“Do you Create or do you Destroy?” Evil at Our Doors

Column by Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox on 28 April 2022 1 Comments

Not only does our species do great evil with our vast creativity and intelligence, we also do amazing positive things as well.  We are capable of the Awesome as well as the Awful.

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Question

Why do fundamentalist believers take every word of the Bible as totally correct, when no one, to my observation, has an answer to the exact quotes of Jesus, Moses, Samuel, etc. Do you remember the game where a conversation was started about a subject, and then passed on to others until it came full circle and related back to the originator. Usually, not the same. I think the Bible accounts such as the creation story exemplifies that game!

Answer

Dear Larry,

Thanks so much for this question. I grew up in a strict fundamentalist sect of Christianity, so I’m in a pretty good position to try to answer it.

Your question is why, and I think there are at least three answers: historical, psychological, and social. Some other time we could look at the psychological and social reasons for biblical literalism and inerrancy. For now, it makes sense to begin with history.

In the 1400’s the Christian countries of Europe found themselves in a series of wars with Islam. As a result, the Pope found himself in a situation of mutual dependence with the kings of Europe: if they prospered, the Church prospered. If they were defeated, the Church would share in the defeat. So here’s what he did: he gave the kings of Europe a carte blanche or blank check to colonize the world, to enslave all nonChristian nations and expropriate their wealth. That wealth would help them win their wars in Europe, and it would put Europe, and Christianity, in the global drivers’ seat.  (The proclamations that gave permission for this global colonization are known collectively as The Doctrine of Discovery. You’ll find a good introduction here: https://wirelesshogan.com/doctrine-of-discovery/, and here: https://www.amazon.com/Unsettling-Truths-Dehumanizing-Doctrine-Discovery/dp/0830845259, and here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFinFW3_shs. I also give a short overview in Chapter 3 of my upcoming book, Do I Stay Christian?)

The church thus helped give birth to the era of Christian conquistadors, slavery, genocide, and European empires.

Right around the same time, the Reformation happened. In addition to the theological arguments northern Europeans had with the Catholic church, there was a financial advantage to schism: if the contemporary counterparts of England, Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and other Northern European countries used the Doctrine of Discovery’s permission slip for colonization, they wouldn’t have to share profits with Rome.

But for the Reformation to work, it needed to justify its existence apart from the Catholic hierarchy. It did so by appealing to the Bible. The Bible alone (sola scriptura) became the rallying cry of the Reformers. We don’t need the Pope or Cardinals to legitimize us, they said. We are legitimate if we can defend our actions based on the Bible alone.

About a century after the Reformation was up and rolling, a new movement swept across Europe: the Enlightenment. The leaders of the Enlightenment realized that people quoting the Bible could do a lot of harm — burning witches, launching wars, and the like. So they said, You Protestants don’t need the Pope, and we Enlightenment Rationalists don’t need the Bible! Reason alone is sufficient to guide us and give us legitimacy!

Suddenly, the Protestants were left vulnerable. Since they had used the Bible to legitimize their break from Rome, many of them doubled down on the Bible when they were threatened by the Enlightenment rationalists. This tradition, of doubling down on the Bible as a sole source of authority, is the lineage of fundamentalism today.

When Charles Darwin and Karl Marx raised uncomfortable scientific and economic questions in the 19 Century, they answered them by doubling down on the Bible even more. When Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein raised uncomfortable questions of psychology and physics in the 20th Century, they did the same. When Walter Rauschenbusch and Martin Luther King, Jr. raised uncomfortable questions about poverty and race, they did the same. In my upcoming book, Do I Stay Christian?, I describe this use of the Bible not simply as anti-intellectualism, but as constricted intellectualism, an engagement of the intellect in the service of confirmation bias (and related biases).

Again, this isn’t the whole story. But it’s a start, and it leads to many other important and fascinating conversations. I hope that helps, Larry!

~ Brian D. McLaren

 

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