The Psychology of
Biblicism
Robert M. Price
For many years I have studied the theology
underlying biblicism, the fundamentalist belief in the absolute authority of the
Bible in every aspect of life, only to conclude that it is not theological in
nature at all, but rather entirely psychological. That is, biblicism is not, as
its adherents claim and think, an implication of a set of beliefs about the
Bible but rather the outgrowth of a particular frame of mind. I am not impatient
with theological claims; I just do not think they are the real source or
motivation of biblicism, and this becomes evident once we discover certain
inconsistencies in biblicism which make nonsense of its theological claims but
are quite consistent with the psychological function of biblicism. If it were a
matter of theology, surely biblicists would notice the problems. But since
biblicism does the job biblicists want it to do, they simply never notice the
problems.
Biblicism, again, is the term for
that stance toward the Bible whereby a believer intends to obey whatever the
text tells him to do, and to believe whatever the text asserts. If occasionally
the commands of the Bible (say, to give away all one’s possessions) seem just
too outrageous, biblicists may rationalize them away, but even this does not
mean they are not taking them seriously; a non-biblicist would say he rejects
the command of the Bible and leave it at that. And there are more liberal
Christian theologies which do not entail biblicism, managing, as Reinhold
Niebuhr said, to take the text seriously even if not literally. So what is it
that attracts many people to biblicism?
Faith as Skepticism
First I think we may identify the
fundamentalist’s, the biblicist’s, desperate felt need for “a sure word from
God.” Why do we need God to break the silence of the ages with a revealed word,
an inspired book of infallible information? Perhaps paradoxically, this need
stems from a kind of skepticism, a lack of confidence in the ability of the
human mind to discover necessary truth by reason alone. This is a very different
stance from that of the old Deists who believed in a divine Creator but who did
not believe in the inspiration of the Bible. Not only did the Bible appear to
them a poor candidate for an inspired book, but they believed the Creator had
written the only revelation book human beings needed in the world itself,
nature, not scripture. And he had given us reason as the only spectacles needful
to read and understand it. The biblicist, however, is flustered by overchoice,
the condition of being faced with too many options, each with plausible
arguments and spokespersons. How is he to decide between them? Suddenly, a
religious claim that God has tossed confused humanity the Bible as a
life-preserver sounds pretty good. The problem, of course, is that there are
just as many competing revelation claims vying for our faith, and one is left
without a clue as to deciding between them!
But whence the urgency of arriving at
true and sure beliefs about all ethical and theological questions? Why not
emulate the ancient Skeptics? Like fundamentalist fideists today, the Skeptics
viewed the conflict of dogmas from the sidelines and despaired of joining any
particular team with confidence. But their conclusion was that such answers,
such knowledge, must not be either available or necessary, that one can live
perfectly well in this life on the basis of common sense and mere probabilities.
Why does our biblicist not adopt the same attitude? I think it is because he
holds an unexamined assumption, perhaps a vestige of childhood catechism, a
picture of God as some sort of punitive theology professor who stands ready to
flunk you if you write the wrong answers on your theology exam. You die and
appear at the Pearly Gates, and God hands you the blue book. You do your best on
the Theology and Metaphysics final, but if you make enough mistakes, the floor
is going to open beneath your feet, as it did beneath old Korah’s, and you are
going to slide down the shaft to Hell. This is a God who does not excuse honest
mistakes. Again, I can understand this obnoxious God-concept only as a matter of
psychology, not as the implication of any orthodox theology. What element of
theology implies that God should be unfair, even peevish? To think him so is to
project a childish fear of retribution which can only stifle intellectual
growth. Surely it is a legacy of retrograde education, whether religious or
secular.
A prime example of this fearful
skepticism that needs God’s word to settle issues too important for mere human
minds to decide would be abortion. It is a difficult matter precisely because of
the ambiguities of the issue. Strong cases may be made on various sides of the
issue. That fact alone inclines many of us toward a pro-choice position. But
some fundamentalists feel the stakes are high enough that those on the wrong
side of the issue, especially abortion doctors, may be justifiably murdered. How
can they be so sure they are right? Because God has told them so in the Bible.
And this despite the fact that the question of abortion never even comes up in
the Bible. The need for the Bible to adjudicate the subject produces the optical
illusion that it does.
The need for a sure word from God may
simply stem from the kind of intellectual laziness posited by Ludwig Feuerbach.
We feel we need to know certain things but are too lazy or impatient to try to
figure them out, and the belief in a divine revelation is all too convenient.
Convenient both for the lazy one who wants to be spoon-fed, and for the
authorities who view themselves as far more capable of finding truth than the
laity. But in any case, whether it is a matter of fear or of laziness, I think
we may chalk up the desire for “a sure word from God” to a low tolerance for
ambiguity.
This is clearly seen in the advice
given to pastors and students for studying the Bible. Suppose one is reading the
text, seeking divine guidance for one’s own life or scriptural grounding for
one’s beliefs (predestination or free will? Pre- or Post-Tribulation Rapture?).
One will shortly discover ambiguity, individual passages that seem to point in
one direction or another, or where things are just not so clear. One must then
make one’s best exegetical judgment call, and then go forward confident that one
has achieved the truth. The biblicist awards himself a license for dogmatism,
heedless of the necessary tentativeness of one’s results. One intends to be
dogmatic about whatever conclusions one will wind up embracing. It is just a
question of which dogma one will promote.
A fear of ambiguity is the chief
reason any definitive biblical canon was ever stipulated in the first place: to
limit the options for textual divination. God’s word and will must be sought
only within certain limits. Similarly, this is why the Roman Catholic
authorities sought to limit access to the Bible to properly catechized priests
who could be trusted to read the text through the spectacles of church
tradition. Protestants believed all Christians should be welcomed to read the
Bible, over-optimistic that the central gospel truth would be clear to all
readers. It wasn’t, and immediately Protestants had to frame their own creeds to
regulate how the Bible might be read and understood. The trend continues today
as various Evangelical seminaries and denominations draft statements of how the
Bible may and may not legitimately interpreted. The goal is to get everyone to
agree with the traditional interpretation of the sponsoring group. “Heresy,”
after all, simply means “choice,” the idea being that it is effrontery to choose
one’s own beliefs rather than submit meekly to spoon-feeding.
What a Tangled Web We Weave When We Practice
to Believe
I mentioned above that there are liberal
theologies of biblical authority that do not entail biblicism. Such theologies
often accommodate the possibility that the Bible writers may have contradicted
each other. A more liberal theologian might observe that Paul and James disagree
over whether faith is sufficient to save one’s soul, or whether faith must be
realized through works. Such a theologian would consider neither Paul nor James
mouthpieces of revelation, both as possible sources of religious wisdom. The
theologian’s task would be not to submit to either Paul’s or James’ teaching,
but to draw upon both in the process of forming his own (tentative) beliefs. The
fundamentalist theologian, by contrast, dismisses the liberal’s form of faith as
mere speculation, worthless in the face of the ultimate question of salvation.
With one’s eternal destiny at stake, one must know. And thus one needs
revelation, not mere speculations whether ancient (James’ and Paul’s, if that’s
all they are) or modern (one’s own). Since he wants revelation, that is what he
is determined to find in the ancient text.
The fundamentalist cannot even
recognize that Paul and James contradict one another, since if he did, this
would disqualify either or both as mouthpieces of revelation. One might be
accepted as a true prophet, the other rejected as a counterfeit, but then who is
to decide, and how? Martin Luther had no hesitation in relegating James to the
status of a mere appendix to scripture, but most are not so bold. A statement is
authoritative for the fundamentalist simply because it appears somewhere in the
canon of scripture, all canonical texts being equally authoritative. This is
what the slogan “plenary inspiration” means. Unlike in liberal theology, no
parts of the Bible are deemed superior or inferior to others. The biblicist,
remember, wants to be able just to open the Bible and find his answer. If it is
up to him and his meager human abilities to weigh and choose, he is back to
square one. He does not want to have to make decisions like this! That’s the
whole point!
But he cannot escape the horns of
dilemmas like this. Fundamentalists follow Martin Luther in wanting to interpret
the text of scripture literally, or according to the “plain sense,” what it
apparently means by straightforward exegesis, such as one would apply to any
ancient text. The Bible is inspired, but this only means that its message, once
determined by exegesis, must be heeded. Inspiration does not entitle us to read
the Bible in some esoteric way, as medieval Catholics did, discerning all manner
of secret meanings between the lines. If the Bible may be taken to mean just
about anything, then the Bible becomes a Rorschach blot. Again, as a literalist,
the biblicist wants to banish ambiguity. Reading the text in a careful and
“literal” way, however, sooner or later discloses “apparent contradictions” like
those between Paul and James. And at this point the biblicist abandons
literalism, falling back to a less-than-literal reading. Suddenly one may and
must read between the lines after all. An exception to the straightforward
reading is allowed when otherwise the two texts would negate each other’s
authority and inspiration, a collapse that would take the whole canon with it!
But the cure is worse than the
disease! Whatever a “real contradiction” might be, “apparent contradictions” are
quite sufficient to vitiate a doctrine of biblical authority that is based on
the supposedly “apparent” reading of the text. And it is not just a
technicality. For the poor biblicists finds himself situated like the proverbial
donkey between the two haystacks: he must decide whether it is Paul or James who
is to be taken literally, and which is to be read in a looser way as if he
agreed with the other. Though the phrase used is that one must “interpret the
less clear texts by the more clear texts,” the biblicist is really interpreting
the text he doesn’t like as if it said the same thing as the one he does like.
In short, he is in precisely the same position as the liberal theologian,
choosing between biblical voices; he just doesn’t realize it.
How can he continue in such
self-deception? Simply because his choice is an automatic one, determined in
advance by his particular church’s tradition of interpretation. If he were a
Catholic, he would read Paul as agreeing with James. As a Protestant, he reads
James as echoing Paul once you “really understand” him. The biblicist is
submitting to authority, all right, but it is not as he imagines the authority
of the text but rather that of his church. And this, too, is fatal, since the
first principle of the biblicist is Sola Scriptura: “Scripture alone!”
It is such gross, vitiating
contradictions that reveal the origin of biblicism to be essentially
nontheological. If it had been theological in origin, it would have more
consistency. To call on a related field of supernaturalist belief, we might
compare biblicism to astrology. A survey of horoscope readers in Britain
revealed that most of them admitted the newspaper predictions proved accurate
less than half the time. Why then did they continue to read the horoscope? If it
were a matter of theoretical consistency, the utter failure of astrology would
have been quickly evident. But it was not a matter of theory. It was a matter of
psychology: the astrology believers really sought, not knowledge of the future,
but rather peace of mind for the night, permission to sleep well in the
confidence of being forewarned and thus forearmed for the morrow. When the
morrow came and the prediction, probably forgotten, turned out not to prepare
them for events, it hardly mattered. They were competent to deal with the day’s
surprises, but the night before they felt they needed an edge, and reading their
horoscope allowed them to imagine they had it. Even so with the biblicist. What
he wants from the Bible is not so much a coherent system for divining infallible
revelations, but only the permission to dogmatize, whether the goal is to quiet
his own fears or to push others around.
A Mighty Fortress Is Our Mentality
Once one has adopted the belief that the
Bible must function as the final authority in all matters, some strange results
follow. Above, I gave abortion as an example of how the desire for a sure word
of revelation leads some biblicists to imagine that the Bible speaks to issues
of which it is in fact innocent. To do this is what I call hermeneutical
ventriloquism. The biblicist may chant “The Bible said it! I believe it! That
settles it!” But in practice this often amounts to “I said it! The Bible
believes it! That settles it!” One does the scripture the dubious favor of
attributing to it one’s own beliefs. The (psycho)logical process goes like this:
“My opinion is true. The Bible teaches the truth. Therefore the Bible must teach
my opinion.” One suspects that the dogmatist has simply become so accustomed to
dogmatizing that appealing to the Bible is just his way of asserting the truth
of his opinion, wherever he got it. Saying “The Bible says” is tantamount to
saying, “Verily I say unto thee...”
One’s imaginary possession of the
word of God, or the mind of God, allows the biblicist to wield what I call the
Prophetic Ramrod, an attitude of invulnerable narrow-mindedness: “Friend, there
is your view, and then there is God’s view.”
Such dogmatism may even rub off onto
areas where the biblicist feels no especial need to quote the Bible or knows he
cannot, areas such as party politics or even selling merchandise. Whether one is
“witnessing” to the glories of Christian salvation, Amway products or May Kay
Cosmetics, one uses the same methods (as Southern Baptist salesman and
evangelist Zig Ziglar freely admits in his book Secrets of Closing the Sale).
The Sliding Scale of Biblical Inerrancy
Another anomaly resulting from the
psychological, not theological, basis of biblicism is the shifting opinion of
biblicists over the years as to what is the allegedly infallible teaching of the
Bible is when it comes to the world of nature. There was a time when readers of
the Bible could see quite well that it “taught” (or presupposed) a flat earth
that floated on water, covered by a solid firmament (dome) that kept out another
ocean above. The earth was orbited by the sun and supported by pillars. And
every Bible reader understood this. In the name of the infallible Bible,
religious authorities opposed the progress of science. Today, most
fundamentalists reject evolution because it contradicts the Bible. But only a
tiny minority still believe the earth is flat. A slightly larger minority
believe that the sun orbits the earth. Most fundamentalists believe that the
earth is round and that it orbits the sun. And they do not even realize that the
biblical picture of the earth contradicts these notions. Their religious
upbringing has told them that the Bible contradicts science only at the point of
evolution. As for the rest, they have even been told that the ancient writers of
the Bible miraculously foreknew what it took modern science centuries to learn,
that the earth is round, that it orbits the sun, etc. These assertions are read
into the Bible by forced and implausible readings of various passages out of
context, akin to attempts to show that the Bible writers knew about flying
saucers. The true teaching of the Bible on these matters, they say, could not be
understood until modern science allowed us to understand the relevant texts
correctly! This is very close to (but also very far from) a frank admission of
the game of catch-up being played here.
But what makes the difference between
whether one recognizes contradictions between the Bible and science or one
pretends the Bible anticipated modern science? It is simply peer pressure,
massive and permeating public opinion. Ancient biblicists lived in a peer group
(a “plausibility structure,” as Peter Berger would call it) that believed in a
flat earth orbited by the sun, created in a week. It would have been hard to
believe anything radically different. As the plausibility structure shifted, so
that most people in the culture no longer took the ancient world-picture
seriously, it ceased to be an option for biblicists to retain the biblical
cosmology. They couldn’t withstand the cognitive peer pressure. And today the
great majority, including biblicists, believe in a round, sun-orbiting earth,
but it is not so obvious to the great majority that all life forms gradually
evolved from a common ancestor. One still has breathing room on that point; one
can still afford to recognize what the Bible says. One can still, for the time
being, reject evolution and not seem a freak. The fundamentalist dreads the time
when universal belief might turn to accept evolution, and so they seek to defer
that day by means of public debates, censoring biology textbooks, etc. Their
effort is not to persuade the intelligensia (scientists) of the truth of
anti-evolutionism, but rather to appeal to the gallery in the manner of a
political campaign,. They are looking for votes in order to retain an amenable
plausibility structure. It is all psychological, not theological, since what the
Bible says or does not say about the natural world is utterly beside the point.
The day will eventually come when biblicists will reinterpret Genesis to teach
evolution and will claim that God had revealed it to the ancient scriptural
writers ages before scientists supposedly discovered it. And these new
scriptural “insights” will have come not from exegesis but solely from social
peer pressure.
If one wishes to get anywhere
reasoning with fundamentalists and biblicists, I suggest one try to determine
the emotional issues that attach believers to their beliefs. The beliefs
themselves are, I think, a function of certain psychological needs that would be
better met in other ways. But until those psychological needs are identified and
met in other ways, we will have no way of getting believers to budge from their
beliefs, and we might not even have the right to do so.=================
http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/art_biblicism.htm
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