It's just a movie of course and yet there's something to be
said on that topic. The old backwoods sensibility and pride in lack of
sophistication is something deeply rooted in sections of American culture. It
took one form in the log cabin and another in the halls of academia along the
Eastern Seaboard, and yet it's something common to the American experience and
its intellectual tradition.
This history has hardly been static and in many ways the old
Common Sense Realism that dominated Colonial America has been dethroned and
cast aside. That said, there are interesting ties with the whole British
Empirical tradition and the way in which American philosophy has largely
followed this path into the Analytic method. While Logical Positivism was more
a British phenomenon, the naive realism it posited shared a certain
epistemological camaraderie with the old Common Sense Realism of Thomas Reid
and his disciples.
I was thinking about some of this the next day when I was
sitting in a Fundamentalist Church and reflecting how on the one hand as a
movement it is profoundly anti-intellectual and yet in another sense it is
still strongly wed to the naive realism and Empiricist epistemology of the
Enlightenment.
I'm not at all a fan of Karen Armstrong and yet this quote is
interesting.
'Before the modern period, Jews, Christians and Muslims all
relished highly allegorical interpretations of scripture. The word of God was
infinite and could not be tied down to a single interpretation. Preoccupation
with literal truth is a product of the scientific revolution, when reason
achieved such spectacular results that mythology was no longer regarded as a
valid path to knowledge.'
She is of course only partly right, guilty of generalisation
and is wrongly dismissing any notion of orthodox hermeneutics even within the
referenced traditions. Christian orthodoxy has in the past permitted a richer
and more layered potentiality in hermeneutical method and application and yet
it was hardly the subjective free-for-all she seems to suggest. The boundaries
of orthodoxy, even in the realm of interpretation and method are not merely a
product of the modern period.
As a Biblicist I of course believe there is a right
interpretation of the text but I too believe in layers, symbolism, typology,
and redemptive-historical narratives. I can be a 'literalist' and yet have a
more nuanced and sophisticated (in the good sense) understanding of the text.
Fundamentalism tends to fall into a restrictive and sometimes
naive minimalism and it is at this point Armstrong is right at least in
identifying its origins. Well, partly right and yet I think we can go further.
Yes, on the one hand the Fundamentalist adherence to literal
evidence, an 'objective' reading rooted in an epistemological monism (what you
see is what you get) is tied to the Enlightenment and in fact finds
similarities in the hyper-empiricism of the scientific worldview. At this point
in order to go further we would have to revisit a great deal of intellectual
history spanning Medieval Scholasticism to the Renaissance and finally the
Enlightenment and what it truly represented.
There's little agreement here and the sharp disagreements
become all too clear when we consider figures like Hume or Kant. To some
schools of thought these transitional figures represent a reaction to the
Enlightenment or Anti-Enlightenment while to others they merely represent the
outworkings of the Age of Reason and its various stages and schools of thought.
Hume to some would represent the end or collapse of Empiricism and depending on
your read of Kant he's either the saviour of the philosophical project or the
nail in its coffin, the progenitor of Idealist and ultimately Continental
philosophy, which to many is a dead end. Detractors from Bertrand Russell to
the present view this development as a degeneration into subjectivity and
scepticism. Others would say Hume and Kant laid the foundation stones for
modern relativism or what is sometimes (and often improperly) labeled
post-modernism.
Common Sense Realism was largely a reaction to Hume and of
course as a movement utterly rejected Kant and all that was born of his
synthesis.
Interestingly modern Objectivists of the Rand school seem to
flourish in the American intellectual milieu. Could this be due to the
pervasive and lingering influence of Common Sense Realism? There are
significant similarities in their epistemological commitments.
Likewise Fundamentalism assumes a great deal of
epistemological confidence and optimism. The Grammatico-Historical method is an
almost scientific approach to Scripture. Commitments to propositional truth,
induction as a methodology (with some exceptions) and an almost fanatical
desire to extract 'to the letter' statements and apply them to science, history
and prophecy are all hallmarks of the school. Whether they are successful in
this endeavour and whether or not their use of Scripture in this regard is
correct, is of course another matter.
On the one hand, though Fundamentalism is viewed as
anti-modern it's actually very much rooted in Enlightenment Empiricism and thus
qualifies as modern in its outlook,
or at least embraces a cohort of concepts identified with modernity. Karen
Armstrong has something of a point. Its requirements for knowledge and
coherence are rooted in common experience both in terms of logic and
justification. The role of 'testimony' is interesting to consider at this point
in both the revivalist and Fundamentalist traditions. While subjective, it
smacks of evidence-based epistemology and in the 20th century a case
could be made that strains of this thought were integrated with another
American philosophical development, that of Pragmatism.
And yet paradoxically Fundamentalism is also anti-modern. In
fact its primary identity is rooted in an anti-modern stance to theology and
society. How can this be?
I think the strain of anti-modernism has to be understood
primarily in sociological rather than specifically theological terms. While
Fundamentalism rejected Liberal Theology, the basis for doing so was not rooted
in pre-Enlightenment commitments, some kind of doubt concerning Empiricism, the
scientific method or a correspondence theory of truth. Additionally, its
rejection of Liberalism was not rooted in a Counter-Enlightenment response or
development that expressed scepticism regarding man's ability to learn from
nature and experience. Like the theological basis for many Liberal theologies,
Fundamentalism maintained a commitment to these principles.
To clarify, some at this point might argue that Theological
Liberalism divorced content from experience, that it was Counter-Enlightenment
and succumbed to a type of theological Romanticism. That may be true in some
quarters and yet the basis for divorcing content from experience was a
scepticism... not generated due to epistemology in general, rather a scepticism
regarding Scripture rooted in Rationality. This could be built on Empiricist or
Rationalist foundations. Either way, regardless of the method, Liberals
believed and argued Scripture did not accord with historical and scientific
fact. Therefore, in order to 'salvage' Christianity and Scripture some turned
to Idealist constructs, experiential revisions, comparative religion
(approached analytically), and/or a stripped down de-mythologised type of
social philosophy.
Just because Schleiermacher and others emphasised emotion and
experience does not mean that their basis for doing so wasn't ultimately still
rooted in a commitment to Enlightenment principles regarding rationality and
science. They weren't so much turning to a subjective epistemological theory
regarding reality but rather were turning to the subjective attempting (at
least in their minds) to salvage Christianity from its complete and utter
collapse. A foundational commitment to intuition, emotion and mysticism is more
akin to Quakerism or the Catholic Mystical tradition... not Theological
Liberalism.
Fundamentalism retained this same commitment to these
Enlightenment principles but it did so while retaining a faith in Scripture.
Scripture was taken a priori which it
may be argued was incoherent, and yet taking Scripture as axiomatic the whole
of their system and thought still functioned within an Enlightenment framework.
It is admittedly an odd historical and intellectual phenomenon and I also argue
it won't stand and largely hasn't.
That said, Biblicism can still be salvaged but a different
approach must be taken.
But first we need to return to the question of
Fundamentalism's Anti-Modernism to understand how the movement came about and
provide context for its continuation and/or collapse.
Continue reading part 2
Continue reading part 2