Brian Baxter *
July 2007

It is December 2004 and Peter Stokes of the Melbourne Salt Shakers ‘Christian ethics’ group is being interviewed by Gary Fishlock, editor of the Sydney gay publication SX. At one stage, Fishlock says:

… can’t help pointing out to Peter that many of the Bible’s passages are ambiguous, open to interpretation and mistranslation and have been taken out of context both historically and culturally, and that this is acknowledged by many people who know and understand the Bible well.

Stokes calmly replies that ‘[t]heological revisionism is nothing new‘, elaborating as follows:

Once a person feels able to disbelieve or revise one piece of scripture then there really is no reason why they should not change any or all of it to suit themselves. (Salt Shakers E-News, 16 Mar. 2005)

In the course of his Channel 4 documentary Who Wrote the Bible?, recently shown on SBS, British theologian Robert Beckford asks a very conservative Jew for his opinion of the ‘JEDP’ or ‘documentary’ hypothesis. This refers to the idea that the first five books of the Bible were not written by Moses but were instead derived from a number of different sources. The Jewish man hunches his shoulders, looks at the ground and then grins. He’s read nothing about such an idea and it strikes him as ‘naive’. Later, Beckford expresses concern that the man declined to ‘engage with the scholarship’. He seems slightly puzzled about this.

In April 2006 Bill Muehlenberg, formerly with the National Civic Council’s ‘Australian Family Association’ and now a Religious Right freelancer, takes issue with Beckford’s series:

… [I]n the Beckford version of things, the five Books of Moses weren’t written by Moses at all, but by four anonymous writers [sic], each with his own particular view to promote.

Muehlenberg asserts that this hypothesis has now been ‘largely abandoned by Old Testament scholars‘. Nor does he like the critical stance that Beckford adopts towards the New Testament, claiming that ‘very few credible New Testament scholars would take that position‘ and that Beckford continually ignores ‘the wealth of contemporary biblical scholarship that is out there‘. (’ABC’s Easter assault on Christianity’, News Weekly, 29 Apr. 2006, 4)

A few minutes on Google will rapidly convince you that all of Muehlenberg’s assertions are wrong. So is he telling us fibs? Not at all. It’s just that the Old Testament scholars he’s talking about are conservative evangelical Old Testament scholars, the ‘credible New Testament scholars‘ are also conservative evangelicals, and of course the ‘wealth of contemporary biblical scholarship‘ is also essentially fundamentalist in nature. On this reading, modern critical scholars aren’t really scholars at all, but rather, mere ‘liberal theologians who are quite happy to debunk the Bible and challenge orthodox theology.‘ Critical scholarship simply doesn’t count.

Baseline

What we are talking about here is a ‘baseline’ problem. Whereas most modern researchers try to follow the evidence wherever it leads, conservative Christians (and the conservative adherents of many other religions) pursue lines of evidence only so far as this evidence does not contradict the basic beliefs mandated by their holy texts. In the case of conservative Christians, scientific research, educational research, biblical research - all of these are just fine as long as they don’t clash with the ‘foundational truths of scripture’. The ethical, but otherwise unfettered pursuit of knowledge is no longer the researcher’s point of departure. The Bible is the baseline.

Jonathan Sarfati of Creation Science Ministries (formerly Answers in Genesis) has put this position explicitly:

… [T]he ministry’s axioms are the propositions of the Bible, not the theories of fallible scientists. (Technical Journal 12[2], c. mid-1998, 150)

The word ‘axiom’ can mean either a widely-accepted principle or, as in geometry, a self-evident truth and I strongly suspect that Sarfati is using it in the latter sense. But just how self-evident is this baseline? Sarfati obviously thinks that the propositions of the Bible are both accessible (Scripture is supposed to be ‘perspicuous’, or easily understood) and absolutely clear-cut. But most of the world’s Christians don’t agree with him on this. The Catholic Church, for example, holds that its ‘magisterium’ or teaching authority plays an essential role in the correct interpretation of the Bible and its ‘propositions’.

Smaller Christian bodies also often claim the right to make definitive decisions about scriptural propositions. Diane Wilson (2002) gives this account of how such questions are dealt with by the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ own teaching authority, the Watchtower Society (Sarfati would probably deny that Jehovah’s Witnesses are true Christians, but he can rest assured that the feeling is mutual):

… [T] he Watchtower Society’s response to sincere questions often does cause problems. Once questions are voiced, the questioner is all too often told that he or she is to accept whatever the Society teaches and is not to ‘reason’ about it, but must blindly and dogmatically fully accept whatever is taught. The individual’s reason, they stress, is ‘human reasoning’, but the Watchtower’s reasoning is ‘God’s reasoning’. (Awakening of a Jehovah’s Witness [Prometheus], 293)

God’s reasoning

So not only are conservative Christian researchers supposed to work from a different baseline: they seem to have a choice of baselines depending on whether they’re Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jonathan Sarfati etc. To pursue one of Diane Wilson’s points, it would be a great help if we knew something about ‘God’s reasoning’. He seems to like the idea of reasoning: ‘Come now, and let us reason together‘ he says in Isaiah 1:18, but unfortunately it’s all downhill from there.

We’ll pass over one troubling passage: ‘[M]y thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways‘ (Isaiah 55:8), but we can’t skip around Paul’s observation to the Corinthians: ‘For the foolishness of God is wiser than men …‘ (1 Cor. 1:25) Rather than engage in speculation about what this might mean, I’ll hand over to Hans Peter Royer, head of the Capernwray Bible College, Tauernhof, Austria, who recently enlightened a Queensland audience in the following terms:

[Royer] said that in Corinth where two-thirds of the people were slaves and 1,000 people were temple prostitutes, Paul preached nothing but the cross for 18 months and many people became followers of Jesus Christ. But in Athens, a city of intellectuals, the people would not listen - and perished - because the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom … [T]o make the cross intellectually acceptable empties it of its power. ‘It sounds stupid. It is foolishness. But it works.’ (Helen Woodall ‘Going God’s way’, New Life, 27 Apr. 2006)

‘God’s foolishness’ begins to look increasingly like an obscurantist ploy. Royer confirmed this impression when at another meeting ‘[he] spoke of the many convincing proofs that Jesus was alive and that we should not need many proofs - or any.’

The ‘propositions of the Bible’ seem to be an unsatisfactory basis for serious research of any kind - imprecise, somewhat protean depending on whose version of the propositions we are talking about, and all with a healthy dose of anti-intellectualism thrown in. Some conservative evangelicals actually seem afraid of the research process itself, or perhaps of what it might uncover.

Enlightenment

It all gets back to the deep-seated fundamentalist desire to ‘repeal the Enlightenment’. I used to feel that this phrase exaggerated conservative evangelical rejection of so much of modernity, but I no longer think so. One of my favourite proto-fundamentalists is Rev. Samuel Andrews who in 1898 wrote a book entitled Christianity and Anti-Christianity in Their Final Conflict. Andrews was quite sure that the reappearance of Christ was at hand and had no trouble in listing the ‘tendencies’ preparing the way for the ‘Antichrist’ who would precede him: liberal Christianity, biblical criticism, modern science, modern literature etc.

The most interesting thing about Andrews was the way in which he resolved ‘the problem of modernism’. No half-measures here:

Andrews reinterpreted the conflict between modernism and biblical faith in such a way as to leave no doubt where God-fearing Christians’ loyalties must lie. His constituency no longer had to trouble themselves with reasoned refutations of modernism’s intellectual claims. Instead, all modern science and philosophy could be dismissed outright as an act of religious loyalty. (Robert Fuller [1995] Naming the Antichrist [OUP], 117)

Simple, isn’t it? Just cut the Gordian knot. On a literal reading of the Bible, modern science and biblical criticism etc. simply can’t be right and therefore why waste time arguing with their proponents?

Andrews felt no obligation to examine the academic soundness of biblical scholars’ conclusions … He was certain that ‘this overthrow of the faith of men in the Bible is a great step forward in preparing the way for the Antichrist.’ Once his readers knew that biblical scholarship was the work of the Antichrist, it would not be necessary to inquire any further into its academic merits. (118)

Bob Jones University

The rapid advance of secularisation in the West during the past century has rendered a ‘pure’ Andrews-style approach virtually untenable. Only a fundamentalist audience will accept the bald assurance that anything contradicting the Bible must be wrong. Instead, conservative evangelical speakers and authors present their arguments in a pseudo-scientific style, their articles often laden with abstracts, appendices and long lists of references. Popularisers of the neo-creationist notion of Intelligent Design are very good at this.

However, there are still some educational institutions that follow Andrews’ precepts right down the line. One of these is the well-known Bob Jones University (BJU) in Greenville, South Carolina:

Research and analytical thinking [have] never ranked as high priorities at [BJU]. Conceiving their mission to be one of protection [of the faith] and indoctrination, the Joneses [Senior and Junior] did not place much value upon scholarship if it did not buttress what was already regarded as the truth. (Mark Taylor Dalhouse [1996] An Island in the Lake of Fire [University of Georgia Press], 70)

Bob Jones Sr once remarked that every time the university hired an academic with a PhD, they had to hold an evangelical revival to offset his secularising influence. For BJU, knowledge or truth was not something to be discovered through enquiry, but rather something that had been revealed and preserved in the past for faithful transmission to future generations. (120) Education itself was an inculcation process, intended to transmit religiously-established (i.e. biblical baseline) values and uphold the social order. (123) Whatever teachers did, they must not substitute ‘multiple, ever-shifting human constructs for absolute, eternal verities‘. (128) (Compare this with Jonathan Sarfati’s assertion about creationist ‘axioms’, quoted above.) ‘Uncertainty is eliminated. Decision making and critical thinking are kept to a minimum.‘ (146)

It’s worth noting that the educational publications of BJU Press are widely used by Christian ‘home-schooling’ parents in Australia.

Conclusion

Fundamentalist reasoning about subjects like evolution or biblical criticism is invariably specious at heart because it focuses on an irrelevant factor, namely the biblical baseline. Sometimes this is glaringly obvious, as with Rev. Samuel Andrews and Bob Jones University. At other times it’s quite well disguised, as with many advocates of Intelligent Design; and usually it’s somewhere in between, as with the three items that opened this article.

Reading the arguments of the baseliners is quite unlike reading, say, Richard Dawkins, Peter Singer or Carl Sagan who generally attack the opposition head-on and with great rigour. Instead you’ll find enveloping clouds of non sequiturs, ad hominem positions, lots of circular reasoning, inventive insults and regurgitation of long-discredited ‘facts’, together with a final, ringing assertion that yet again, the Bible has been ‘proven true’. Conservative evangelicals’ point of departure doubles as their conclusion.

Although I’d only recommend it to masochists, you can occasionally induce feelings of doubt in some fundamentalists by honing in on the baseline itself. To use Robert Beckford’s term, you must make them ‘engage with the scholarship’ - ‘Why do you reject the documentary hypothesis?’; ‘What is your evidence for the existence of Moses, Abraham, Jesus?’; ‘Why is the story of the woman taken in adultery included in the Bible?’ etc. - and then nail them every time they give a baseline answer e.g. ‘I know Moses existed because it says so in the Bible.’ Generally they’ll walk away but a surprising number will admit they’ve learned something from the experience. And one of them even thanked me.

(This article was originally published in The Skeptic Vol.27, No.1, Autumn 2007.
Republished with permission.)