Charlotte Iaquinta was the Christian Ed prof, and she was a legitimate scholar with a background in psychology, education, and psychometry. She also probably still thinks I'm a sociopath, which is fine; I probably am to some degree. I was the resident heretic at SCCM. I didn't believe in the Rapture. I didn't believe in baptism with evidence of speaking in tongues, etc., etc., but my GPA was 3.89 (thanks to my profligate semester at OU) and my money was good. They endured me until they didn't, but that's another story. Charlotte was ranting about some aspect of the downfall of Western Civilization this day, and I was doing what I usually did: argue with the fundamentalists around me. I was a very serious, conservative evangelical charismatic at the time, so I had more in common with them than I had differences, but the points at which I disagreed seemed critical to them (see previous post about sanctifying minutiae). One prof actually told a classmate that if I compromised on the Rapture, I was likely to compromise on anything. Indeed, premillenial dispensationalism is critical to proper biblical hermeneutics. For those of you with a background in this shit, you now know what my typical day was like.
I don't even remember the substance of Charlotte's rant; she had several of them, mostly related to the importance of knowing the Bible in Christian education. She held aloft her big, black Bible (of course), and thundered, "This is not Charlotte Iaquinta talking; it's the Word of God!" That's when it hit me. The private and even to some degree corporate interpretation based on a very narrow language game in a very small community of reference had been internalized to such a degree that it now functioned as the Word of God. Barth's divisions between primary, secondary, and tertiary witness had been obscured or obliterated by the horseman, this time in the guise of a morbidly obese Pentecostal professor. Irony on top of irony.
You may remember that Ichabod is the scholar, mathematician, and scientist in Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. He is described in a fashion that became iconic language in English to describe all academics, scholars, scientists, or any other who chose the mental/analytical world over the physical/romantic world.
He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock, perched upon his spindle neck, to tell which way the wind blew.
Ichabod was the bad guy in the story, not the horseman. By refusing to believe in the romantic notions of headless horsemen and supernatural events, the symbol of the age of reason rode to his death. Cue the bitter scorn and schadenfreude from the romantics, christians, and transcendentalists of the time!
Charlotte showed me that day, as did many subsequent conversations with my professors, that it was possible simultaneously to trust in scholarship and to compartmentalize the mind along a know/believe continuum that allowed the thinker/believer to uncritically hold irrational ideas or ideas that badly needed parsing. It was further possible to enthrone those uncritically held ideas as cardinal doctrines of belief, thereby insulating them from analysis. The reasons are two-fold, I think: 1. any cardinal belief that is overturned requires a rethinking of the entire framework when that framework is based on the old foundationalist metaphor of a tower of knowledge; 2. most fundamentalists have inherited the deep-rooted mistrust of analysis (higher criticism) of the Bible and doctrine that has been passed on since at least the early 20th century.
It's important to note that fundamentalism of the stripe seen in the United States is a fairly new phenomenon, less than 100 years old. There have always been literalists in the Church, but there have not always been fundamentalists. That distinction is critical when talking to fundamentalists. They will equivocate on the meaning of literalist and conflate it with fundamentalist. The Church Fathers themselves were divided into many camps when it came to hermeneutics, including allegorical, spiritual, typological, literal, etc. The modern fundamentalists were a reactionary movement against higher criticism and Darwinism. Not surprisingly, the battle for the Bible comes down to those two issues: creation versus evolution (or as Ken Ham put it, the first eleven chapters of Genesis) and Biblical authority.
The fundamentalists made two critical errors, but they've done a pretty good job of convincing millions of believers that they aren't errors. By reading Genesis as literal rather than mythological, they have forced themselves to adopt a literalist hermeneutic that cannot be applied consistently, even to similar writings, throughout the Bible. This is not the "Revelation is not Genesis" sort of hermeneutical problem, as if critics are incapable of understanding different genres. Rather, it's the Genesis 1 is not Genesis 2 hermeneutical problem, wherein it's impossible to apply the same literalist hermeneutic to both those myths and believe they say the same thing. If the chronology of creation is sacrosanct and inerrant in Genesis 1, the literalist is not then allowed to turn around and abandon divine chronology by sleight of hand in Genesis 2. I don't want to spend a ton of time here, but think of the occasions when the fundamentalists you know have argued for this hermeneutic, only to abandon it when convenient.
Second, they failed to understand that Biblical authority does not emanate from a manuscript; it comes from the community that conveys authority on that text. This is not to say the book itself possesses no intrinsic authority; certainly questions of veracity, wisdom, and consistency will add to a book's authority. In other words, no religious sect I know has formed around Winnie the Pooh; the book lacks authority as a sacred text. However, the authority given to the book by a community is far more important, because the community then determines how the book is understood. Sacred texts are not brain-dumped into practitioners by the gods above; they must be read, interpreted, discussed, and applied in a community. The fundamentalist errors are to believe that God "wrote" the book, and that the English is plain enough for anyone to understand--ironically, this despite the proliferation of denominations based on verse-splitting. Ken Ham is a great example of the error here. Genesis 1-4 traces the development of the first family. The text says what it says, so incest had to be permissible for the human race to expand. Ham and his ilk get around this by insisting that God had not forbidden it yet. First, ewwwww! Second, he seems to have no idea what this does to the understanding of how divine law functions, as well as casting doubt on divine authorship. He will, of course, take the fundamentalist/Calvinist route and say that god can do what god wills. Great. Nothing solved, especially the true character of god and how this book is supposed to function. God could always change the rules again, after all, so who is to say murderous prophets aren't telling the truth? The hermeneutic allows for an open canon, even as fundamentalists insist on a closed canon, and a damned narrow one at that. (It really doesn't even allow for passages contrary to their fundamentals to be true in the sense that the rest of the Bible is true.)
Finally, when the fundamentalist hermeneutic is brought to the soteriological discussion, the big problems finally merge with the reductionism I mentioned in the previous post. Once salvation is understood as substitutionary atonement, the verses that have the most weight will be those that uphold the very idea of S.A. Those that don't speak of S.A. are waved off by sleight of hand. The entire midrash of Scripture is reduced to a formulaic understanding of a few verses taken out of context. This, again ironically, is what fundamentalists accuse liberals or moderates of doing. The text is never allowed to speak for itself, as it were; instead, a framework for interpretation is superimposed on the text and then that framework is internalized to the point that a professor can crow, "That's the Word of God."
Helpfully, Daniel Radosh points out in Rapture Ready! that a community will endure this literalism as long as very little commitment to intellectual suicide is required, but once you have children playing with dinosaurs in a creation museum or Jesus riding a raptor in a coloring book, the ability of the average person of faith to live with the cognitive dissonance is adversely affected. Only the truest of true believers (i.e., the least rational and least critical) will commit to such a comprehensive revisioning of the text and the world. Unfortunately, that same dissonance doesn't extend to the soteriological discussion, because it's far easier to believe that "If I'd been the only one, Jesus would have died just for me." And that ties directly into the growth of success marketing in the church, because, hey, we're all narcissists to some degree.
