Bible's Literal Truth

[Champollion]

Maybe my previous reply wasn't thought out well enough.

Would you, if given the chance, get up and preach and/or teach, that you can cast spells?

We have precedence:

"To whom the angel said, Open the fish, and take the heart and the liver and the gall, and put them up safely....Then the young man said to the angel, Brother Azarias, to what use is the heart and the liver and the gal of the fish? And he said unto him, Touching the heart and the liver, if a devil or an evil spirit trouble any, we must make a smoke thereof before the man or the woman, and the party shall be no more vexed. As for the gall, it is good to anoint a man that hath whiteness in his eyes, and he shall be healed."

God Bless

Till all are one.

Cast a spell? Or incantation? Like abracadabra? Likely, no.

But I might use other words, sales pitch, brain wash, or hypnotize.

If I were to write a history of Fundamentalism, I might begin with a quote "concerning his twofold coming; the first in lowliness when he was despised, which has taken place, the second glorious in royal power, which is still in the future."

It is a quote from the Muratorian Fragment, which is a seventh century document that is said to contain a second century list of new testament gospels and letters.

 

[DeaconDean]

Cast a spell? Or incantation? Like abracadabra? Likely, no.

But I might use other words, sales pitch, brain wash, or hypnotize.

If I were to write a history of Fundamentalism, I might begin with a quote "concerning his twofold coming; the first in lowliness when he was despised, which has taken place, the second glorious in royal power, which is still in the future."

It is a quote from the Muratorian Fragment, which is a seventh century document that is said to contain a second century list of new testament gospels and letters.

Here again, the only reason why I quoted what I did, is to show that there is scripture that says you can do this sort of thing. (Tobit 6:4,6-8)

And just like Chuck Missler, he incorporates extrabiblical passages to suit his theology.

And here again, the "canon" was not "officially" set, not even in Catholicism until 1546 at The Council of Trent.

God Bless

Till all are one.

 

[Champollion]

Here again, the only reason why I quoted what I did, is to show that there is scripture that says you can do this sort of thing. (Tobit 6:4,6-8)

And just like Chuck Missler, he incorporates extrabiblical passages to suit his theology.

And here again, the "canon" was not "officially" set, not even in Catholicism until 1546 at The Council of Trent.

God Bless

Till all are one.

The verse from Tobit sounds to me more like a medical procedure than the casting of a spell.

I have never met a Fundamentalist who would accept Tobit as Scripture. However, I expect one could use examples from the Old Testament, for example, the story of King Saul and the Woman of Endor.

Why did the Council of Trent need an official canon? Maybe because the Protestants had published their own canon, which was different than the Vulgate?

And why have a canon? I'm going to guess that it has to do with what can be read in worship. Books were expensive, even in the Reformation. It must have been a matter of using resources like ink, labor, and animal skin as efficiently as possible.

 

[Champollion]

For a more complete text of the Niagara Creed of 1878 see:

Earnestly Contending for the Faith by Walter Ungar Page 320 Appendix A

download at:

summit.sfu.ca/system/files/iritems1/4002/b12743276.pdf

In the same publication read about how James H Brooks developed his ideas about the second coming. He says he read Revelations for the first time with a view to understanding. Then he read the entire Bible as he marked every passage relating to the second coming. He doesn't mention being influenced by Darby.

He calls this new understanding of Revelations "a key to unlock the meaning of the Scriptures."

Page 324 Appendix B

 

[Champollion]

One root that led to the birth of Fundamentalism came from the ideas promoted during the Enlightenment which German theologians applied to biblical scholarship. The first to do so may have been Friedrick Schleiermacher.

He believed that "the essence of religion was not dogma, creed, nor confession, but feeling. In the tradition of German idealistic philosophy, he defined feeling as rapport or empathy with the universe. As a romantic, he believed that there was a unity and a communion among God, man, and nature and that this unity was mediated by feeling. This unity was part of the natural order."

Earnestly Contending for the Faith by Walter Ungar Page 14

For me the above paragraph sounds mostly like gibberish. I have no clue about what it means.

So according the Schleiermacher, no miracles were necessary because religion was intuitive.

Some call Schleiermacher the father of liberal theology, which provided a target for the Fundamentalist complaints about how liberals had hijacked the Protestant view of religion.

 

[Champollion]

So the German theologians debated about whether God acted in a natural or a supernatural way, and after American scholars studied in Germany, they moved the debate to the United States, where some Protestants, later calling themselves Fundamentalists, insisted on the traditional view. The debate continues to this day.

At first, the argument appears to have two sides. Does God act naturally or supernaturally? However, one theologian, James Freeman Clarke, found a third answer, which he discusses in his book, Ten Great Religions.

Clarke asks, "Is Christianity a supernatural or a natural religion? Is it a religion attested to be from God by miracles? This has been the great question in evidences for the last century. The truth and divine origin of Christianity have been made to depend on its supernatural character, and to stand or fall with a certain view of miracles. And then, in order to maintain the reality of miracles, it became necessary to prove the infallibility of the record; and so we were taught that, to believe in Jesus Christ, we must first believe in the genuineness and authenticity of the whole New Testament."

Then he says that "the real question between Christians and unbelievers in Christianity is, not whether our religion is or is not supernatural; not whether Christ's miracles were or not violations of law; nor whether the New Testament, as it stands, is the work of inspired men. The main question, back of all these, is different, and not dependent on the views we may happen to take of the universality of law. It is this: Is Christianity, as taught by Jesus, intended by God to be the religion of the human race? Is it only one among natural religions? is it to be superseded in its turn by others, or is it the one religion which is to unite all mankind? "Art thou he that should come, or look we for another?" This is the question which we ask of Jesus of Nazareth, ..."

The world appears to me to have forgotten Clarke's view on this question, but during the last half of the nineteenth century, people read about his ideas in The Atlantic magazine. His articles found an audience, which resulted in a book, a best seller for a couple of decades.

 

[Champollion]

The first American theologian, who applied Higher Criticism in the United States, may have been Horace Bushnell, the Pastor of the North Congregational Church in Hartford, CT from the early 1830's to the late 1850's. Another, Henry Ward Beecher, is more famous for being the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Other books, which advocated a view known as the New Theology, provided a target to which Fundamentalists objected.

By Newman Smyth
1877 The Religious Feeling
1878 Old Faith in New Light
1881 The Orthodox Theology of Today

by Theodore Munger
1883 Freedom of Faith

by Washington Gladden
1891 Who Wrote the Bible?
1899 How Much is Left of the Old Doctrine?
1918 Present Day Theology

Smyth was a preacher.
Munger was a preacher and a political activist.
Gladden was a preacher, a journalist, and a political activist.

The New Theology alarmed the Fundamentalists. The two sides had very little constructive conversation. To the Fundamentalists, the New Theologians were not Christians. They were atheists, panteists, skeptics, and rationalist.

Edit 2/15/2018 Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe were brother and sister. Their father was Lyman Beecher, also a preacher.

 

[Champollion]

Some hold an alternate theory about the source of American liberal theology. It started as a reaction to the teaching of men like Johnathan Edwards during the Great Awakening in the 1740's and 1750's when men like Charles Chauncy, Johnathan Mayhew, and Ebenezer Gey called for a supernatural rationalism that combined reason and revelation. They argued that Christianity needed a modern, rational, freedom affirming religion that caught up with the European Enlightenment.

The Making of American Liberal Theology
By Gary J. Dorrien page 1

 

[Champollion]

By the end of the eighteenth century, the liberal ideas had produced a groundswell of liberal Congregational pastors, and in 1803 the death of David Tappan, the Hollis Professor of Divinity, caused and open breach in the Congregational Church. The Hollis chair was the oldest and most prestigious endowed professorship in the United States, and Tappan's death upset a delicate liberal-conservative balance on the Harvard faculty, which set of a bitter factional fight for control of the college. At that time only one of Boston's nine Congregational churches was still control by Conservatives. When Unitarian scholar Henry Ware was appointed to the chair, the conservatives knew that they had lost Harvard. After Samuel Webber, a Unitarian, was appointed as President of Harvard, the conservatives established their own seminary at Andover, MA.

A hundred years later, many of the essays in The Fundamentals would complain about how similar circumstances had changed the nature of other divinity school, and how that had led to the establishment of other conservative seminaries.

The Making of American Liberal Theology
By Gary J. Dorrien page 4

 

[Champollion]

The Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the 1920's must have begun before the War of 1812 when Joseph Stevens Buckminster was the pastor of the Brattle Street Congregational Church in Boston. Buckminster was the first Dexter Lecturer on Biblical Criticism at Harvard. He was the first American to acquire scholarly proficiency in the German Biblical criticism.

In the first decade of the nineteenth century, the Congregational Churches in Boston found itself embroiled in a controversy very much like the the schisms which split other denominations after the Civil War and in the twentieth century.

The Making of American Liberal Theology
By Gary J. Dorrien page 19

 

[Champollion]

After Joseph Buckminster's death in 1812, William Ellery Channing became the reluctant leader of the liberal Congregationalists. Just like Fosdick more that 100 years later the tried to argue that the church had room for differences of opinions, but the conservatives could not accept that.

The liberals became known as the Unitarians. The word, Unitarian, like the word, Puritan, had originally been an insult, but like the Puritans, the liberal Congregationalists accepted the insult as their name.

Many Congregationalist churches had become Unitarian in fact. On May 5, 1919, the first church founded as a Unitarian Church ordained its first minister, a Unitarian graduate of Harvard, Jared Sparks, he became a history professor and a President of Harvard.

The Making of American Liberal Theology
By Gary J. Dorrien page 28-38?

 

[Champollion]

See also postings 75, 85, 87, and 89

The debate about whether or not the Bible may contain mistakes or false information extends from at least the fifth century (see posting 75) when Saint Augustine argued for its truth.

According to DeaconDean, (see posting 89) scholars began using the notion of infallibility in the fifteenth century.

Samuel Clarke in his book, The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity, published in 1712, describes the authors of the New Testament as having "infallible authority."

He says, (with odd punctuation and spelling) "The Christian Revelation, is the Doctrine of Christ and his Apostles; that is, the Will of God made known to Mankind by Christ, and Those whom Christ intrusted with infallible authority to teach it."

The Scripture doctrine of the Trinity : Clarke, Samuel, 1675-1729 : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

 

[Champollion]

Harriet Beech Stowe recalled that when her father, Lyman Beecher, moved to Boston in 1825 to fight the Unitarian insurgency, "All the literary men of Massachusetts were Unitarian. All the Trustees and professors of Harvard College were Unitarians. All the elite of wealth and fashion crowded Unitarian churches. The judges on the bench were Unitarian, giving decisions by which the peculiar features of church organization, so carefully ordained by the Pilgrim fathers, had been nullified."

"A fund given for preaching an annual lecture on the Trinity was employed for preaching an annual attack upon it, and the Hollis professorship of divinity at Cambridge was employed for the furnishing of a class of ministers whose so distinctive idea was declared warfare with the ideas and intentions of the donor."

The Making of American Liberal Theology page 38

The above makes Massachusetts sound like fertile soil for the growth of liberal (or modernist) Christianity after the Civil War. Even Harriet's brother, Henry Ward Beecher, came up on the liberal side.

 

[Champollion]

Among a long list of American clergy and scholars who studied in Germany during the nineteenth century, was Edward Everett, pastor of the Brattle Street (Congregational/Unitarian) Church, professor at Harvard, teacher of Emerson, diplomat, politician, speaker at Gettysburg when Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address, and who may have been the first American to earn a PhD in Germany.

~ Wikipedia

 

[Champollion]

In the 1820's, William Ellery Channing had become the reluctant leader of the liberal Christians, who called themselves Unitarians. In 1830, on a trip to Saint Croix in the West Indies, he learned, up close and personal, the nature of slavery, and he became a reluctant abolitionist. In 1831, William Lloyd Garrison began publishing The Liberator and Channing became Garrison's reluctant ally.

The Making of American Liberal Theology page 51-54

 

[Champollion]

for more about German critics and Harvard see also posting #110

In 1824 when Ralph Waldo Emerson studied Divinity at the recently established Harvard Divinity School, he read the German Higher Critics in English. His older bother William studied them in German in Gottingen, which is now in Germany.

The next year, William returned to the United States and switched from divinity to study law. Waldo continued with his studies in divinity. Maybe Waldo went by Waldo instead of Ralph, so the brothers could alliterate.

The Making of American Liberal Theology page 59

 

[Champollion]

For a decade after the Unitarian Church split from the Congregational Church, the Unitarians began applying Transcendentalist arguments. The Unitarians split into at least two groups, an old guard, led by a Harvard professor, Andrews Norton, and the Emersonians, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, with each side offering its own epistemological arguments for the issues. The debate became very public after Emerson delivered a Commencement address at the Harvard Divinity School in July 1838.

One should avoid thinking of Norton as a conservative. For example, his arguments against the Nativity Story being canonical would certainly alarm modern Fundamentalists.

Also, slavery became a major issue with the old guard arguing that slavery was a political issue, not an issue for he church; and Transcendentalists, like Theodore Parker actively opposed slavery.

American leaders, such as Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr, have often quoted Parker.

One might also note that the Unitarians were not unique as a denomination in turmoil. 1838 was the year of the famous old-school-new-school schism in the Presbyterian Church, and off course the Presbyterians split into northern and southern branches just before the Civil War.

 

[Champollion]

Except for the notion that critics consider Channing of the nineteenth century and Fosdick of the twentieth century as liberals, I have found no clear connection between them. However, Fosdick had a professor at Colgate, William Newton Clarke, who, based on the following quote from his book, Sixty Years with the Bible, is clearly not a Fundamentalist.

"I came across much influence of the Plymouth Brethren, whose attitude toward the Bible was reverent almost to the point of worship, but who seemed to me utterly to miss the point, and to be making of the Bible the very thing that God never intended it to be. Under this influence profoundly ignorant persons were exhorted to regard their own understanding of the Bible as unquestionably the interpretation of the Holy Ghost—usually with the result of a most comfortable superiority to all other Christians. I met with much interpretation that claimed to be simple literalism; and I was confirmed in my old conviction that there is no man who will find more fanciful meanings than the average literalist. I found people who were using the Bible to identify the British nation with the lost ten tribes, whereby they brought over to the existing British Empire all the promises of God to Israel. I knew many who found prediction of great things yet to come in what seemed to me passages of plain and simple meaning. The handling of unfulfilled prophecy, indeed, was a favorite employment with very many, who deemed this one of the most important uses of the Bible."

Sixty Years with the Bible, 1909 about page 139

 

[Champollion]

William Newton Clarke in Sixty Years with the Bible says that he could not remember when he could not read nor when the Bible was not in his hands for reading. He remembered family worship. There were three children of whom he was the second. After breakfast, they all set down with the Bible in their hands, and they read in turn three verses apiece. In that manner, they read the Bible through. skipping genealogies and a few hard places, with little or no explanation.

page 13

 

[Champollion]

In the 1850's, Clarke studied geology at a secondary school. The textbook's authors made geology plain and convincing by wanted not to disturb a student's confidence in the Bible. The last chapter compared geology with the Biblical creation story. He learned that the doctrine of a six thousand year old earth, which he had understood the Bible to teach, was irreconcilable with Geology. Science had demonstrated that the earth was ancient, and it was useless to object. The Bible appeared to teach otherwise, but he must have misunderstood the Bible.

This new scientific information did nothing to shake Clarke's faith, mostly, I think, because he had found many parts of the Bible which he did not understand, so one extra misunderstanding had little affect.

page 27