Literalism vs. Everything Else - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > April 1994

Literalism vs. Everything Else

A continuing conflict

By Martin E. Marty

A fissure runs through communities that take the Bible seriously, especially within American Protestantism. “Literalism” marks the divide between the two camps, the two spiritual regions, the two political forces. Listen to the two factions fighting for the spoils within a single denomination—as in the recent case of the Southern Baptist Convention1 or the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod—and you will hear them fighting over biblical inerrancy and a literal approach to Scripture. As battle lines are drawn between the “evangelical” and the “mainline” churches, no concept is used more frequently as the divider than literalism, by whatever term it is […]

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Endnotes

1.

For a fair-minded account of the Baptist struggles, see Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1990), especially the references to “inerrancy.”

2.

George Gallup, Jr. and Jim Castelli, The People’s Religion: American Faith in the 90’s (New York: Macmillan, 1989) pp. 60–61.

3.

David Barrett, who computes statistics on world religion, estimates that the number of “Pentecostals/Charismatics” in world Christianity grew from 74,366,000 in 1970 to 429,523,000 in 1993. They are part of “Practicing Christian” growth in the same period from 905,526,000 to 1,259,691,000. See International Bulletin of Missionary Research, January, 1993, p. 23.

4.

Crane Brinton, “Many Mansions,” American Historical Review, XLIX (January 1964, p. 315).

5.

An excellent summary of Jefferson’s theology is in Robert M. Healey, Jefferson on Religion and Public Education (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1962); on the Bible, see pp. 102–104: on clergy, pp. 105–107, 118–119. The best of many versions of his work on the Gospels is Dickinson W. Adams, ed., Jefferson’s Extracts from the Gospels: ‘The Philosphy of Jesus’ and ‘The Life and Morals of Jesus,’ in the Second Series of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993).

6.

Alfred North Whitehead, Essays in Science and Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), p. 114.

7.

Reported in Chautauqua Assembly Herald 17, no. 14 (4 August 1892), p. 382.

8.

George F. Parker, Recollections of Grover Cleveland (New York, 1911), p. 382.

9.

For Bryan’s views on Literalism, see Lawrence W. Levine, Defender of the Faith: William Jennings Bryan: The Last Decade, 1915–1925 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 247, 281 and 292.

10.

Walter Lippman, American Inquisitors (New York: Macmillan, 1928), p. 63.

11.

John C. Vander Stelt, Philosophy and Scripture; A Study in Old Princeton and Westminster Theology (Marlton, NJ: Mack, 1978) ch. V and VI, pp. 90–200 detail the development of Princetonian biblicism. A contemporary defense is John D. Woodbridge, Biblical Authority (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1982).

12.

A variety of evangelical responses, all sharing a high view of biblical authority but critical of literalism, appear in Jack Rogers, ed., Biblical Authority (Waco, TX: Word, 1977).

13.

James Barr, Fundamentalism (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978), pp. 191–207 detail “Dispensationalism.” See esp. p. 195.

14.

On Reagan and dispensationalism, see the somewhat polemical account in Grace Halsell, Prophecy and Politics: Militant Evangelists on the Road to Nuclear War (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1986), “Reagan: Arming for a Real Armageddon,” pp. 40–50.