While preparing for a conference on Jewish-Christian relations, I was asked by students to define Fundamentalism. I explained its five main tenets as (1) the inerrancy of the Bible, (2) the virgin birth of Jesus, (3) his performance of miracles, (4) his atonement offered to God by shedding his blood and (5) his bodily resurrection.1 My students’ response was direct and to the point: “But isn’t that what all Christians believe?”
Their reaction was telling. It shows how little impact academic theology over the past 200 years has had on popular awareness. That theology understands Christianity as something far more symbolic and collective than the Fundamentalist emphasis on individual literal belief. My students’ reaction suggests that the “take” on Christianity in America is along Fundamentalist lines.
Fundamentals came to be asserted in both Protestantism and Catholicism in response to two basic challenges that were first voiced during the 19th century and continue to be influential today.
The first challenge is best appreciated by considering the example of David Friedrich Strauss. In 1835 Strauss published his major work, The Life of Jesus. It was immediately translated into several languages, and it assured that Strauss would repeatedly be denied professorships. Strauss, under the influence of the philosophy of Hegel, believed that Jesus in the Gospels embodies the synthesis between divinity and humanity, and that the texts should be read as symbol, not as literal history.
The second major challenge was Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1859. The concept of evolution has since been applied in many different fields, including the study of religion. In theology, an evolutionary approach leads to the assertion that today we are in a better position to understand the significance of past events—including the life of Jesus—than those who were alive at the time. Taken together with the reading of the Gospels as symbols, the principle of evolution makes for a strong tendency to reinterpret the Scriptures.
Among both Catholics and Protestants, the reaction against these two principles has been to insist upon certain fundamentals as literally true. In 1870, the First Vatican Council promulgated the doctrine of papal infallibility. Among Protestants, the very name of Fundamentalism was embraced as a way of insisting that the Scriptures themselves set the infallible standard of faith.
Through the 19th century and into the first half of our century, resistance to literal fundamentals was adamantly maintained among Catholics and Protestants. In France and England, those who used historical tools to assert a symbolic and evolutionary approach to interpretation were called Modernists. The most famous of them was Alfred Loisy, a French priest who found it perfectly natural to deny the infallibility of any human being, who doubted the Virgin Birth of Jesus, saw Jesus’ miracles as symbols, did not believe God needed a payment in blood in order to love us and overtly denied resurrection in the same body. For him, the meaning of the Gospels resided in their capacity to transform our collective existence.2
A similarly collective, but less academic, theology was espoused by the Protestant Walter Rauschenbusch. He called his message “the social gospel” and he insisted that the purpose of the Gospels was to change totally the nature of our social life on behalf of justice.
These theologians were both praised and blamed for their symbolic, evolutionary brands of Christianity. Loisy’s books were banned by the Vatican; he submitted to their banning and agreed not to engage in publication. But he refused to say that his opinions were wrong and was excommunicated from the Church by Pope Pius X in 1908. His isolation from the Church provided him with a new opportunity: a position in the Collège de France. Rauschenbusch was Baptist pastor in Brooklyn during the final years of the 19th century, just as Fundamentalism was making itself felt; he found a warmer welcome at the Rochester Theological Seminary, where he taught from 1897. His claim that Christianity was a matter of programmatic social action, rather than individual belief, found more support among intellectuals than in the Baptist hierarchy.3
Both of these thinkers are influential today. Loisy’s methods, and his claims (for example) that Moses did not write the Pentateuch and that the Apostle John did not author the Gospel named after him, are now standard in Catholic and Protestant seminaries. Similarly, part of the training of any pastor—Protestant, Catholic or (for that matter) Jewish—includes what most people would call social work: counselling, community organizing, mediating and the like. In religious academies, Loisy and Rauschenbusch won a long time ago.
But the popular scene has shown a 054reaction against symbol and evolution as the key to the Gospels. Fundamentalist forms of Protestantism, and pro-papal forms of Catholicism, have enjoyed enormous growth in the United States since World War II. That is one reason why those interested in American religion have little choice but to deal with the claim of fundamentalism. Americans appear to want definitive answers, fairly easily assimilated, and either claim of infallibility—for the pope or for the Bible—seems to suit that need.
The persistence of progressive theology (that is, the symbolic and evolutionary approach of Loisy and Rauschenbusch) may be explained in two ways. First, it has prospered better in Europe than here, even in popular culture. Indeed, Catholic Europe has largely made its peace with papal infallibility by restricting its validity to symbolic truth. (That explains, for example, why France is an international leader in the field of birth control.) Insofar as Protestantism in France is Fundamentalist, it is usually as a result of American influence, especially by cable television. Because American academics still tend to look to Europe as an example, it is perhaps not surprising that our academies (including our seminaries) espouse a theology that is rarely spoken to the American public at large, but which would be at home in Europe.
But the second reason for the persistence of a symbolic and evolutionary alternative to Fundamentalism is the more profound and interesting. Christian theology in its origins rejected literalism as an approach to Scripture. St Paul was emphatic that “the letter kills, while the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6). Classical Christianity strongly maintained that the fundamental basis of faith is not literal at all, but a link between our spirit and God’s.
While preparing for a conference on Jewish-Christian relations, I was asked by students to define Fundamentalism. I explained its five main tenets as (1) the inerrancy of the Bible, (2) the virgin birth of Jesus, (3) his performance of miracles, (4) his atonement offered to God by shedding his blood and (5) his bodily resurrection.1 My students’ response was direct and to the point: “But isn’t that what all Christians believe?” Their reaction was telling. It shows how little impact academic theology over the past 200 years has had on popular awareness. That theology understands Christianity as something far […]
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These are the “Five Points,” held to be “essential and necessary” teachings of the Church by the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1910. See Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972).
2.
The best book on Loisy is in French: Raymond de Boyer de Sainte Suzanne, Alfred Loisy, entre la foi et l’incroyance (Paris: Centurion, 1968).
3.
See D.R. Sharpe, Walter Rauschenbusch (New York: Macmillan, 1942).
