What exactly do fundamentalists believe? Why do they believe as they do? Dr. Matthew Ogilvie, writing in the Australian Journal of Theology in August of 2003 says in the opening abstract for his fascinating article:
| The fundamentalist doctrine of Biblical Inspiration provides the theological foundation for all other fundamentalist doctrines, especially those concerning the Bible’s inerrancy and infallibility... The implication of these doctrines about the Bible’s production is that fundamentalists exclude substantial human involvement from either the writing or the reading of Scripture. |
Likewise, the Baptist missionary Louis A. Turk, writing for the Independent Baptist website The Baptist Pillar says:
| "The original autographs of the Scriptures were verbally inspired of God. These Scriptures have been divinely preserved down through the ages. The King James Version of the Bible is a true and faithful translation of these providentially preserved Scriptures. It is folly to beat around the bush on the doctrine of verbal, plenary inspiration of the Scriptures. Every other doctrine stands or falls upon it. And I for one am willing to stake my whole ministry on it..." |
So there you have it, from all sides of the fence, written by an academic theologian and by a missionary. By a non-fundamentalist (Professor Ogilvie is, I believe, Roman Catholic) and by a fundamentalist of the purest stripe. Fundamentalism's core doctrine is the verbal, plenary inspiration of the Bible -- everything else that fundamentalists believe descends from that one thing.
The doctrine of inspiration faces a number of tests -- many of those tests are covered amply elsewhere on the site -- for example, the question of blatant errors in scripture is covered. There are hundreds of pages of errors if one were to list every error in the Bible, and only a few are given on the webpage -- but enough to clearly demonstrate that errors exist, errors that cannot by explained away except by human reasoning and deliberate dishonesty -- for they are not explained in the Bible, and being errors they fly in the face of the idea of divine inspiration by an omniscient being.
It isn't only errors that plague a literlistic approach to the Bible. There are other serious questions, canon for example. If God wrote the Bible with the intention of having it be a single book he did so in an odd manner -- through 30 to perhaps 50 authors over somewhere between 800 and 1500 years. And editors? Even I could have edited the book in a manner to eliminate many more of the errors, and the abominations and the failed prophecies. The editors were even worse than the authors -- of course they did come centuries later, and perhaps they spent as little time reading the texts they were editing as most of the followers of fundamentalism spend actually reading the result -- rather than proof texting with it.
Beyond all of this comes a question just as basic. Was the Bible the foundation of the Church -- the document upon which the early Church was built? The answer is a resounding no. Even many fundamentalists realize that the only scripture available to early Christians was the Jewish scripture -- the Torah and the haf-torahs. In II Timothy 3:16, the scripture referred to as being inspired is the Old Testament, not the New Testament - which was not even a thought in someone's mind at the time. The careful reference to ALL scripture being inspired probably was a response to a movement among Jewish leaders to reduce the number of books that were considered to be inspired by God among the Jewish people. Most modern Christians of whatever stripe do not understand how intertwined the two faith communities were at the time Timothy was writing. Jesus was, by all accounts, a devout Jew and a Rabbi. The early Christian community was widely regarded as a subgroup of Judaism, and Christianity continued to be considered a Jewish subcult for some time.
Fundamentalists would claim that in those days the "autographs" of the Bible were already out there, being used. These "autographs" were perfect and were god breathed. All the earliest Churches were in possessions of these autographs, I've even been told by fundamentalist acquaintances that the early churches kept them until Roman Catholicism arose and destroyed them. I have news. There were no autographs. There is not one shred, not one shred -- of any kind of evidence that there ever were autographs -- in fact that the New Testament existed in anything other than pieces and books as it was written. There are no parchments, no extra-biblical or intra-biblical records. There simply were no autographs. The idea that early Christians were "Biblical" Christians goes beyond wishful thinking all the way to fantasy.
The only fragments in our possession that predate about 100 AD and relate to the church... are fragments comprising a copy of a eucharistic prayer -- almost indistinguishable from the one used in Roman Catholic and Anglican churches today -- apparently dating from about 60 AD. No autographs, just more proof that the early Church, far from being fundamentalist was fundamentally Catholic.