to establish newer, stricter Churches of Law—churches whose walls, so to speak, were high and strong enough to protect them, in their doctrinal certitude, from a world full of ambiguity and doubt.
Yet Darby would have a greater impact on religion in twentieth-century America than did any of his contemporaries. One aspect of that impact was a sharp division that continues in America to this day. By the end of the nineteenth century the findings of Darwin and the Higher Critics had been embraced by many educated Christians (especially in the cities and in New England) and by influential figures in the media, universities, and seminaries; these people who accepted the "new learning" came to be called modernists or liberals. Meanwhile, millions of Americans (especially in the South and rural areas) rejected modernism vehemently and affirmed the literal truth of the Bible; these people would come to be known as fundamentalists.
By century's end, most major Protestant denominations had become divided into modernist and antimodernist wings (the staunchly anti-modernist Southern Baptists were an exception), while the major seminaries and theological reviews came to be identified with one or the other side of the controversy. During the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century, antimodernist ministers (mostly Baptists and Presbyterians) met annually at the Niagara Bible Conference, where in 1895 they issued a statement insisting that there was no true Christianity where there was not total acceptance of Christ's divinity, virgin birth, physical resurrection, and future physical return to earth. Also insisted upon was the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement—the belief (still central to Protestant fundamentalism today) that Jesus, in some kind of cosmic transaction with God the Father, paid the price of his earthly life to redeem human beings, who through their own sinfulness had forfeited salvation.
The antimodernists also demanded belief in biblical inerrancy. That every word of the Bible was literally true had been a popular sentimental notion—and had been vaguely affirmed by some church figures—for at least two centuries, but had never been considered a key theological doctrine or developed in any systematic way. There was a good reason for this—namely, the fact that the Bible is chock-full of internal contradictions as well as errors in history, botany, medicine, physics, and other fields of knowledge. These errors ranged from the obvious (Joshua's command that the sun stop in its course was plainly based on a pre-Copernican understanding of astronomy) to the not-so-obvious (for example, Jesus' statement that the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds).
Among the many contradictions were these: The lists of Jesus' disciples differ from Gospel to Gospel; in the synoptic Gospels Jesus' ministry lasts one year, while in John's Gospel it l
asts two or three; the synoptics place Jesus' cleansing of the temple at the end of his ministry while John puts it at the beginning; in the synoptics, but not in John, Jesus has a formal trial before the Sanhedrin; the synoptics and John give different dates for the Crucifixion; Matthew, Luke, Acts, John, and I Corinthians give contradictory accounts of Jesus' Resurrection appearances; and Luke and Acts provide conflicting reports of his Ascension. The genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke, moreover, are totally irreconcilable; since both trace his descent through Joseph, moreover, neither genealogy is consistent with the claim of his virgin birth, which Paul in turn directly contradicts when he says that Jesus "was made of the seed of David according to the flesh" (Rom. 1:3).
In addition to these factual contradictions, the Bible contains large-scale incongruities that, for a legalistic Christian, cut to the heart of the faith. How does an inerrantist explain, for example, the often chillingly wrathful actions attributed in the Old Testament to the God whom Jesus describes in the New Testament as a perfectly loving Father? How does an inerrantist square the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith with the Epistle of James, which says that "it is by action and not by faith alone that a man is justified" (James 2:24)?
Such errors and inconsistencies abound in the Bible. Yet with the advent of modernist thinking, the doctrine of biblical inerrancy nonetheless became a major rallying point for antimodernists at every level of the American Protestant Church. Over the years, moreover, this doctrine—which was defined and disseminated by the antimodernists who dominated the Princeton Theological Seminary—would harden into a transcendently irrational article of faith that allowed for no exceptions whatsoever. Marsden notes that in the 1870s the theologian Charles Hodge, while stating that the Bible was divinely inspired, "could easily allow for errors in biblical texts"; a generation later, however, "his son, A. A. Hodge, and colleague, Benjamin Warfield, pushed his ideas to new heights of certainty. . . . literalism became dogma." In their view, God had not merely inspired the Bible; he had dictated it word for word. When forced to acknowledge blatant contradictions in scripture, the younger Hodge and Warfield came up with the bizarre notion that the Bible had been inerrant in its original manuscripts (which of course no longer existed) but that errors had been introduced later by copyists. This version of the inerrancy doctrine is still ardently affirmed by many legalistic Protestant churches, whose faith statements contain affirmations to the effect that "the Bible is without error in its original autographs."
It was at the annual Niagara conferences, and at a few other contemporaneous events, that Darby's dispensational premillennialism established itself as the orthodox theology among fundamentalist leaders. Among the more important of these leaders was the popular evangelist Dwight L. Moody, who spread Darby's teachings far and wide through his sermons as well as through his Moody Bible Institute. Founded in 1886, Moody's school—and others modeled on it—would serve as a reactionary alternative to the increasingly modernist mainline seminaries. Yet for all his devotion to dispensationalism, Moody was far less legalistic than are his present-day heirs. "The one feature that almost everyone noticed" about his preaching, writes Marsden, "was that Moody emphasized the love of God" and "did not preach Hellfire and God's wrath," a subject with which Moody was uneasy. "Terror," Moody insisted, "never brought a man in yet." Yet by embracing dispensational theology and rejecting modernism, Moody inadvertently helped set his segment of American Christianity on the road to being a Church of Law.
So it was that the turn-of-the-century middle-American reaction against modernism took shape around a fixation on strict dogma and biblical literalism. Never before had the professed faith of so many Christians been so utterly at odds with the accepted scientific knowledge of their own day. Faced with the chance to embrace new knowledge and reason, American fundamentalists—unlike virtually all other Christians around the world—chose instead to ally themselves with ignorance and irrationality.
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5
RAUSCHENBUSCH'S KINGDOM
If John Nelson Darby helped lay the nineteenth-century foundations for the contemporary American Church of Law, the career of a northern Baptist named Walter Rauschenbusch likewise helped shape the ideas with which many members of America's more liberal and mainline churches have since attempted to build a Church of Love. How many Christians today, however, would even recognize the name of Rauschenbusch, whose work influenced (among others) Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Desmond Tutu? The son of a German preacher who was considered "the father of the German Baptists," Rauschenbusch was born in 1861 in upstate New York, to which his parents had immigrated and where his father taught at Rochester Seminary. The young Rauschenbusch was raised on the orthodox Protestant doctrines of the day, including biblical literalism and the substitutionary atonement; yet when he entered Rochester Seminary, he found these teachings radically challenged. For one thing, he encountered the Higher Criticism, as a result of which, he later explained, "my inherited ideas about the inerrancy of the Bible became untenable." He also came to doubt the substitutionary atonement because, as he wrote, "it was not taught by Jesus; it makes salvation dependent upon a trinitarian transaction that is remote from human experience; and it implies a concept of divine justice that is repugnant to human sensitivity." What kind of a cosmic justice system, in other words, would require a loving God to take his son's life in exchange for humankind's salvation? The idea made no sense to him, moral or otherwise.
Rauschenbusch's changed views did not shake his faith; they refocused it. He found kindred spirits in the early-nineteenth-century Congregationalist Horace Bushnell, who had written that Jesus had sought to reveal God's love for all humanity and "to win them to new life," and in the Anglican Frederick W Robertson, who had written that "the attempt to rest Christianity upon miracles and fulfillments of prophecy is essentially the vilest rationalism; as if the trained intellect of a lawyer which can investigate evidence were that to which is trusted the soul's salvation." (Or, as Tillich might put it, the preoccupation of much Protestant theology with miracles and prophecies was exemplary not of genuine vertical orientation, but rather of a fixation on supposed horizontal manifestations of Godhead.) Rauschenbusch copied out the following line from Robertson: "To the question, Who is my neighbor? I reply as my Master did by the example that He gave: 'the alien and the heretic'"
This became Rauschenbusch's answer as well. "The hallmark of his new position," notes Rauschenbusch's biographer, Paul M. Minus, "was the importance of living like Christ, not of believing a prescribed doctrine about Christ." It is no coincidence that Rauschenbusch, like Robertson, referred to Jesus more often as "Master" than as "Savior" or "Lord"—a usage that reflects an emphasis on Jesus as a teacher and life model, rather than on such doctrinal matters as his divinity or substitutionary atonement. (This usage would later be taken up by Harry Emerson Fosdick.) Nor is it a coincidence that these developments of Rauschenbusch's early adulthood took place in America during the second half of the nineteenth century, when the mainline Protestant churches had become instruments and allies of the American social and political establishment, in effect supporting the economy's domination by robber barons, the extreme income disparity in the cities, and the practice of child labor. Most church leaders saw these socioeconomic facts as having little or nothing to do with their ministries. Today, when many people take social outreach programs for granted as an essential part of church mission, it can be hard to realize how strongly these assumptions differ from those of many mid-nineteenth-century ministers and theologians. Scandalized by his colleagues' apparent indifference to suffering, Rauschenbusch considered it his obligation as a minister of the gospel to seek to ameliorate social conditions. To love one's neighbor, in his view, was to act with love. To spread the gospel was a matter not of shrill proselytizing but of living out Jesus' message.
While more and more Americans were preaching Darby's despicable theology of the kingdom, then, Rauschenbusch was developing
an utterly different kingdom theology. At an 1886 political rally, a Catholic priest struck at Rauschenbusch's imagination and conscience—and captured the spirit of what would eventually be called the Social Gospel—when he began a speech by saying, "Thy Kingdom come! Thy will be done on earth." That was what Rauschenbusch came to be about: spreading the kingdom. For him the gospel was central to Christianity, and central to the gospel, in turn, was the concept of the kingdom of God. For him, spreading the kingdom did not mean hell-fire evangelism; it meant seeking to lead a Christlike life. Jesus had come, Rauschenbusch proclaimed, not to die in an act of substitutionary atonement but rather "to substitute love for selfishness as the basis of human society." Yet Christians had forgotten that purpose. They had forgotten, as Rauschenbusch wrote, that "Christianity is in its nature revolutionary." Rauschenbusch's job, as he saw it, was to remind them of that fact.
To this end, Rauschenbusch and some friends formed a group in 1892 called the Brotherhood of the Kingdom. Writing in their charter that "the Spirit of God is moving men in our generation toward a better understanding of the idea of the Kingdom of God on earth," they declared their intention "to reestablish this idea in the thought of the church, and to assist in its practical realization in the world." In a pamphlet, Rauschenbusch developed this point:
Because the Kingdom of God has been dropped as the primary and comprehensive aim of Christianity, and personal salvation has been substituted for it, therefore men seek to save their own souls and are selfishly indifferent to the evangelization of the world.