Time and again when engaging with anti-religious people one encounters the old notion that everyone knows that to be a Christian you have to believe every single word in the Bible. And preferably in the Authorized Version of 1611, complete with all the “thees” and “thous”. But this is patent nonsense. It was certainly never a part of historic Christendom, for as we saw in Chapter 2, not only was the Bible in the form that we know it the result of careful sifting and scrutinizing of both ancient Jewish and Christian writings, but different parts of it have been re-evaluated and re-understood in the light of new knowledge over the past 2,000 years. This is what textual “criticism” has always been about, from the first century AD to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls after 1948.
What the attackers of Christianity persistently fail to take on board is that Christian understanding has developed – and evolved – over 2,000 years. This does not mean that the church has “changed its mind” or become fuzzy, as the secularists like to claim, so much as that insights have deepened as Christian spiritual experience has broadened. The centrality of Christ’s incarnation, resurrection, or saviourship has in no way been “explained away”; rather, we now know far more about the world in which Jesus lived and ministered and how language was used than we did in AD 1000 or 1800. And this means that we read texts differently, and more deeply, and can give them a better context than before linguistics, archaeology, Egyptology, Assyriology, and new studies into the Greco-Roman world began in their modern form in the 1790s. Likewise with geology for our understanding of natural phenomena in the Old Testament, for until the seventeenth century we had no real insights into earth-forming processes other than what was said in Genesis.
On the other hand, we should remind atheists who go on about fundamentalism or Christians “changing their minds” that scientists are always changing theirs. In 1500, for instance, the leading astronomers in Europe believed that the spherical earth was fixed in the centre of the universe, while in 1820 the best doctors believed that cancerous lumps (Greek onkos, “mass” or “bulk”, hence oncology) were caused by fluid blockages within the body. Of course, these views changed in the wake of newly discovered evidence, as is implicit within the very nature of science.
Yet why, if our ever-deepening knowledge of the world of matter allows us to develop new interpretations in the light of new evidence, should a sincere Christian not be granted the same privilege? And just as the exploring scientist never doubts the fundamental laws of matter, why should the exploring Christian doubt the eternal guidance of God? It seems blatantly unfair that scientists should be allowed to deepen their understanding of matter, while the validity of Christians’ attempts to deepen their knowledge of the spirit is denied. And this is especially significant where interpreting ancient texts and languages is concerned.
Biblical literalism can be attributed in part to the Reformation, when much of the apparatus of Catholic thought and spirituality was thrown out, and “the plain word of Scripture” put in its place. Yet all the great Protestant thinkers, from Luther and Calvin onwards, fully acknowledged that a critical caution should be exercised when reading the Bible, for none of these men were fundamentalists.
Indeed, fundamentalism in its modern form is really a twentieth-century phenomenon, originating in America in the 1910s among independent Protestant communities, and people who were angered by Darwinism and especially the higher criticism of the Bible. This movement in its various shades, however, “went global”, especially from the 1960s onwards, appealing as it did to millions of people who felt at odds not only with Darwinism and higher criticism, but also with what seemed like a liberal sell-out to secularism.
Yet the fact is, to many atheists and secularists, the strict, literalistic Bible faith of those early twentieth-century Americans who insisted that they were going back to “the fundamentals” has become synonymous with “Christianity”. It is, however, a wholly false analogy, though one must admit that it has been cleverly used by the atheists to form a hypothesis which runs: “Christianity is simple-minded and locked into out-of-date texts, whereas atheism is sophisticated and scientific.”
The basic fact remains, however, that the great majority of Christians worldwide – Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox – while seeing God’s inspiration, creative power, and love fully at work in Scripture, are not fundamentalist. Spreading the myth that all Christians are fundamentalists, therefore, only indicates how ignorant of history the New Atheists are.