Discussion Group Report

The title of this article is taken from the title of a section in an article, "The Psychology of Biblicism," by Robert M. Price in the May-June issue of The Humanist.

Price concludes that biblicism, that stance toward the Bible whereby a believer intends to obey whatever the text asserts and orders, isn't theological in nature at all, but, rather is entirely psychological. An examination of certain inconsistencies in biblicism makes nonsense of its theological claims but are quite consistent with its psychological functions. Since biblicism does the job biblicists want it to do, they simply never see the problems in it.

What attracts many people to biblicism? Why the desperate need for a sure word from God? This need stems from a lack of confidence in the ability of the human to discover necessary truth by reason and observation alone. The old deists believed the creator had written the only revelation book human beings needed in the world: nature, not scripture. But biblicists are flustered by overchoice, being faced with too many options, each with plausible arguments and spokespersons. A religious claim that God has tossed confused humanity the Bible as a life preserver sounds pretty good. The problem is that there are just as many competing revelation claims vying for our faith, and one has no clue as to how to decide between them.

Biblicists hold an unexamined assumption, 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. The floor is going to open beneath your feet, and you are going to slide down the shaft to hell. This is a god who doesn't excuse honest mistakes.

"What element of theology implies that God should be unfair, even peevish?" asks Price. "To think him so is to project a childish fear of retribution that can only stifle intellectual growth. Surely it is a legacy of retrograde education, whether religious or secular." The need for a sure word from God may grow out of the kind of intellectual laziness posited by Ludwig Feuerbach. The belief in a divine revelation is all too convenient. Price thinks we may chalk the desire for "a sure word from God" to a low tolerance for ambiguity. Sometimes the scriptural text is ambiguous as a guide for the discovery of the "divine will." The biblicist awards him- herself a license for dogmatism, which is intentional regardless of which conclusions one winds up embracing. The only question is which dogma one chooses to promote.

More liberal theologies often accommodate the possibility that the Bible writers might have contradicted each other. Paul and James disagree over whether faith is sufficient to save one's soul, or whether faith must be realized through works. Such sources would consider neither Paul nor James as mouthpieces of revelation but, rather as sources of religious wisdom. The task would be not to submit to the teaching of one or the other but to draw upon both in forming one's own tentative beliefs. Fundamentalists cannot even recognize that Paul and James contradict one another for fear of disqualifying both as mouthpieces of revelation. A statement is authoritative simply because it appears somewhere in the canon of scripture, all such texts being equally authoritative. Reading the text literally, however, reveals "apparent contradictions." In this case fundamentalists abandon literalism and read between the lines, after all. They find themselves situated like proverbial donkeys between two haystacks: they 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. They are interpreting the text they don't like as if it said the same thing as the one they do.

"How can biblicists continue in such self-deception?," Price asks. "Simply because their choice is automatic, determined in advance by their particular church's tradition of interpretation." This, too, is fatal, since the first principle of biblicists is "scripture alone."

Such contradictions reveal the origin of biblicism to be essentially nontheological. If it were theological in origin, it would have more consistency. A survey of horoscope readers in Britain revealed that most of them admitted the predictions proved accurate less than half of the time. Astrology believers do not seek knowledge of the future but peace of mind for the night, permission to sleep well in the confidence of being forewarned and thus forearmed for the morrow. When the predictions, probably forgotten, turned out to be wrong tomorrow, it hardly mattered. But the night before, they felt they needed an edge, and their horoscope allowed them to think they had it. Even so with biblicists. What they want from the Bible isn't so much a coherent system for divining infallible revelations but only the permission to dogmatize, whether the goal is to quiet their own fears or to push others around. The psychological process goes thus: "My opinion is true. The Bible teaches the truth. Therefore the Bible must teach my opinion." "Friend, there is your view, and then there is God's view."

Today most fundamentalists reject evolution because it contradicts the Bible, but most of them believe that the sun orbits the earth, that the earth is round and that it orbits the sun, contrary to the Biblical description. They have been told that the ancient writers of the Bible miraculously knew what it took modern science centuries to learn about these phenomena. What makes the difference between whether one recognizes contradictions between the Bible and science or pretends the Bible has anticipated modern science? It is simply peer pressure, massive and permeating public opinion. The day will come when biblicists will reinterpret Genesis to teach evolution and will claim that God revealed it to the ancient scriptural writers ages before scientists supposedly discovered it.

Price suggests, "If one wishes to get anywhere when reasoning with fundamentalists and biblicists, ...try to determine the emotional issues that attach believers to their beliefs. The beliefs are, I think, a function of certain psychological needs that would be better met in other ways. Until these...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."