Freedom is the freedom to say 2 + 2 = 4. Unless you are a fundamentalist...
This image has been doing the rounds over the past few days:
1. Humphreys, E The Problem of Sin's Origin (1969: D Bedson, D. Manton; Coventry)
2. Osborne & Woodward, Handbook for Bible study, pp. 13-14 (1979)
Fundamentalism in a nutshell. The disturbing part of this image is that since the mid-20th century, this line of thinking has infected our community, displacing an intelligent interaction with the best of modern scholarship with a reflexive disparaging of any branch of scholarship that threatens a hyper-literal fundamentalist reading of the Bible.
This mindless fundamentalism is invariably championed by people who are rank amateurs with zero professional understanding of the many disciplines needed to properly understand the nuances of the many parts of the Bible which are, or are directly impacted by:
- the fact of common descent and large-scale evolutionary change
- the genetic evidence flatly ruling out recent monogenism
- an ancient Earth
For example, anyone who reads the early chapters of Genesis without understanding the ancient Near Eastern background of the text is simply going to produce nonsense instead of sound exposition. Ditto for the genealogies, where an appreciation of the ANE use of numbers is needed if only to stop people seriously propounding that people lives for centuries several millennia ago.
In a rational community, such people would be ignored due to the fact that they don't know enough to have an opinion that should be heard, let alone respected. That is alas not the case with our community, which since the mid-20th century has uncritically swallowed the poisonous advice offered by Elwyn Humphreys:
As servants of God it is not possible for us to investigate the claims of science experimentally. What we can do, however, is to discover whether tension exists between God's Word and the theories of science. If such is discovered then the servants of God must reject immediately and without question the conclusions of men. (Emphasis mine) [1]
The irony of course is that the interpretation of the Bible that Humphreys mindlessly championed was itself just the conclusions of men. Given that the natural world is itself a revelation of God, Humphreys, and his fundamentalist successors in our community are guilty of privileging the conclusions of men (YEC dogma and a literalist reading of the Bible) over the clear witness of nature.
Fundamentalism has poisoned our community for long enough: one only wishes for a modern-day Wesley: to reprimand the fundamentalists in our community:
‘John Wesley once received a note which said, “The Lord has told me to tell you that He doesn’t need your book-learning, your Greek, and your Hebrew.”
Wesley answered “Thank you, sir. Your letter was superfluous, however, as I already knew the Lord has no need for my ‘book-learning,’ as you put it. However—although the Lord has not directed me to say so—on my own responsibility I would like to say to you that the Lord does not need your ignorance, either.” [2]
References
2. Osborne & Woodward, Handbook for Bible study, pp. 13-14 (1979)
This is an excellent post. There are too many Christadelphians who assert authority they do not have, making wild and completely unsubstantiated claims about word meanings and textual issues, when they don't have any relevant qualifications, they're ignorant of even the basics, and when the overwhelming consensus of scholarly sources contradicts them completely. It's utterly embarrassing to see such ignorance paraded as knowledge.
ReplyDeleteAs just one example of many I could cite, I was once told that the Greek translated 'a second time' in Hebrews 9:28 really means 'out of the second'. Here's the verse.
Hebrews 9:
28 so also, after Christ was offered once to bear the sins of many, to those who eagerly await him he will appear a second time, not to bear sin but to bring salvation.
A Christadelphian insisted to me dogmatically that the Greek here means 'out of the second', and used this ass the foundation of a theological argument. I am no Greek authority, but I took two years of Greek at university, which is more than enough to know that the claim was completely false and that the claimant was simply making a foolish blunder based on an ignorance of Greek grammar. This is absolutely shameful, and there's no excuse for it whatsoever.
http://berea-portal.com/what-is-the-dunning-kruger-effect/
Ken,
ReplyDeleteWhat of those though who lack the academic ability to do as you say and understand the ANE matters that you speak of? Are they to be denied salvation as a result of ignorance? If not then how do they know who to listen to to find out what they cannot themselves? If the likes of Bernard Burt, Don Pearce, John Hellawell et al are placed on the platform and allowed to spread this nonsense, and indeed in the case of my former Ecclesia, are invited back year after year to do so, then why is a surprise that others do so too?
I am Ex-Christadelphian, I walked away from the rubbish you speak of. My children are made to listen to this fundamentalist clap-trap once a fortnight, what for you is an academic exercise in pointing out ignorance is for me a sad spectacle of two young minds being poisoned by the decaying minds of Christadelphians. Think how that makes me feel.
Keep up the good work, if you had been around decades ago, you may have been able to save your religion from oblivion, but now, I fear, it is too late.
Joseph, a YEC Christadelphian is not going to be 'denied salvation' because they believe Genesis is literal, scientifically accurate account of origins. Rather, if they are not faithful to their baptismal promise to follow Christ, then they are at risk of losing salvation. The 'ANE matters' need to be understood if one is trying to understand how the creation narratives were understood by the original audience, but a person who recognises the need for salvation, is baptised, and follows the commands of Christ faithfully (and these are agnostic on the mechanism of creation) will be saved.
ReplyDeleteWhat bothers me is when those YECs insist that these views should be normative for the entire community and champion a naked anti-intellectualism which would have made the early generation of Christadelphians embarrassed. As I've noted before, while our community never accepted evolution, it was willing to interact with contemporary scholarship in a way that would be considered questionable by contemporary Christadelphian fundamentalists.
This is anything but an academic exercise for me. Along with a number of others in our community, I am trying to drag out community back onto the trajectory it was following up until the mid-20th century when it caught a bad case of fundamentalism. I'm well aware of people who have left our community because of the facile, dismissive way in which genuine questions were answered. I also have children whom I want to grow up in the community, so I have a stake in its continued existence as an intellectually honest, vibrant community.
While I am cynical to the core, I am not so pessimistic as to think that our faith community is doomed. There are seven thousand in Israel whose knees have not bowed to Baal. You know where to find the rational bastions of our faith. :)