Fundamentalism and American Culture

by Marsden, George M. ;

  VI. Dispensationalism and the Baconian Ideal

  Dispensationalist thought was characterized by a dual emphasis on the supernatural and the scientific. Supernaturalism was a conscious and conspicuous organizing principle. Underlying dispensationalist thought, however, was an almost equally important set of ideas concerning how to look at things scientifically.

  At a major prophetic conference in 1895, Arthur T. Pierson, one of the leading representatives of the movement, summarized the basic philosophical assumptions of dispensational thought—and indeed much of the thought of the anti-modernist movement generally. Speaking of various systematic theologies that he considered artificial because they did not have the Second Coming at their center, he said: “I like Biblical theology that does not start with the superficial Aristotelian method of reason, that does not begin with an hypothesis, and then warp the facts and the philosophy to fit the crook of our dogma, but a Baconian system, which first gathers the teachings of the word of God, and then seeks to deduce some general law upon which the facts can be arranged.”1

  Whatever one might think of the accuracy of Pierson’s claim to be a true representative of the method of the early seventeenth-century champion of the objective empirical method, his appeal to Francis Bacon sounded a note that still rang true to many American Protestants. At least throughout the first two thirds of the nineteenth century “Lord Bacon” was the preeminently revered philosopher for many Americans, especially those of the dominant evangelical colleges. This popularity of Bacon, in turn, was built on the strong support for the Baconian tradition in Scottish Common Sense Realism.2

  Mid-nineteenth-century America is usually characterized, in literary history at least, by the full flowering of romanticism. Yet, especially among American college leaders, scientists, and theologians, transcendental and romantic trends had by no means successfully replaced commitment to empirical scientific analysis. Rather, the prestige that “the great Mr. Locke” had been given in eighteenth-century America was now challenged and surpassed not as much by Kant and Coleridge as by an even more rugged empiricist, Francis Bacon.3 Romantic and empiricist interests were not mutually exclusive, of course. The most uninspired taxonomer could weep at the sentiments of Longfellow, or break into a doxology over evidence of God’s design in nature. Evangelical professors who insisted on not going beyond the careful arrangement of the facts, could at the same time champion the popular romanticism and “religion of the heart” of the revivals.4 Even Common Sense Realism, although surely a foundation for empiricism, was based ultimately on an appeal to pre-rational intuitions that left room for moral sentiments.

  Nevertheless, when it came to identifying their philosophical stance, until after the Civil War American evangelicals overwhelmingly preferred the method of Francis Bacon to “metaphysical speculations.” Common Sense philosophy affirmed their ability to know “the facts” directly. With the Scriptures at hand as a compendium of facts, there was no need to go further. They needed only to classify the facts, and follow wherever they might lead.5 To return to Arthur Pierson’s statement of this principle: “a Baconian system … first gathers the teachings of the word of God, and then seeks to deduce some general law upon which the facts can be arranged.”

  To whatever degree dispensationalists consciously considered themselves Baconians (it is rare to find reflections on philosophical first principles), this closely describes the assumptions of virtually all of them. They were absolutely convinced that all they were doing was taking the hard facts of Scripture, carefully arranging and classifying them, and thus discovering the clear patterns which Scripture revealed. The unusual firmness of the facts of Scripture was believed guaranteed by its supernatural inspiration. Dispensationalists acknowledged that Scripture possessed a human as well as a divine character and they consistently denied mechanical dictation theories of inspiration. But the supernatural element was so essential to their view of Scripture, and the natural so incidental, that their view would have been little different had they considered the authors of Scripture to be simply secretaries. Their language and metaphors sometimes betrayed this fact. James Brookes, for instance, spoke on one occasion of “the Holy Spirit in the last letter He dictated to the apostle Paul….6 At a major Bible conference on “the Inspired Word,” organized by millenarian leaders in 1887, William Hoyt, although he attacked a dictation theory, spoke nonetheless of the prophetic portions as a “photographically exact forecasting of the future….” Using a term just coming into vogue, he said the Bible was in every detail “kept inerrant.”7

  “Inerrancy,” which was to become a code word for much of the fundamentalist movement, had a scientific quality that was related to the view of truth as directly apprehended facts. It was vital to the dispensationalists that their information be not only absolutely reliable but also precise. They considered the term “inerrancy” to carry this implication. Statements found in Scripture would not deviate from the exact truth. The importance of this assumption for prophetic interpretation is obvious. Precise numbers of years had to be calculated and correlated with actual historical events. Nathaniel West, one of the leading American interpreters of prophecy, insisted that the four hundred eighty-three years must mean “‘exactly’ 483 literal years” and the one thousand years “exactly ten centuries” on the grounds that these figures were ordained of God in the same way as were the laws of nature described by Newtonian physics.

  All are established, firm as the ordinances of the heavens, and the dominion of the Sun and the Moon, by whose motions they are measured, and whose offspring they are. Science, the boast of modern times, has nothing more fixed, nothing more exact.

  Likewise, West said, the “Law of the Seven“—a rule he applied to all sorts of things from the Sabbath to the four hundred ninety prophetic years and the seven dispensations—“is as much a literal law of God in Chronology governed by Sun, Moon and Stars, as are the laws of motion and gravitation, in Astronomy, which Kepler and Newton discovered….”8 Thus the millenarian’s view of Scripture was, in effect, modeled after the Newtonian view of the physical universe. Created by God, it was a perfect self-contained unity governed by exact laws which could be discovered by careful analysis and classification.

  This view of Scripture is implicit in their apologetics. Often they used a variation on the argument from design with Scripture rather than nature providing the evidence. Arthur T. Pierson, who was active in the formulation and defense of the millenarians’ view of Scripture and had organized the 1887 conference on the Bible, also had produced a work significantly entitled, “Many Infallible Proofs.” In this he maintained that if one approached Scripture “in a truly impartial and scientific spirit,” all honest doubt would be cured. “Nothing,” he said, “is to be accepted unless based on good evidence….” He asserted with utter confidence that the facts of Scripture would speak for themselves: “if there is one candid doubter living who has faithfully studied the Bible and the evidences of Christianity, he has not yet been found.” The reason why Mohammedans and Roman Catholics did not avow true Christianity was that for them it was considered a crime to read the Bible. “The consequence of searching the Scriptures would be the ruin of false faiths.”9

  When Scripture was looked upon as the compellingly perfect design of God, every detail was significant. Hence, even though the Bible was not intended to teach science, God had guided even the poetic language so as to anticipate scientific discoveries. Pierson, in addition to the standard evidences for Scriptural accuracy, pointed out some more unusual cases. Job, for instance, anticipated the modern discovery of the vibrations of light (morning and evening “sing”—both sound and light make vibrations) and the weight of air (“To assign to the wind its weight“). Solomon anticipated some of the basic operations of the human body. “Or ever the silver cord is loosed” referred to spinal marrow; “or the golden bowl be broken” suggested the basin that holds the brain; “or the pitcher be broken at the fountain” meant the lungs; and “
or the wheel broken at the cistern” referred to the heart as a wheel circulating blood. “Longfellow or Tennyson,” he hazarded, “might covet” the language used by Job “to describe refraction.”10

  In this view Scripture was an encyclopedic puzzle. It was a dictionary of facts that had been progressively revealed in various historical circumstances and literary genres and still needed to be sorted out and arranged11 Pierson went further than most in his anti-allegorical efforts to turn poetry into science. He also strayed from the characteristic dispensationalist claim to stick to plain meanings. Such extremes illustrate the general view of Scripture as a precisely designed unified production of God in which no clue was too small to be used in the search for hard facts.

  The role of the interpreter, according to the same Baconian assumptions, was not to impose hypotheses or theories, but to reach conclusions on the basis of careful classification and generalization alone. The disposition to divide and classify everything is one of the most striking and characteristic traits of dispensationalism. C. I. Scofield, the great systematizer of the movement, epitomized this tendency. In “Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth,” an authoritative summary of his views, Scofield interpreted the phrase of his title from the King James Bible to mean that “The Word of Truth, then, has right divisions … so any study of that Word which ignores those divisions must be in large measure profitless and confusing.”12 The work sketched out a series of distinctions: “The Jew, the Gentile, and the Church of God,” “The Seven Dispensations,” “The Two Advents,” “The Two Resurrections,” and “Law and Grace.” Regarding the last distinction (to take an example that became a source of conflict with other Calvinists who insisted on the primacy of grace in all ages) Scofield said characteristically, “It is … of vital moment to observe that Scripture never, in any dispensation, mingles these two principles.”13 Distinctions were also made on the basis of seemingly small variations in Biblical language. So, for instance, Scofield placed great weight on the distinction between “the kingdom of God” and “the kingdom of heaven” and on the differences among in, with, and upon as used with reference to the Holy Ghost.14

  Dispensationalist leaders regarded these methods of dividing and classifying as the only scientific ones. Scofield, for example, contrasted his work to previous “unscientific systems.”15 Similarly, Reuben Torrey regarded ideas basically as things to be sorted out and arranged. One of his major works, What the Bible Teaches (1898), is an incredibly dry five-hundred-page compilation of thousands of Biblical “propositions” supported by proof texts. The closest analogy would be to an encyclopedia or dictionary. Torrey explicitly defended this utter lack of style or elegance. “Beauty and impressiveness,” he said in the preface, “must always yield to precision and clearness.” As usual, his model was the scientist. Torrey depicted his work as “simply an attempt at a careful unbiased, systematic, thorough-going, inductive study and statement of Bible truth…. The methods of modern science are applied to Bible study—thorough analysis followed by careful synthesis.”16

  Induction had to start with the hard facts, and dispensationalists insisted that the only proper way to interpret Scripture was in “the literal sense,” unless the text or the context absolutely demanded otherwise.17 All dispensational interpreters agreed on this. Prophecies must mean exactly what they said (“Israel” must mean the Jews, never the church). Prophetic numbers referred to exact periods of time. Predictions would come true as real events, although the Bible might use images to describe them—as “The Beast” of Revelation 19 for the earth’s last and worst political tyrant.18

  These literalistic conclusions reflected the accentuation of an attitude toward the Bible that had been strong in America since the days of the Puritans. The Puritans too had assumed that Biblical interpretation was an exact science with precise conclusions. “There is only one meaning for every place in Scripture,” wrote William Ames, a contemporary of Francis Bacon and one of the great Puritan expositors. “Otherwise the meaning of Scripture would not only be unclear and uncertain, but there would be no meaning at all—for anything which does not mean one thing surely means nothing.”19 The Puritans accordingly attempted to keep to the plain meaning of Scripture, developing a “plain style” of preaching as opposed to the flourishes of Anglican rhetoric. Nineteenth-century American dispensationalists moved in a similar direction. Their method of presenting their views was the “Bible reading,” a plain exposition of the words of the text, as opposed to the flowery orations of such princes of the pulpit as Henry Ward Beecher or Phillips Brooks.20 Like the Puritans,21 the dispensationalists were strongly oriented toward the printed word, eschewing the mysterious in both exposition and worship. They assumed a literate audience who could follow the exposition of the text and also study it on their own. Personal devotions meant Bible study, combined with prayer.

  Such emphasis on the printed word is sometimes viewed as socially conservative and elitist22 and in the emerging fundamentalist movement seems oddly yoked with the revivalist orientation toward the spoken word which had parallel populist and radical overtones. There is no explaining this paradox except to observe that it is in conformity with such recurrent conflicts in fundamentalism as that of head and heart religion or that of being simultaneously the religious establishment and cultural outsiders. All of these tensions were inherited from the American revivalist-evangelical-Puritan tradition which was an amalgamation of traditions and not always internally consistent. The strong concern for the exact meaning of the printed word, however, is one of the principal things that distinguish fundamentalism from other less intellectual forms of American revivalism or from the more experientially oriented holiness tradition or—most populist, sectarian, and vocally oriented of all—pentecostalism.

  Nevertheless, the prophetic teachers regarded their approach as a popular one. The literalistic approach, they maintained, was simply that of common sense. Since it was based on laws of language and meaning which were common to all people, the method was especially appropriate for the “commonman.” “Appeal to the common sense of any stranger …,” said the Reverend Stephen H. Tyng, Jr., of New York, host of the first International Prophetic Conference in 1878. Common sense, he said, would prove that “a literal rendering is always to be given in the reading of Scripture, unless the context makes it absurd.”23 “I insist,” said Professor Jerry Lummis (of Lawrence College, Wisconsin) in an address at the 1886 Conference, “that the New Testament statements conform to the laws of language as truly as do those of Xenophon.” We should expect no “mystical” language with “secret or hidden meaning.” Rather, said Lummis, the prophetic teachings of Christ “are just as easily apprehended by the common sense of the common people as are His teachings in respect to duty.”24 “In ninety-nine out of a hundred cases,” concurred Reuben Torrey, “the meaning that the plain man gets out of the Bible is the correct one.”25

  The belief that the facts and laws they were dealing with were matters of plain common sense was basic to the dynamics of the movement. Although fundamentalists emphasized that it was scientific, they never regarded their scheme of Biblical interpretation as esoteric. Esoteric, complicated, mystical, allegorical, and other fantastical interpretations were the characteristic productions of theology professors, especially Germans.26 Their own scheme was by contrast presented as simple and straightforward interpretation of fact according to plain laws available to common sense and the commonman. Fundamentalism did not develop in seminaries, but in Bible conferences, Bible schools, and, perhaps most importantly, on the personal level of small Bible-study groups where the prophetic truths could be made plain.

  The structures of the movement harmonized with its ideology. Rather than developing a hierarchical order from the top down, it first grew from a network of inter-personal and inter-institutional relationships,27 as the informal summer Bible conference demonstrates. The vacation setting put everyone on almost the same level and social amenities gave way to the higher spiritual purpose
. Yet in the context of common sense informality and equality, a new hierarchy readily emerged. The structure was at least analogous to the ideology. As in the Baconian view of reality one began with particular facts and built from them conclusions of universal validity, so out of the network of seemingly egalitarian relationships among Bible teachers and students effective evangelistic leaders emerged to build authoritarian empires.

  Not everyone associated with the networks of Bible teachers, Bible institutes, Bible conferences, and evangelists precisely fit the ideological mold of dispensationalism and thoroughgoing Baconianism. Dwight L. Moody was an outstanding exception. A whole spectrum of opinions separated him and his dispensationalist associates. Yet, while there was not complete uniformity of belief, the intellectual predispositions associated with dispensationalism gave fundamentalism its characteristic hue.

  VII. History, Society, and the Church

  HISTORY

  More explicitly articulated than their Baconianism (which they simply regarded as self-evident common sense), the dispensationalists’ other distinct intellectual predisposition was a strong inclination toward the supernatural. “Heightened supernaturalism”1 appeared everywhere in dispensationalist thought. Their view of the supernatural origins of Scripture rendered the human element negligible. They stood firm against any erosion of traditional doctrinal emphasis on the miraculous, especially in fundamental teachings about the birth, work, death, and resurrection of Christ. Their view of his dramatic second coming fit this pattern. The great conflict preceding the millennium would be a terrible confrontation between the hosts of Christ and the minions of Satan. This coming conflict, moreover, would mark the culmination of a fierce struggle that dominated all of history. Accordingly, Christians must view themselves as caught between two powers, Christ and Satan.2