Myopegesis and Hyperliteralism

The following quotation is a reprint of a post on my blog, Unorthodox Faith, from April 22, 2009. I felt at the time that there was no word to really describe the method of interpretation that leads to hyperliteralism.

There are two accepted terms for interpretation of Scripture:

• exegesis: a form of interpretation which attempts to allow the text to guide interpretation
• eisegesis: a form of interpretation which reads an agenda/doctrine into the text from an external source

I felt that there was a need for another word denoting a type of interpretation I observed in many forms through the years.

my·op·e·ge·sis (mahy-op-jee-sis) noun. a flawed method of interpreting Scripture in a near-sighted, limited way. The text is seen without consideration of greater context, supranarrative, and interpretational heritage.

In essence, myopegesis is a step beyond topical preaching. It is quite literally (pun intended) topical interpretation. It is interpretation based on the needs of the moment, in light of whatever the interpreter needs to address at the moment. This is a dangerous sentiment, but not an unknown one.

Pesher and the Evangelists

The Qumran communities, the authors of the now famous Dead Sea Scrolls, employed a similar interpretational formula known as pesher.  Although pesher is the generic Hebrew word for ‘interpretation’, it meant something else to the Qumran communities. Qumran pesher (pl. pesherim) interpreted the Scriptures in terms of the needs of the day rather than in its original context. It was an extreme form of hyperliteralism. Since the Qumran interpreters saw themselves living in the end times, the Scriptures must have a veiled, end times meaning. They believed that all Scripture had this veiled meaning.

In a sense, the Christian evangelists used a similar interpretational methodology. The evangelists re-interpret passages from the Prophets in light of Jesus as the Messiah. In some cases, these interpretations have absolutely nothing to do with the literal reading of the passages they are drawn from. Their justification, best explained in the Epistle to the Hebrews, was that everything they knew about the Tanach had to be reinterpreted in light of Jesus’ revelation as not only the Messiah, but also as the Son of God.

As Christians, we do embrace this variant of pesher. We have since the first apostles reached the inevitable conclusion that in order for Jesus to be who he was and do what he did, he must have been not only Messiah but God himself.

Since we do believe that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures, we cannot do otherwise. In fact, it could be argued that to not interpret the Scriptures in this way would be to deny the essence of Christianity itself.

The difference between Christian interpretation and Qumran pesher is that the Christians interpreted in light of their Messiah, not in light of their current context in general. In fact, the apostle Paul may have even argued against pesherim in some of his churches. (He seems to answer some kind of pesher in the letters to the Thessalonians and depending on how one reads Hebrews, the same might be true there.)

Certainly, the writer of the book of Revelation used some elements of pesher in his interpretation of the Prophets in his visions. This is not the only similarity of the Revelation to Qumran apocalypse literature, but again, his interpretations revolve always around Jesus. In his case, they revolve around the conflict between Jesus and Caesar -  both the Caesar of his day and clearly some kind of expectation of a coming Caesar, known traditionally as Antichrist.

Medieval Interpretation

Although the medieval church would never have admitted the influence of pesher on their interpretation, the use of allegorical interpretation by the likes of Thomas Aquinas had more in common with Jewish pesher than it did with literal interpretation. Scriptures were interpreted with a very distinct bias. Everything pertained to the Church which was, in many ways, indistinct from secular government. It was the fusion of the Church and government that produced the concept of christendom in European theology.

Thus, everything was interpreted in terms of the context of the moment. If a preacher needed justification for his position, he had only to find a verse that pertained to it, regardless of context. The Bible became a mine from which the interpreters extracted whatever ideas suited them.

This type of interpretation, commonly known as eisegesis, was not quite the same as pesher and was far from modern hyperliteralism, but it did set the stage for the emergence of the doctrine of sola scriptura during the Reformation.

Reformation Myopegesis

Although John Calvin is credited with the development of sola scriptura, it was a common sentiment of his day. The idea was simple. In reaction to the medieval abuses, Calvin and his contemporaries determined to read the Bible literally.

There was only one problem with their interpretational idea. They were removed from the original context of the Scriptures by at least 1,500 years. They lived in a post-Crusader world, a world where Constantinople had fallen to the Ottoman Turks. They read the Bible in Latin or from the few known Greek texts in existence. Hebrew was the language of the Jews, a group of people most Christian (even Protestants) considered to be heretics because they rejected Jesus. They had little access to information about the true context of the Scriptures and often made erroneous interpretations because of this lack of information. It was not their fault; but it did limit their ability to truly interpreting the Scriptures as it was intended for the original audience.

In some ways this contributed to a sort of Protestant pesher. For example, Luther maintained to his dying day that the papacy was Antichrist. His interpretation contributed vastly to the development of an anti-Catholic mentality that still exists in the Protestant churches. Although Luther was a very well educated man who knew the history of the Roman Empire and has most likely read the works of Erasmus, he still interpreted the Scriptures in the context of his day.

This kind of interpretation pervades the work of European Calvinists of the next couple centuries. It flourished in the Americas as well. This type of interpretation was often employed in Puritan pulpits and was even used to justify the persecution and murder of ‘witches’ in 17th century Massachusetts.

Now, Hyperliteralism and Myopegesis

Now we can fast forward about two millennia to the emergence of fundamentalism at the turn of the 20th century. The deluge of new textual, linguistic, historical and archaeological evidence shook the foundations of interpretation. I’ve already addressed the ways this affected how literalism should be understood, so there’s no need to return to the topic. But the reality is that we now have access to at least a pretty good approximation of many of the original contexts of the Scriptures.

Unfortunately, the myopegesis of modern hyperliteralism persists. Many interpretations are still being made based on the ‘need’ of the moment. Nowhere is this more evident in the realm of eschatology (the doctrine of last things) where a new theory emerges almost every week about the Second Coming of Christ. One has only to watch a Christian television station to be exposed to a varied and bizarre array of eschatological views, all of which seem to be looking for a way to do pesher with the Scriptures. They use the Bible to disparage world leaders, to whip up cultish followings, and generally to embrace their poor hermeneutic.

Myopic interpreters can only see their context, and worse, they have a pre-existing conclusion that they make the Bible conform to in order to justify their position. In some cases, entire passages are reinterpreted in the name of literalism just to make a single pesher point.

The Danger of Hyperliteralism

1. It is not the form of interpretation used by the biblical authors in the first place.
2. It ignores the original matrix of the Scriptures (things like genre, idiom and linguistic development) in favor of a reading based on the current matrix.
3. It places interpretation in the control of the interpreter.
4. It is closed-ended. It forces the expositor to close his eyes to reinterpretation.

How has Literal Interpretation Changed?

Probably the single most important aspect of The Fundamentals was the intense emphasis on the literal interpretation of Scripture. This had a lot to do with the rise of higher criticism in the 19th century, which the fundamentalists reacted to. Almost all of Volume 1 of The Fundamentals is devoted to essays concerning literal interpretation.

I should caution the reader that the views of the early fundamentalists were somewhat incomplete. Remember that they were writing at the turn of the 20th century. Very little was understood about the context of the Old Testament in particular, and even the New Testament was a bit obscure. Palestine and the Middle East were in Ottoman hands and archaeology had not developed many of the tools used to illuminate historical context. Much of the debate about the Bible was based on purely academic observations from both the literalists and the proponents of higher criticism.

Today’s literal interpretation of Scripture does not and should not look like the literal interpretation of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The resources available to the interpreter today are vast. We often have more data and analysis at our finger tips than whole university staffs had a century ago. We are able to lean on archaeological discoveries, manuscript analysis and contextual information that illuminate even the most obscure passages.

With all of that said, what were the main tenants of literalism in The Fundamentals? That is more difficult to answer than you might think. For the most part, The Fundamentals focused on the rejection of higher criticism and not on the exposition of a competing view. The authors assumed that the reader would know what literal interpretation meant. Here are the tenants of literal interpretation as I saw them in The Fundamentals.

• The Church requires the infallible revelation of God. As James Orr wrote, “There is no disguising the fact that…there is much uneasy and distrustful feeling about the Holy Scriptures.” The writers then set about allaying the uneasiness of the Church and confirming that the Bible was indeed the Word of God. They felt, right or wrong, that criticism of the Bible tore at the belief of inspiration. In Orr’s case, he went about his proof by arguing that there is a necessity of an inspired canon and then shows a need for said canon, followed by proofs that the Bible meets the needs.
• The Bible internally states that it is inspired. G. Osborne Troop, George Robinson, Dyson Hague and James Orr all wrote articles dealing with the internal cohesion of the Biblical books. Given the time and resources, the writers probably would have analyzed every book of the Bible, but they seem to have contented themselves with writing about the Pentateuch.
• Archaeology and history confirm the inspiration of Scripture. M. G. Kyle and George Frederick Wright both wrote articles in The Fundamentals arguing that archaeology supports the Biblical claims. Their arguments became the basis of many of the archaeological proofs still presented today.

The question before the modern literalist is whether we can confirm these statements, knowing what we know about the historicity of the Bible. In general, I think we can reaffirm these statements but they do require some clarification.

• Infallibility now must be understood to include the transmission of the Bible in cultural context. As an example, the Book of Job may not be, as Orr would have argued, a historical document. It is inspired, but it is a morality play of sorts, a work of poetry meant to convey ideas and not historical personages. The same would apply to the possibility of having two distinct creation epics in Genesis 1-2 or the seeming contradictions of the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles. This is not compromising literalism but understanding it better.
• The internal statements of Scripture still support the divine inspiration of the Scriptures. There is no denying that Jesus believed in a divinely inspired canon and that his belief was confirmed by the apostles. But this inspiration does not have precedents outside of the Scriptures. Human history does not hold that there must be an inspired book. It is the testimony of the Bible itself, which is circular by nature. The Bible claims inspiration but to embrace the Bible’s claims, the reader must already believe it is inspired. We must concede this as a point of faith rather than to try to rationalize it.
• Archaeology has indeed confirmed Scripture in the abstract but rarely in the details. We have competing records of events and timetables that are out of sync. Archaeology is not a discipline that proves the Bible, only one that confirms the plausibility of its records. Archaeology is not an exact science and should not be treated as such. It is very much subject to something akin to the Heisenberg principle – the state of the observer will often dictate what is observed.

In short, historical literalism can still be espoused based on the same observations. All of the modern scholarship of the texts has certainly shed light on the process of the transmission of Scripture, but it has not weakened the internal testimony of the Scriptures and if anything, it has confirmed the plausibility of the Bible’s accuracy. I should however contend that the Bible’s accuracy cuts both ways. It accurately preserves the words of the original authors, but it also accurately preserves them as the original authors wrote and the original audiences read. This means that Bible does not conform to our modern perception of accuracy. It reports things as they were recorded and not in the modern sense of accurate reporting.

If anything, literalism has become more flexible in the 21st century. We understand oral history, textual composition and transmission, genre and contextual study much better than we did when The Fundamentals were written. The arguments for literal interpretation are strengthened because the Bible is not required to conform to modern tests of accuracy but can show its age. What was taken to be the Bible’s inferiority in the 19th century has become its greatest testament of superiority. It has not been tainted by realignment over the ages but has actually remained in essentially its ancient states. The very things that were once criticized are now its greatest strengths.

Fundamentalism’s Reactionary Ideological Roots

Introduction

Before we get too deep into the comparisons of classical fundamentalism and neo-fundamentalism, it is important that we have a working, abstract knowledge of fundamentalism’s original matrix. By matrix I mean the womb in which it was conceived and birthed from. This matrix was significantly different from the matrix we find ourselves in today.

The Birthing Controversies

The Fundamentals were published and distributed between 1909 and 1915. This followed closely on the heels of unprecedented developments in science, theology, philosophy, logic and other areas of thought. The previous century had produced enormous changes in the ways people viewed themselves and their past. The sheer volume of these developments had placed the Church in a crisis which began in Europe and spread quickly to the United States.

These movements and developments were primarily in two fields, ideological and scientific. I provide a far from exhaustive sampling below:

Ideological threats:

• Modernist progressive thinking dominated philosophy and theology during the 19th century because it carried a sentiment of continual human improvement. Concepts like “Manifest Destiny” in the United States and the intense imperialism of Great Britain are easily recognized as signs of this way of thinking – that man was better now than he had ever been. This, of course conflicted with foundational Christian ideas such as sin and depravity.
• Higher criticism made the transition from secular texts to the Biblical texts and became wildly popular. Based on the work of the Tübingen School of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it viewed the sacred texts as primarily human works and deconstructed them.
• Natural selection had been presented as a theory for the development of biological species, seminally defined by Charles Darwin in Origin of Species in 1859 and aptly defended by Thomas Henry Huxley thereafter. (I class this as ideological because at the time, Darwin’s theories were based on little evidence and mostly ideological assertion.)
• Christian schism also threatened the foundations of the Christian faith. This is perhaps less understood than the others but still very influential was the continual fracturing of the church into subsets, including the birth of a number of movements that would be considered cults (the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, et al).

Scientific developments:

• Paleontology produced fossils of creatures previously unknown for millennia, causing many to question the universal nature of the Bible.
• Geology painted pictures of the earth that seemed to extend far beyond the assumed the roughly 6,000 years of history that James Ussher had calculated in the 17th century.
• Archaeological research was diving into the remains of thousands of ancient sites, illuminating worlds that had only been known through written texts. The leading archaeologists were of two schools – Biblical archaeologists who used archaeology to “prove” the Bible and secular archaeologists who generally used their work to disprove it.

Before fundamentalism, there were two common reactions to all of these developments. Some churchmen attempted to synthesize all of this accumulated scientific data with the contemporary Biblical interpretation, producing bizarre and illogical hybrids like theistic evolution and the like. Others rejected the Scriptures as authoritative in any way. Under the pressure of all of this information, it is not surprising that many did the latter.

The classic fundamentalists wanted to present a third alternative. As it came to be fleshed out in The Fundamentals, the fundamentalist movement was primarily an attempt to establish the basic tenets of the Christian faith in the face of this onslaught of new information. They branched off of these tenets into corollaries truths based on the basic tenets of the literal interpretation of Scripture and the unique nature of Jesus (his virgin birth, incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection) but at their core, the fundamentals were focused solely on the anchor points of the Scriptures and Jesus.

Why were these the anchors? And what did the fundamentalists intend to happen once they had secured these anchors?

Fundamentalism was reactionary

At its core, fundamentalism was a reactionary movement. James Orr, later the editor of the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, wrote in his article “Holy Scripture and Modern Negation”:

Is there today in the midst of criticism and unsettlement a tenable doctrine of Holy Scripture for the Christian Church and for the world; and if there is, what is that doctrine? That is unquestionably a very pressing question at the present time. “Is there a book which we can regard as the repository of a true revelation of God and an infallible guide in the way of life, and as to our duties to God and man?” is a question of immense importance to us all. Fifty years ago, perhaps less than that, the question hardly needed to be asked among Christian people. It was universally conceded, taken for granted, that there is such a book, the book which we call the Bible. Here, it was believed, is a volume which is an inspired record of the whole will of God for man’s salvation; accept as true and inspired the teaching of that book, follow its guidance, and you cannot stumble, you cannot err in attaining the supreme end of existence, in finding salvation, in grasping the prize of a glorious immortality. (The Fundamentals, ch 5)

Fundamentalism began as an effort to wade through all of this new information without being distracted by it. It was an assertion of the foundations from which Christians could evaluate what most of the early fundamentalists considered valid ideological reasoning and scientific evidence.

In the midst of everything being thrown at them, often by atheists and secularists, men like Orr were attempting to rally Christians to the things which cannot change. Regardless of evidence presented for or against the Scriptures and the doctrines of Jesus, without them there was no Christianity. They became the fundamentalist’s sin qua non.

(By the way, Orr was a theistic evolutionist. He was trying to make sense of all this new information just as everyone else was, and in his article his primary response was to exalt the Scriptures as best he could. Nothing better demonstrates the transitory and reactionary nature of the early fundamentalist movement than this, especially when compared to modern fundamentalism which is almost always militantly young earth creationist.)

Fundamentalism was a transitional stage

Perhaps the most difficult thing to grasp about fundamentalism’s reactionary nature is that it was, by definition, transitional. Fundamentalism’s response to all of this new information was a way of setting an anchor in the midst of a stormy sea, but any ship’s captain will tell you that safe anchor in the midst of sea is not the same thing as arriving at your destination. You could argue quite convincingly that fundamentalism was intended to lead somewhere else and not to be an ends to itself. Again, I will allow James Orr to illustrate this:

If by a conflict of science and religion is meant that grievous mistakes have often been made, and unhappy misunderstandings have arisen, on one side and the other, in the course of the progress of science,—that new theories and discoveries, as in astronomy and geology, have been looked on with distrust by those who thought that the truth of the Bible was being affected by them,—that in some cases the dominant church sought to stifle the advance of truth by persecution,—this is not to be denied. It is an unhappy illustration of how the best of men can at times err in matters which they imperfectly understand, or where their prejudices and traditional ideas are affected. But it proves nothing against the value of the discoveries themselves, or the deeper insight into the ways of God of the men who made them, or of real contradiction between the new truth and the essential teaching of the Scriptures…It is never to be forgotten, also, that the error was seldom all on one side; that science, too, has in numberless cases put forth its hasty and unwarrantable theories and has often had to retract even its truer speculations within limits which brought them into more perfect harmony with revealed truth. (The Fundamentals, chapter 18)

Orr’s language showed the tension between his faith and his understanding of valid science. He did not want to get locked into a single opinion of the science because things were happening quickly. He remained fluid in his approach to the extra-biblical information and skeptical of those who had become dogmatically anti-scientific, all the while still asserting his fundamental belief in the truth of the Scriptures. This is a pristine example of fundamentalism’s transitional nature. Far from nailing down their opposition to things, they are attempting to nail down what it is that they are absolutely certain of in their faith.

(This gives us glimpse into what is probable the greatest flaw of neo-fundamentalism. They view the reactionary statements as normative. Reaction becomes their modus operandi. The neo-fundamentalists existed to react against something. Perhaps this is also why it is becoming increasingly isolated and ineffective.)

Closing Thoughts

While far from exhaustive, perhaps these two points can help us understand better what is foundational to fundamentalism. It is not primarily reaction but it was begun in reaction. In reaction to a deluge of ideological and scientific changes in the world around them, the early fundamentalists felt it was necessary to establish their fundamentals so they could transition the Christian faith and ministry to be effective in that world. They were striving for relevance and trying to hold the truth of God’s Word in the necessary tension with evolving ideologies.

Fundamentalism was meant to flex and bend as new science and ideology became available but always remain rooted in the two sin qua non – the literal interpretation of the Scripture and the doctrines of Christ. Unfortunately, as I will write in a later article, the horror of the Great War in 1914 and its sequel in 1941 transformed this inherently optimistic and forward-looking movement into something else entirely. But that is a story for another time.

I Am the World’s Worst Fundamentalist

Fundamentalism is the basis of everything that I have ever known. I was born while my father was attending a fundamentalist Bible college. He planted a fundamentalist church in New Jersey. My parents homeschooled me and my two sisters until I was in 11th grade, when I went to a small fundamentalist school. I graduated from a fundamentalist Bible college and worked in a fundamentalist church for the first seven years of my ministry career.

My problem is that I never bought into it. Everything about the fundamentalism that I grew up in felt forced. Whether it was knocking on my neighbor’s doors to hand them tracts or going to summer camp and getting ‘rededicated.’ I was always the slightly offbeat kid who did not quite fit in. Unlike my friends, I never hid the ‘unchristian’ parts of my faith, especially in the area of music.

It might have had something to do with my childhood problems (I had some kind of scar tissue in my brain that required several medications to repress neural activity until my brain could work around it) but in my teens, I saw the substance in my faith and just basically ignored everything else.

If we were singing hymns, I wanted to kick up the rhythm. If I was asked to preach, I almost always got talked to later about crossing some line or another. I repeatedly got in trouble while teaching at a Christian school because I had no problem with swearing, teenagers holding hands, etc. In short, I have always been a terrible fundamentalist. I conformed if I had to, but I never drank the Kool-Aid.

I like to believe that historical fundamentalism embraces truths that unify believers, not distinctions that give us excuses to separate from them. For me, fundamentalism begins and ends with a belief in the historical-grammatical, literal interpretation of Scripture. When you interpret the Bible literally, you will arrive at the conclusions that were the doctrinal foundations of fundamentalism:

• A rejection of the higher criticism of Scripture
• Acceptance of the virgin birth, incarnation and deity of Jesus

(People will argue lists that range from 5 to 11 ‘fundamentals’ but they all boil down to these two points).

My place in this blog is as one of the historians. I am fanatic when it comes to historical accuracy.