James Madison was keenly aware of this when in his notes preparing for his famous Memorial & Remonstrance he wrote:
I probably reproduced more here than necessary for the thesis of this post. However, the different points of what's shown above encapsulate what is key to the controversy over how to understand the political theology of the American Founding. On point V6, John Adams endorses the "essential parts" only of the biblical canon position. Or perhaps that the canon in general is inspired, with particular words contained therein subject to dispute.
Adams was "up" on the state of late 18th Century biblical criticism in America and Europe. We know he rejected atheistic and deistic notions that attempted to debunk the concept of special revelation entirely just as he rejected "Athanasian" orthodox Trinitarian understandings of the canon.
Adams' third way was a path traveled by those who understood themselves to be Christian-Deists, unitarians, those in the "latitudinarian" wing of the Anglican Church. And they didn't necessarily speak in a univocal voice.
Still, this third way needed a solid ground on which to rest its case. That came in the form of belief in the existence of an overriding Providence, a future state of rewards and punishments, and something uniquely special about Jesus' place in history as embodying religious perfection.
As it relates to the canon of sacred scripture, certain parts were thus "essential" and not up for grabs. Other parts were either "suspected" or outright rejected. Unlike Thomas Jefferson, Bolingbroke and others, Adams preferred more to "suspect" or question rather than outright reject, for instance, the teachings of St. Paul and other parts of the Bible that didn't constitute the "essential parts."
On the other hand, Jesus' words were essential.
In his Marginalia, Notes on Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Arthur Ashley Sykes, D.D., Adams uses the term "pure" for what he views as those "essential," non-negotiable truths of the faith.
Against whom is this woe pronounced? How shall we know what is pure and uncorrupted but by by the first revelation? Is Sykes pure? Is Priestley pure? Is Lindsey pure? Is Paul pure? Is Jude pure? Is Locke pure? Is the great knight pure? Love God and Man! That is pure. Do as you would be done by! That is pure. Three units, are three times one! That is pure. All this can be understood by man, woman, and [] children, rich and poor, without the study of three score years in a million volumes of philosophers, divines, and historians in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Russian.Did you see that? A.A. Sykes, Joseph Priestley, Theophilus Lindsey, St. Paul, the book of Jude, John Locke get lumped in the same box of questionable "purity." There may have been wisdom and truth in general in all of these sources, but still fallibility.
The essential, non-negotiable truths of Adams' creed are "Love God and Man! That is pure. Do as you would be done by!" In other words, the Sermon on the Mount.
Interestingly, Adams places rejection of the Trinity in the same box as he does the other "pure" teachings like the Sermon on the Mount. It's not just some hard to understand mystery over which good Christian might disagree. Those who affirm the Trinity indulge in a "supposition [that] is destructive of the foundation of all human knowledge and of all distinction between Truth and Falsehood."
10 comments:
However, the different points of what's shown above encapsulate what is key to the controversy over how to understand the political theology of the American Founding.
Once again, this ignores the theological elephant in the room, the problem of "Protestantism." All of Madison's reservations can be posed under that umbrella, and the Unitarian Controversy pushed the envelope of Protestantism to the point where it was questioned whether they were still even Christian.
You'll also see the theological outliers like John Adams [and as we suspect, James Madison], continually try to make room and attempt to squeeze their heretical selves under the Christian umbrella, if for no other reason than it would be damned politically inconvenient to be pushed outside it and be known not just as a mere heretic [Protestantism creates heresy practically by definition], but as an infidel.
As Tom Paine learned, infidelity is bad for business, if your business is politics.
Theologically I have no problem with Dr. Gregg Frazer "as a Christian" trying to push these guys out from the umbrella as mere "theistic rationalists," but as Gregg is a Protestant himself [albeit of some relatively orthodox variety], he is vulnerable to Madison's criticisms as well. How much heresy before you're no longer Christian, and who decides?
Yes it's true that the Christian-Deists and unitarians took cover in "Protestant Christianity's" social standing. And they had to deal with the "Athanasians" of Protestant Christianity of that era trying to push them out of the umbrella and lump them with the "infidels" (or at least 1/2 way there).
I know you dislike being reminded of the context in which such statements are made, Jon, but you may want to read the paragraph from Sykes to which Adams was responding. It begins on page 351 at: https://archive.org/stream/memoirsoflifewri00disn#page/351/mode/1up
In essence, Adams was making one of the arguments that I made in my booklet The Founders and the Myth of Theistic Rationalism in which I pointed out that every claim to know the canon of Scripture is a rationalistic claim. Frazer's canon of Scripture differs from my own in that he uses a Bible which denies the canonicity of the last twelve verses of Mark, the trinitarian formula of I John 5:7 and several other statements found in the Bible that I accept as true. Frazer's canon is founded on a rational consideration of the evidence for and against various individual passages of Scripture. My canon is also founded on a rational consideration of the evidence for and against various individual passages of Scripture, though in my case, I've studied the evidence for myself rather than trusting in the studies of others as I suspect Frazer has done. Adams was endorsing the exact same approach of using reason i.e. "the first revelation" to determine which passages
claiming to be Scripture were actually Scripture i.e. "pure" and which were not. There is no difference between Adams' application of reason to the Canon and the standard Christian approach to the canon today.
I did read it and my problem is when you invoke "context" to try and manipulate the meaning of the words of the original texts in question.
As for you theory about application of reason to the canon, it may be correct, but I doubt it's accurately termed the "standard Christian" approach.
In Madison's notes, he observes different approaches. The idea that one can use his reason to extract certain "essential parts" from the books in the canon, while questioning or outright rejecting the rest, I have no problem with. But it was in the late 18th Century and today associated with a more theologically liberal approach to the faith.
The method has the possibility to leads to the Jefferson Bible or Bolingbroke like faith that rejects the entire Old Testament, all the books St. Paul wrote, Revelation and more.
And again, I have no personal problem with such faith, but as I observe, it seems the antithesis of everything conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists stand for.
If you want to tell such folks, you really all employ this method whether you know or not, be my guest, you may be right.
http://ourfoundingtruth.blogspot.com/2017/02/jq-adams.html
I don't need to "tell such folks" that they rely on rational considerations in order to determine which passages of Scripture are valid. The vast majority of Christians already know this. The technical term for this rational consideration is "textual criticism," and it's taught in just about every Christian university in the world. You could literally pick any random church in America, ask the pastor about textual criticism, and he'll tell you that it's the method of reasoning by which Christians determine which portions of ancient manuscripts are actually part of the Canon of Scripture. Or if you'd like, you could check out either of these links:
https://www.gotquestions.org/textual-criticism.html
https://www.theopedia.com/new-testament-textual-criticism
No the vast majority of "Christians" do NOT know this because they don't engage in "textual criticism" at all to begin with. One thing that resonates with me on what John Locke and the unitarians (like Disney in the text Adams was responding to) noted on salvation was the average person did not have the mind of Aristotle, but to the contrary. In today's parlance we would observe that the average IQ is 100 and those on the left half of the bell curve (50% of the population) need to be taken as they are, as equals. The Bible is not an easy book and many of the doctrines that have been extracted therefrom are hard to understand. Therefore, it would be cosmically unjust to demand understanding or assent to various things that have been demanded in order to be saved or considered a "real Christian" or whathaveyou.
Perhaps it would be different if you framed it as "the vast majority of pastors."
Still, what I see from those links is that those who are qualified or otherwise interested in "textual criticism" will engage in such and end up with a happy ending, something like this:
https://www.gotquestions.org/faith.html
See section 1 in particular. It's reminiscent of Madison's "as dictated every letter by inspiration" position.
What they should find is that the vast majority of "differences" in the different reproductions of the original texts are no more significant than whether "who" or "whom" would be the correct word to use. And if more significant, let's not make mountains out of molehills and deconstruct, or limit notions like "canon" or "inerrancy," "infallibility."
Again, I don't see Jefferson, Franklin, J. Adams, Priestley, or even Bolingbroke as trying to debunk the concept of "special revelation" entirely. But where they end up with is texts, passages, entire books, being either rejected, or as I see it with Adams, questioned.
Adams doesn't question the sermon on the mount. Jesus' words weren't questioned. The apostles, original evangelists insofar as they reproduced Jesus' words and testified to His witness were credible. When they spoke in other contexts, not so much. All of Paul's epistles under such method could be "questioned" at best (Adams' apparent position, as I read him) or rejected at worst (Jefferson, Bolingbroke).
Now, I see a lot of theologically liberal, emergent Church type Christians of today arriving at that destination. I personally consider John Shelby Spong to be as good a Christian as the Pope or Jerry Falwell.
But no, I don't see this as an acceptable outcome to "those folks" who are conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists. I've dealt with many of them here, and OFT's link is representative of what they've been taught. Once you start using your reason to accept and reject certain parts of the received canon you are rejecting the whole thing.
This is an excellent demonstration of the difference between engaging with a few representatives of a group on a blog and actually living among them for a lifetime.
Yeah well I get around too with lots of different folks in this world. Maybe you and I would agree that conservative Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists don't speak for normative Christianity.
Most of the ordinary folks I've come across from this tradition fit Locke's and Disney's description of human nature. They do their best and very often, not their very best to parrot what some authority -- their pastor, a family member, etc. -- has drilled into them. They aren't competent and don't understand the faith well enough to engage in arguments among academic types. Though, they are likelier to be debating these issues with their fellow age related friends who perhaps aren't members of their tradition.
From my experiences with my friends who have grown up in this tradition (I was born in 1973) they were every bit as likely to fornicate, get drunk, consume pornography, smoke pot, etc. as the rest of us.
Blogger Bill Fortenberry said...
I don't need to "tell such folks" that they rely on rational considerations in order to determine which passages of Scripture are valid. The vast majority of Christians already know this.
Again, not "Christian," Protestant.
It may come as a shock, but Protestantism still remains the minority of Christianity. Catholics, be they Eastern or Roman, combined are the majority and do not as individuals decide what belongs in the Bible and what does not. It is believed that the Holy Spirit, through the Church and via Tradition [capital "T"], wrote the canon.*
You are entitled to your opinions, Bill, not entitled to speak for Christianity. I happen to think Protestantism is responsible for the Founding as we know it [impossible under the Magisterium], but you're making the same error Dr. Frazer does, letting your theology infringe on the study of history. Your Biblicism is idiosyncratic, and as Jon aptly points out, your method is no different from Jefferson's.
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*CCC 105, which quotes Dei Verbum:
God is the author of Sacred Scripture. “The divinely revealed realities, which are contained and presented in the text of Sacred Scripture, have been written down under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.”
“For Holy Mother Church, relying on the faith of the apostolic age, accepts as sacred and canonical the books of the Old and the New Testaments, whole and entire, with all their parts, on the grounds that, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author, and have been handed on as such to the Church herself.”
Blogger Jonathan Rowe said...
Yeah well I get around too with lots of different folks in this world. Maybe you and I would agree that conservative Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists don't speak for normative Christianity.
Most of the ordinary folks I've come across from this tradition fit Locke's and Disney's description of human nature. They do their best and very often, not their very best to parrot what some authority -- their pastor, a family member, etc. -- has drilled into them. They aren't competent and don't understand the faith well enough to engage in arguments among academic types.
This is, by the way, St. Thomas More's 500-yr-old argument against early Reformer William Tyndale, that precious few master the ancient Hebrew and Greek to make any assessment whatsoever, and whether it's the Catholic magisterium or some Protestant scholar or preacher, in the end the vast majority of Christians are going to have to take someone else's word for what the Bible says [and indeed what should be in it!].
http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/moretyndale.pdf
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It is only in the last treatise, the Confutation of Tyndale's Answer, that More comes to the
strongest part of his case against Tyndale, in the impracticality of Tyndale's vision for ordinary
people. They cannot be the “spiritual man” demanded by the reformer, as they have lives to live,
and may not be very educated anyway. More creates a fictional dialogue between two ordinary
women and Tyndale's fellow reformer Robert Barnes. They ask him a series of questions about
the significance of his program for them. Since they are not learned people, and since they
cannot spend all their time scrutinizing the Scripture, how are they to know truth from falsehood?
At the outset, the first woman claims to trust Barnes, but wants to know how she is to stay on the
right path once he is gone. The second woman, who is illiterate, is more hostile. The standard
Protestant answer to their question, which Barnes gives, would be that a good preacher will give
them doctrine that is consistent with the scripture. In the Obedience, Tyndale had recommended
a program of teaching to enable them to make good judgements. More's women point out that
this will not do—and here More's understanding of language comes into play in a way that
conflicts strongly with Tyndale's. More does not believe that certain knowledge can arise from a
text, analyzed by philological means or not. His women are not only the unlearned, but all
humanity. At the same time, the inferiority of their femaleness serves to disgrace Protestants:
even women can confute the reformers.
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