422 - The Bible Tells Them So: The Discourse of Protestant Fundamentalism

The Bible Tells Them So: The Discourse of Protestant Fundamentalism
By Kathleen C. Boone
Albany, State University of New York Press, 1988. 139 pp. $34.50 ($10.95 pb.).

This is an extremely good book, one of the best ever written on fundamentalism. It is deeply informed, well researched, and very well written. Obviously, some readers may think, this reviewer would say so, for the book displays numerous agreements with the reviewer's own work. But her position is not identical with mine, and where she puts a

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question mark against my own arguments, as over literalism, I would often accept that my earlier position was inadequate (and have now tried to improve upon it, as in an article soon to appear in Faith and Philosophy). Boone's discussion is so good that a review must be less a criticism of it and more a series of reflections arising from it.

The essential importance of her book is that she writes not primarily as either a theologian or a biblical scholar, but as a scholar in English literature; and her study, as the title indicates, focuses upon the discourse of fundamentalism, which she examines with reference to the theories of Stanley Fish and Michel Foucault-a very attractive prospect, in view of the wide interest now being taken in hermeneutics as part of a possible approach to, or justification of, essentially conservative religion. Her chapters deal with with the plain book, the inerrant text, the literal sense or senses, the interpretative community, the authority of interpreters, and-a particularly instructive example-the conception of hell. Essential to the approach is the view, in my judgment correct, that the core of fundamentalism is a certain type of discourse, a way of speech that is the real authority. Thus, ironically, inerrancy itself is rather marginal to fundamentalism and incidental to its working. Participation in the authoritative type of discourse is more important than either theological competence (which actually counts for little) or consistency in biblical interpretation. The fundamentalist preacher, in spite of a seeming authority, is not free to deviate from this style of discourse.

The author is well aware of the distinction made between fundamentalists and evangelicals, and handles it well. Much depends on the way in which terms are defined. But, however they are defined, this remains a problem throughout her book, because much of the discourse of fundamentalism is a discourse of more general evangelicalism as well, and it is only at certain points that distinctive elements, tied to strict inerrancy or other features peculiar to fundamentalism, can be separated out. Although a distinction between fundamentalism and evangelicalism is perfectly possible, and on the level of individuals is entirely proper, as an ecclesial reality the two merge together to a considerable extent, and the very factor of discourse, which Boone has emphasized, helps to explain this.

For this, one or two additional reasons may be suggested. One is that, although evangelicalism is certainly not tied to inerrancy doctrine, there has not been, historically speaking, any prominent and well-known proposal about the nature of the Bible that is distinctively evangelical but markedly different from the fundamentalist one. The latter very easily functions, therefore, as a kind of badge of evangelical identity. The anti-liberalism of much evangelicalism works in the same way. People like to think that the liberals "rejected the Bible." But of course they did not, and the authority of the Bible remained central throughout the liberal period. It meant, indeed, taking the Bible in a very different way from the conservative evangelical way; but it was still the

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authoritative Bible. Only by applying the fundamentalist test of inerrancy was it possible for evangelicals to sustain their accusation that liberalism rejected the Bible. Even, therefore, where evangelicalism is carefully distinguished from fundamentalism, in respect of views of the Bible there has usually been considerable overlap.

Boone writes in the shadow of recent scandals affecting the television evangelists. She is careful not to over-emphasize this aspect and wants, justifiably, to work rather on the level of the millions of simple and sincere fundamentalist people. The televangelists have been "erroneously perceived" as the anointed spokesmen of American fundamentalism. Well, yes and no. These same persons, whom she wants to deemphasize, seem to keep popping up in the discussion. And she might have added, as a literary scholar, that no one should have been surprised by these scandals, for there is a long history of such ongoings, and American literature shows many excellent examples. In this respect, the mainstream churches have an immensely better record.

I think that, in a way, the television evangelist, even if he is not typical or representative, still is the anointed high priest, is the clear representative of the direction in which evangelicalism has gone and is going. He is the pinnacle of a system of thought that strongly emphasizes authority but actually has no authority other than its public (or market?) and its own type of discourse. Thus, those respectable leaders among evangelists who seek to overcome the scandals have no means to do so properly, for there is no critique adequate for the phenomenon of the errant televangelist that does not also put in question the entire mode in which evangelical life and thinking exist.

Boone rightly emphasizes the centrality of the Bible in fundamentalist discourse, and this provides it with its marked textuality. But more attention might have been given to another dimension. When the fundamentalist has to talk with an experienced biblical scholar or theologian, he or she quickly has to slip away from the ground of textual quotation used within the fundamentalists' own public; and here the tendency is to fall back on slogans supposed to represent the Reformation. Sola scriptura is the one most often heard (why in Latin, for a constituency where practically no Latin is known?); the Islamic "people of the book" is now, incongruously, creeping in as well. But such a move at once loses touch with textuality. Sola scriptura isn't in the Bible, one can't give chapter or verse for it, no one knows who said it or in what connection, it isn't part of a text like a verse of Scripture. Thus, underlying all the repetition of biblical texts there ties a network of meaning vaguely expressing what is supposed to be Protestant tradition. And the handling of these connections is vague and diffuse, for it cannot be made precise without a historical consciousness, the reading of Reformational literature, a developed scholarly awareness, and all sorts of other things that fundamentalism in its dominant form fails to furnish. Is the Bible the ultimate authority? If yes, then why should we

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take post-Reformational slogans like sola scriptura to have central architectonic authority?

Actually, it looks as if Protestant fundamentalism is coming closer, not to the Reformation, but to the sort of late medieval Catholicism against which the Reformers protested. The Reformers protested against the ignorance of the Catholic priesthood, and fundamentalist leadership is likewise characteristically ignorant: there are of course exceptions, but so there were in medieval Catholicism. If the fundamentalist pastor exercises the extraordinary power Boone describes, what has been the point of the endless Protestant polemics against the power of the Roman priesthood? The television evangelist sells religious comfort to a gullible public or religious market, just as the seller of indulgences did long ago. Of course, one cannot say that this is true of all fundamentalism; but it was not then true of all Roman Catholicism either. Fundamentalism prides itself on its numerical success, just as Catholicism, always the largest in numbers, did. And, if the Catholic church imprisoned the Bible in the categories of its tradition, fundamentalism likewise does so in the patterns of its discourse, as Boone shows so well. The difference, as she sees, is that Catholic authority is hierarchical, visible, and confessedly human; fundamentalist authority is informal, invisible, and by owning no basis other than the divine authority of the Bible succeeds in having no authority at all, other than its own form of speech.

James Barr
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, Tennessee