The Erosion of Biblical Certainty

Battles over Authority and Interpretation in America

Michael J. Lee

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137299666
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

According to conventional wisdom, by the late 1800s, the image of Bible as a supernatural and infallible text crumbled in the eyes of intellectuals under the assaults of secularizing forces. This book corrects the narrative by arguing that in America, the road to skepticism had already been paved by the Scriptures' most able and ardent defenders.

Part I

The Eighteenth Century

The Battle against Skepticism and Rationalizing the Bible

Prologue

The European Background

Radical Critics and Rational Defenders of the Bible

RELIGIOUS CONVICTIONS, BY THEIR VERY NATURE, TEND to be conservative. Christians have generally believed that God is timeless and above the vicissitudes of history. Therefore, unlike temporal human affairs, his nature and by extension his revelation should be eternal and unchanging. However, beginning in the eighteenth century, a few British American Protestants were compelled to alter their conception of Holy Writ. They increasingly put greater confidence in what they believed to be more empirical tools of analysis, such as history, philology, and natural science. As the naturalistic modes of examination gained prestige and credibility, the validity of supernaturally grounded insights gradually receded. Why this radical shift? First, they believed that in order to withstand the assaults from European skeptics, the Bible needed to be verified by evidence. Second, they were influenced by Anglican thinkers who sought not to undermine the Bible but rather to understand revelation through the lenses of what were regarded as recent philosophical advances. Therefore, in order to understand why Americans felt the need to naturalize their understanding of supernatural revelation, it is necessary to consider the European ideas that were applying enormous pressure on the Americans’ understanding of the Bible.1

John Locke (1632–1704) cast an enormous shadow over the eighteenth century. He influenced both the latitudinarians, who advocated a religiosity characterized by balance, order, toleration, and reason, and the deists, who used his ideas to dismiss the Bible as a viable source of truth.2 Locke lived in a time of political conflict caused in large part by disagreements over a common understanding of reason and doctrine. Disgusted by the excesses of the Interregnum’s clericalism, sectarianism, and enthusiasm, he sought religious tolerance. To this end, he attempted to establish definitive criteria to examine issues of fact and articulate a critical method of interpreting Scripture.3 In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke argued that only empirical investigation, based on the senses, could yield trustworthy data. Therefore he discounted the reliability of innate ideas, personal revelations, or enthusiasm, which were by their nature private and subjective and therefore could not be examined in the public realm. Knowledge of this sort had often been a source for the assertions of religious certainty and therefore was the cause of much intractable disagreement and conflict.4 As an alternative, Locke sought to secure belief on a reasonable and universally accessible foundation.

Locke believed reason was a procedure as opposed to a predetermined set of dogmatic truths. Thus he tried to construct a method of inquiry that any reasonable person could employ independent of theological loyalties. The Bible, Locke believed, should not be simply accepted on faith or authority but interpreted on the basis of universally accessible standards of reason and language. For Locke, that meant the meaning of a Scripture passage lay in the intent of the author and the historical circumstances. He ruled out typological or spiritual knowledge, which could not be examined or verified by a theologically neutral reader. However, Locke was not a deist. Although many parts of the Bible were “above reason,” they could never be contrary to reason. Some aspects of Christian revelation clearly required faith. Reason alone could not lead to the most important religious truths, but reason, he believed, should regulate faith.5

Isaac Newton (1643–1722) also changed the way many people understood the Bible. As Locke attempted to uncover and describe the precise ways in which the mind operates, Newton examined the laws that govern the physical world.6 The body of Newton’s scientific labors transformed the way in which educated Europeans (and their colonial American counterparts) understood their universe. Newton’s Principia (1687) demonstrated that the motion of physical objects and heavenly bodies was measurable, regular, and predictable. The laws of the universe were subject to precise mathematical treatment and discoverable through careful empirical observation. Although some of his followers viewed the world as an enormous machine, driven by impersonal forces, Newton did not. His system required the constant activity of the deity. Newton also believed that God could suspend his laws to allow for miracles. Deists, on the other hand, believed that miracles were impossible because they violated the laws of nature.

In Newton’s wake, some sought to find God’s fingerprints on the design of the elegant machine of the world. These physico-theologians, as they were commonly called, published numerous works in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In 1692, Robert Boyle institutionalized the steady progress of physico-theology by endowing a series of lectures for the purpose of proving the truth of Christianity against “infidels” by using the principles of Newtonian science. For example, Newton wrote a series of letters to the Anglican philologist Richard Bentley explaining how his theories of the order of the universe could be used as evidence of a divine creator. Bentley turned the letters into the first series of Boyle Lectures, which he delivered in 1692. They were published under various titles, including The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism (1693). (Years later, Bentley was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, in 1717.) Important physico-theological works that influenced American defenders of the Bible include Boyle’s Christian Virtuoso (1690), John Ray’s Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691), William Whiston’s A New Theory of the Earth (1696), and William Derham’s Physico-Theology (1713).7

Similarly, Anglican latitudinarians, influenced by Locke, attempted to shore up the reliability of the Bible on the basis of history. Skeptical deists tried to challenge the historical reliability of biblical accounts. For example, Anthony Collins had the audacity to question whether Jesus truly fulfilled Old Testament prophecies. The skeptic Thomas Woolston argued that the Gospel accounts of miracles should be interpreted as allegories because he believed that miracles were preposterous. In response, latitudinarians argued that the Gospels conformed to the standards of historical examination because reliable witnesses testified to the validity of miracles, which authenticated divine inspiration.8 Nathaniel Lardner wrote The Credibility of Gospel History (1724–43) in an attempt to refute Collins and Woolston by corroborating the New Testament from independent sources. Thomas Sherlock wrote one of the most elaborate defenses of the veracity of the Apostles’ testimony of Jesus’s resurrection in Trial of the Witnesses (1729). Archbishop John Tillotson was particularly influential in America. Barbara Shapiro and Gerard Reedy note that historical “proofs” could only rise to the level of high probability rather than absolute certainty. Nonetheless, the latitudinarians believed that highly probable evidence warranted faith.9 Although latitudinarians and physico-theologians elevated the role of reason, they did not question or undermine the importance of faith. Most English rational Protestants believed reason could only “confirm” faith rather than discover new spiritual truths independently. Nonetheless, according to Hans Frei, these men represented the beginnings of a new approach to understanding the Bible. Previous generations tended to believe that the truth of the Bible was guaranteed by the Bible itself. They assumed the authority of Scripture and then sought evidence that affirmed their belief. However, in response to skeptical attacks, latitudinarians subjected revelation to independent investigation to test its veracity.10

La Peyrère, Hobbes, Spinoza, Simon, Le Clerc, and the Bible

Newton, Locke, and the latitudinarians believed that reason, the evidence of nature, and history affirmed the authenticity of Scripture. A few seventeenth-century thinkers, such as Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and Benedict Spinoza (1632–77) drew more radical conclusions by challenging the common understanding of the Bible. Christians generally believed that God supernaturally inspired the writers of the Bible. Though there were various theories of inspiration, most agreed that Scripture presented an accurate record of historical events.11

La Peyrère challenged this conventional view. In his book, Prae-Adamitae (published in Latin in 1655 and in English as Men before Adam in 1656), he argued that the creation account in Genesis was incorrect and incomplete. La Peyrère contended that people must have existed before Adam. There were, he believed, two creations. God first created the Gentiles and then he made Adam, the father of the Jewish people. This theory, he believed, cleared up inconsistencies. For example, this explained how Cain found a wife and built a city after he murdered his brother.12

To support his contentions, La Peyrère attempted to overthrow the traditional understanding of the Old Testament. He was one of the first seventeenth-century critics openly to reject the Mosaic authorship of most of the Pentateuch. Much of the extant Old Testament, he believed, was not the original but copies and redactions compiled from various sources by several editors. He pointed out several anachronisms in the Pentateuch that would have made Mosaic authorship unlikely. Furthermore, he noted textual evidence of truncations, repetitions, and omissions in the Pentateuch.13

La Peyrère posited that Moses recorded the exodus out of Egypt, the giving of the law on Mount Sinai, and the forty years of the Exodus. Moses also must have written a history of the Jews from the creation of Adam to his own time based on oral histories and ancient manuscripts. In composing his histories, Moses emphasized material that was relevant to contemporary Jews and summarized the rest. Later compilers edited in an even more cursory manner. La Peyrère believed that various editors introduced corruptions, contradictions, flaws, and obscurities in the text.14

If spurious authorship were not disturbing enough, La Peyrère also attempted to explain away miracles as natural events. For example, the author of Joshua 10:1–14 wrote that God stopped the progress of the sun and moon after the Israelites defeated the Amorites so that the Israelites could completely vanquish their enemy. La Peyrère believed that the light was not due to the sun standing still in the sky. Rather a nearby mountain reflected the rays of the sun.15 Furthermore, La Peyrère did not believe that the flood of Noah covered the earth as most believed. He contended that the flood was only local to Palestine. His radical interpretation was in part influenced by the explosion of new knowledge emerging from the studies of the distant histories of pagan nations. Scholars such as Scaliger, Saumaize, and Bochart discussed historical accounts of the ancient world beyond the biblical record.16 Some were perplexed because civilizations in distant lands, such as America, China, and India, had historical records that predated the flood. Thus, La Peyrère concluded, they could not have been annihilated by a global deluge. Moreover, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century explorers’ discoveries of new lands and peoples challenged long-held views of the world based on the Bible. Historian David Livingstone writes that La Peyrère’s whole project was rooted in his passion to find a persuasive account of the origin of the native people of America. Richard Popkin asserts that the existence of the New World and its inhabitants challenged the conventional view that the Bible contained a universal history and led some to question “whether the Bible [was] adequate as an account of how the world developed.”17 Seventeenth-century British cartographer Robert Morden wrote regarding the recent flood of accounts of foreign lands, “According to the more accurate observations and discoveries of more modern authors, all former geographies are greatly deficient and strangely erroneous.”18 The wide dispersal of humanity and pagan historical annals that appeared to predate the biblical record caused La Peyrère to question the prevailing interpretation of Genesis. He believed that if the population of the entire world had been wiped out, Noah and his descendants could not have had time to repopulate the distant lands in the time allowed by the biblical chronology.19

Understandably, most Protestants found such critiques of the Bible disturbing. When Protestants conceptualized how the Spirit of God inspired the writers of the Bible, they minimized the human element. Most believed that God placed ideas in the minds of the writers. Some held that God inspired every word and detail of the Scriptures and the writers were practically taking dictation.20 Likewise, the American Puritans emphasized the role of God in inspiration. Cotton Mather wrote that the Holy Spirit “dictated the Sacred Scriptures.” Mather’s nephew, Thomas Walter, wrote that because the Scriptures were divinely inspired, they were “INFALLIBLE.” Though the “Modus or Manner” varied, he held that “all the Writers of the Old and New Testament wrote under the Direction & Conduct of the Spirit of GOD.” Some writers were swept up in uncontrollable “rapturous Enthusiasm” and their bodies convulsed. Others, such as historians, maintained a sober spirit. Regarding historians, “whose Inspiration is the most questioned,” Walter maintained that the Holy Spirit acted by first “Supervising & overruling their Pen, that no Error might be committed by them, securing them from the least Hallucination, or Mistake,” and second by “Keeping them under a Restraint from Writing what had not an immediate Concurrence & Tendency to the Design of the Holy Spirit in that History.”21

The contention that the Bible’s inspired authors culled various sources and then later editors corrected and amended their work seemed to be at odds with some versions of Protestant conceptions of divine inspiration, such as the one articulated by Walter. How could a text be inspired (or possibly even dictated by God) if it had been edited and rewritten several times, centuries after the death of the original writer? If the original writing was inspired, why would it need to be edited? Did not editing tamper with and corrupt the original inspired text? La Peyrère’s views challenged the understanding of the Bible as containing a universal history of human origins. Not surprisingly, many responded to La Peyrère’s Prae-Adamitae with indignation. Historian Colin Kidd writes that La Peyrère’s work “ignited one of the largest heresy hunts of the age.” Within a year of the publication of his book, more than a dozen refutations appeared. Popkin writes that La Peyrère was “regarded as perhaps the greatest heretic of the age, even worse than Spinoza who took over some of his most challenging ideas.” According to Anthony Grafton, everyone, it seems, hated the book and many made a point of declaring their outrage in print. La Peyrère was imprisoned but was released after he supposedly recanted his views. However, La Peyrère’s recantation did not end such ideas. He was only one of many skeptical voices in the seventeenth century. Regarding his legacy, Livingstone writes, “In his wake it became harder to accept the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch uncritically; it became harder to approach ancient sacred texts with unalloyed reverence; and it became harder to ignore extrabiblical data in scriptural hermeneutics.”22

Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) similarly charged that many of the books of the Bible could not have been written by their supposed authors. The Pentateuch, for example, could not have been written by Moses as both church tradition and the biblical text claimed. Hobbes asserted, like La Peyrère, that the books were not compiled in their received form until long after the divinely inspired lawgiver had died. He concluded that the Pentateuch was compiled during the period after the Maccabean revolt, when the temple of Jerusalem and its holy books had been destroyed.23

Like La Peyrère, Hobbes utilized apparent contradictions in the Scriptures in his attempt to challenge the prevailing understanding of the Bible. Deuteronomy described Moses’s death and burial. Hobbes wrote, “It is therefore manifest, that those words were written after his interment. For it were a strange interpretation, to say Moses spake of his own sepulcher.” Hobbes...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: The Eighteenth Century
• Part II: The Early Nineteenth Century
• Epilogue: The Orthodox Reconcile with the Past
• Conclusion
• Notes