Where Everybody's Crazy

So my previous post on this subject got me a lot of traffic and a lot of thoughtful comment. I want to return to the subject, and look a little bit more about the history behind American Christianity, how we got into this state. This journey will take us through questions of why Republicans don't care for the environment, a bit about the various shades of millenialism, the idea of "manifest destiny", and I also want to look at whether or not what I was suggesting there in my previous article was - as some people commented - a variant of the No true Scotsman fallacy. (I've been thinking about this for a while, so Haggard exploding today just shows he's an opportunist trying to cash in on my mojo.)

I'll start by admitting that I'm really not a historian. I'm a theologian. There's a bit of overlap between the disciplines, since to understand what the church did two thousand years ago and what the church is doing today requires a lot of understanding about what the church has been doing in the middle. And I've also got a big interest in the history of thought - theological, philosophical and scientific. But as far as American political history goes, I'm a student; I know what I've researched and what my theological training tells me. So if I get any of the details wrong, forgive me. The history of thought is ideal for me because ideas influence humanity gradually; events tend to happen more discretely. But if I get any of the details so wildly wrong that my conclusions are in doubt, please let me know.

Let's go back to the beginning, and as we do, I want us to hold on to the image of "clutching at straws" - a drowning man trying desperately to find something safe and solid to support him. We're around the 18th century. We've pretty much just had the Protestant reformation, and the Protestant churches are just beginning to sort themselves out. But here in Europe we're still bound by the structures of society instuted by the Catholic Church. The Protestants are basically doing the same again, but without the Pope this time.

The keyword of the time, philosophically, is "freedom". We want to throw off the shackles of authority, the vertical structures of society - God, king, lord, fief, perhaps; God, Pope, priest, individual. We're already experiencing God without the hierarchical church, and nothing's gone horribly wrong yet, so maybe we can make it on our own. And so there's a spirit of wanting to explore and innovate and stand up on our own two feet. The Enlightenment is born.

It's also an age of colonies, part of this desire for exploration and pushing the boundaries of the world. But there's a theological motive as well here for a certain group heading West from England. If we establish a New World, we can start society afresh, free - as in freedom - from the established society. We have a new God-given opportunity here: the opportunity to be the chosen people, the Kingdom of God on earth. This is the first metanarrative, the first straw that our drowning man clutches at: this is to be a Christian nation. More than a Christian nation: a theocracy. A new kind of society.

Now in the Israel story, the chosen people has to inherit the land by expelling and repelling its current inhabitants. Why would the New Israel story be any different? The Native Americans were the Canaanites, the Palestianians, who had to be destroyed to "make room for our Fathers" (see Beaver, Eschatology in American missions, Basileia 1961). Now I am not saying the theological motive was the only motive for the colonization. But it was a motive, and it provided an ethical justification. Colonization and, let's face it, genocide, could be given an overriding story based on the theological motifs of the Reformation. Scary, isn't it?

Let's pause for a second here and take stock. We have already found the genesis of a few of the ideas that became American Christianity. We have the "Christian nation" metanarrative which carries on even to this day. We have a sense of the importance of freedom, and whence it comes. We have an identification, even right at this stage, between America and Israel, which I really don't need to spell out. We can see where this train is headed. Over the next two hundred years these ideas, once explicit, will disappear deeper and deeper into the wiring of American Christian thought, until the underlying reasons for them disappear and only the latent sense of destiny remained.

Let's move on, because something ironic is about to happen. This great idea of freedom and emancipation from the structures of the Catholic Church gets widened and reapplied as the Enlightenment progresses. As we said earlier, we want to break down the hierarchical boxes of authority under which man is oppressed. The first hierarchy I mentioned was God, king, lord, fief. Why should a man have political status just because he was born into a particular family? Someone in France is just about to start asking these questions, and heads will roll.

The second hierarchy I mentioned was God, Pope, priest, individual. If we can live free from the Church without any apparent ill effect, why can't we live free from God? Can man truly stand on his own two feet? Of course, this is a transitional era, and these massive questions are addressed in small stages. We're not quite ready to give up God completely, and so the deists appear: they keep God as the supreme moral authority, but regulate him out of their lives. This pattern is going to progress through the Enlightenment as religion moves from being a public to being a private matter.

So following the example of France, a new metanarrative appears in the American colonies, a challenge to and a thorn in side of the "Christian nation" idea. The cry again is "liberty", and a declaration of independence is drawn up. The new metanarrative, set up by the deists, is the American dream: that in this new land, every man is free from the shackles of vertical society. Every man stands on his own two feet. You can see the moral ambiguity in the Declaration of Independence: "we hold these truths to be self-evident" - that is, they stand on their own authority, and on no higher authority - "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator" - that is, a higher authority. We are moving towards declaring full "independence" from God, but we are not there yet. We will try to do that in the structure of the Consitution.

At the same time, the Enlightenment forces a wide gulf between public and private life. The public sphere, politics and social structures, should be dominated by reason, not superstition; if you wish to carry on with peculiar beliefs, you may do so in the comfort of your own head. But never claim that they should be the basis of society - and with that, the theocratic ideal of the Pilgrim Fathers suffers a mortal blow.

So we have something of a crisis at the moment. There are two metanarratives vying for control of the country, and what do you know, the "secular" one has been the one which managed to set up government. When there are two big ideas in a quarrel they tend to polarize, and become caricatures. So the "American dream" metanarrative transforms from the deist "by their Creator" to the secularist "separation of Church and State", and the "Christian nation" metanarrative becomes "we need to make this a Christian nation, by force if necessary." It's sad, but you can just about see how we got there.

I always used to wonder why America was "one nation under God" and that "in God we trust" but the separation of Church and State was such a big part of American belief. Now I understand it. It is because there are actually two Americas. America A is the New Israel; America B is the New France. They are not going to get on together.

But let's skip a bit. We're doing this Enlightenment thing, and we're starting to see progress. Things are happening. We are going to countries that we have not been to before. We are begining to see that the world is not the same this year as it was last year, and that is a blow to us. People who live close to the land espouse an essentially cyclic view of time. There is planting, then rains, then harvest, the planting again. Progress, developmentalism, breaks the linear view of time. We're getting somewhere. We want to start thinking about where, theologically, we are getting.

But to think theologically in the liberated Protestant era requires a bit of prolegomena. After all, we used to have the Catholic church to tell us how to read the Bible. Now we don't have Tradition any more, and all we have left is the Bible. How do we interpret the Bible? Well, one schema is that we use the Bible to interpret itself. (Of course, that would mean that our faith was based not on the Bible, but ultimately, on choosing this particular schema.) But the Bible is a big corpus, and basically you can find something in there to justify something else in there, so that can't be right.

The other schema you can choose is a "flat" reading of the Bible, where it just means what you think it says. And this, terrifyingly, is what happened. The doctrine was first applied very narrowly, to say that "the Scriptures are so perspicuous in things pertaining to salvation that they can be understood by believers without any external help" (Francis Turretin). But as the need for more and more understanding of Scripture grew, the doctrine was stretched to areas not relating to salvation, and so the doctrine of the "inerrancy of Scripture" arose. This basically attests to "the truth to fact of every statement of Scripture". (Hodge and Warfield) If the Bible said that Eve was created from Adam's rib, then Eve was created from Adam's rib. It happened, because the Bible says so. And there will be no argument about this. Right?

Let's once again pause briefly to check what's going on here. For the first time, a full seventeen hundred years after the compilation of the Bible, it is being asked to stand as its own authority on matters of interpretation. We're entering into what's called "biblicism", where a flat reading of Scripture is expected to actually define reality. "Faith-based" versus "reality-based"? You heard it here, folks! And once again I need to point out that this is a theological innovation. Having divorced ourselves from any other guide to the meaning of the Scriptures, (the Ethiopian in Acts 8 said "How can I understand, unless someone teaches me?") we basically chose to follow our own brains. If you read it, and you understand it, then it's true.

The publication of the King James Version (or Authorised Version, AV) was a watershed in biblicism. I have to admit that I have absolutely no idea why. The King James is considered by many American Christians to be the benchmark of God's Word against which the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts and parchments we now have are tested. Please permit me an aside here.

I used to think that this sort of thing was satire. To this day, I am not sure whether or not the Jack Chick tracts are satirical. I don't discuss the wilder strains of dominionism in this article because again, I'm finding it hard to separate news from Onion. I honestly doubt that people could be that stupid. But people keep proving me wrong. Because then I met some American Christians who really do believe that the AV is the true and unadulterated Word of God. I knew this viewpoint as an example they gave us in Bible college to test how we would deal with people who differed from us. But I wasn't actually aware that it really existed. And in talking to these people, I found that they judged the manuscript evidence based on whether or not it fit their preconceptions. Wow.

And then I thought: Wait. That's what the rest of the world thinks about Christians.

That was humbling. OK, aside over.

At this point, the label "fundamentalist" appears on the scene. Actually, Christians are the only people before or since to apply the label "fundamentalist" to themselves. They have lost their grand metanarrative of a Christian nation, although it still lives in their subconscious. They have confusion within and without about the interpretation of the Scriptures. There will be a saviour, at the turn of the century, in the shape of the pamphlets called "The Fundamentals." These expressed the fundamentals of Christianity as:

• The verbal inerrancy of Scripture (implied: the Authorised Version)
• The divinity of Jesus (at least this one get settled in Nicea in 325AD)
• The virgin birth
• The substitutionary theory of atonement (itself a theological innovation)
• The physical return of Jesus

So, within that bit of America that is clutching at the "Christian nation" straw - which through fundamentalism will become a sturdy plank - we have an understanding that we are part of a bigger picture of history. The relationship between our current state and "the physical return of Jesus" is interesting, and provokes a new interest in eschatology - that is, the theology of the end times.

Now remember that for the past seventeen hundred years, interpretation of the Bible has been regulated - one might say - or controlled - another might say - by the established church. Now, at last, anyone and everyone is able to grab their Bible and let fly. And this they do. The book of Relevation, which was originally written as a comfort to persecuted churches, is taken up in the biblicist tradition, and forced to mean something to me, today, in my situation, now. What I am trying to say is that the degree to which the Bible was ransacked to determine precise schemas of what would happen at the end of the world is unprecedented in the previous seventeen hundred years.

But the Bible is ransacked, and schemas emerge. One of these is Calvin's schema, which prescribes three stages for the life of the church: the apostolic age, the era of the anti-Christ, and the time of the expansion of the church. Those Puritans living under the "Christian nation" metanarrative see themselves at the end of the second stage and the beginning of the third. "Slowly but surely the conviction grew that God's last and eminently successful attack on the forces of Antichrist would be launced from the shores of North America and that the Puritan saints would play a key role in this final drama of history." We can laugh now, but it was no laughing matter at the time.

We can laugh even more about the Scofield Reference Bible, which provided another, much more symbolic and interpretative understanding of the book of Relevation. In hindsight, most of it was based on massive over-interpretation. But at the time Scofield took the approach that, as we have seen above, Scripture is the arbiter of truth; that it tells us what we need to know; and that, therefore, it will tell us something about our situation today despite being written thousands of years ago.

Another aside. I once had a copy of the Scofield Bible. In fact, I had a very, very useful Greek interlinear Bible, with philological notes, but which had the Scofield notes. I took them seriously to start with; then I started to wonder where they were getting things from; then I looked at the notes on Revelation, and I started laughing. Because again, it looked like satire.

I don't remember very much about it, but the principle was that everything mention in Revelation had a truthful metaphorical meaning. Even though it was prophecy. The letters to the seven churches were not, actually, prophecies to seven particular contemporary churches, but descriptions of seven ages of world government before the end times would come, which coincidentally lead right up to where we were at the time. This, I'm afraid, is the hermeneutical problem when everyone gets to interpret Scriptures for themselves.

Anyway, this renewed interest in Revelation came to the fore with three particular interpretations of Relevation 20, in which it is stated that Christ will reign for a thousand years. If we're taking a flat and biblicist interpretation of Scripture, the obvious question arises: Has this thousand years began, and if not, when will it? The Puritans were sure, as mentioned above, that they were entering the final phase of the Church; so they of course began to seek the beginning of the millenium. The New Englanders saw the millenium as being, basically, when the rest of the world would experience the joys they already knew:

It would be a time of "the greatest temporal prosperity", when people would have "sufficient leisure to persue and acquire learning of every kind." Universal peace and happiness would reign, not least because there would be "great improvement in the mechanical arts" through which people would be enabled to produce utensils "with much less labor" than they used now. Because of people's "benevolence and fervent charity", all worldly things would be available to all.

- Bosch, Transforming Mission, quoting Hopkins Treatise on the Millenium

In this particular understanding of the millenium, there is essentially a continuity with the Enlightenment way of life; this is the culmination of everything that secular progress has been promising us all along. This is called postmillenialism and was particularly dominant in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It's a basically positive picture: Once everything naturally tends towards the best it could be, then Christ returns.

But soon after that the dominant theology became one of premillenialism; that is, that Christ would return to earth before the millenium started. This is still the dominant theology in American Christianity today. (The rest of us simply refuse to take Revelation so damned literally. The other positions available to the church are amillenialism - there won't be a thousand year reign - and my favoured panmillenialism - which states that it'll all pan out in the end.)

So in premillenialism there will be a rapture - again, I want to remind you that before the Scofield question, this was never actually taken literally - and Christians will essentially escape the mess that the world has got intself into. In contrast to postmillenialism this is a basically negative picture. The world will not get better and better until it is transformed into the kingdom of God, but will get worse and worse until it needs a radical rebuilding into the kingdom of God.

This decline of the world, in premillenialism, is faced with a sort of fatalism. After all, Jesus told us there would be wars and rumours of wars. And there are. The world is essentially a write-off, because we'll be receiving a new one soon. And so looking after the world is very low on the premillenialist agency. God gave us the world to "steward", and we're going to "steward" the hell out of it, because we're going to get another one soon. This should, I hope, explain some of the more confusing elements of recent environmental policy in the United States.

And that reminds me. Since basically the year dot, Christianity has been faced with an ugly choice: remain an outcast, terrorist organisation, or become part of the established state. Every single time it has chosen option (b), and every single time the integrity of its witness has suffered. And when the "Christian nation" metanarrative and the "American dream" metanarrative conflicted, someone basically said, so, how are we going to establish a Christian nation here, again? And the decision was made to use the trappings of power to establish the overall goal. And, as ever, the integrity of its witness has suffered.

So this, I hope, explains a lot so far. We've explained the "Christian nation" metanarrative, the support for Israel, the policy on the environment, the fundamentalist ideology, and so on. Just one last thing I want to add. Neoconservatism: Can it be explained in this schema? I think so.

There was an assumption - and dare I say it, there still is an assumption - within the missionary movement, that God has chosen the Western nations and culture to be superior to the others so that Westerners can be the conveyers of the Christian message throughout the world. This concept and assumption - the "manifest destiny" - was born with the Pilgrim Fathers but did not die with them. It fed on the nationalism of the time, and melded with the "chosen nation" metanarrative of the American colonies to produce a specifically American sense of uniqueness and privilege.

Allow me to quote Bosch at length on this score, as I believe it explains an amazing amount not just about what happened then but also about what is happening now:

After the American colonies had shaken off the British yoke in 1776, these ideas began to be ventilated much more generally and confidently, gradually hardening into the notion of "manifest destiny". Following, as it did, in the wake of the Revivals, it was only natural that it acquired very clear religious overtones and also that it would soon be wedded to the foreign missionary enterprise. The American Board, founded in 1810, attempted to enlise to the cause not only "Christians" but also those identified as "patriots" [Emphasis mine - SC]. In the early years of the nineteeth century a sense of "American exceptionalism" waxed strongly and even if the "bedrock reality" retained a demand laid upon the church rather than on Americans, it was evident to all that American Christians were better equipped for the task than were others... In 1800 Nathaniel Edmonds could muse that God was about "to transfer the empire of the world from Europe to America, where he has planted his peculiar people"; he added "This is probably the last peculiar people which God means to form before the kingdoms of this world are absorbed into the kingdom of Christ."

Finally, after all I have highlighted in the explanation of the American Christianity school of thought, do I lay myself open to the charge of "No true scotsman"ism? This is a fair comment. I have been essentially saying that American Christianity has sufficiently diverged from Christian belief - and I have not had time to go into the personal holiness understanding of contemporary Evangelicalism (I recommend Jim Wallis' "The Call To Conversion" for that) - that it can no longer be called Christian.

Now reminding me about the "No true Scotsman" argument is useful, because it reminds me that "God knows those who are His". It is not mine to judge. But at the same time, the "no true Scotsman" argument is based on a question of definition, and "Christian" has two definitions: one who believes and upholds the Christian faith, and one who belongs to the Christian church. Both, I accept, are rather self-referential. But the second is interesting to me.

The Christian church historically has determined its own membership. On both doctrinal and ethical grounds it has, through the ages, chosen to expel members, or to call them to discipline and into line. And these callings have generally been effected through a prophet - a prophet in the Bible is one who essentially calls the people of God to order and tells them they need to stop doing stupid stuff. Christianity has contained within itself many streams and patterns of thought, but when they conflict with the doctrinal and ethical standards of the body, then be they Arianism, Montanism, Sabellianism, or Mormonism, they are asked to come into line or cast out of the fellowship.

The privilege of the Church is to determine to what extent subgroups are acceptable to the others. The prophets may rail against them, and the prophets may or may not be heard; they will be given other chances to return to fellowship, and they may or may not do so; they may be accepted in the Church or they may be no longer considered part of the Church. But that's up to the Church. Religious definitions of faith and Christianity do not come into it. I do not believe I am putting forward a "no true Scotsman" argument. I believe I am part of the body which has the right and privilege to determine what a "Scotsman" or in this case, a Christian, actually is. That body may or may not listen to me. To be honest, it probably won't, and I'll respect that. But I work from definitions within, and not definitions outside.

I hope this gives a bit more insight. It certainly helped me to understand some things. I wish I could have written more about the moral reductionism of American Christians, or about the connection between Christianity and "patriotism" that I mentioned above. But I feel the can of worms has been opened now, and I hope there will be plenty of fun things for me to research for the next article!