PDF Version

From Protestant Fundamentalist to Catholic Fundamentalist?

11th January, 2011 - Posted by Wolf Paul - No Comments

A little while ago I came across the websites of Fr. Dwight Longenecker, a Bob Jones University graduate turned Anglican turned Roman Catholic. Much of what he has to say I find interesting and helpful, but lately he seems to have given in to the same temptation many converts from one Christian tradition to another experience: to criticize your former co-religionists in ways that, unless you have subconsciously suppressed such knowledge, you know full well to be inaccurate and unfair.

A case in point is his recent blog post, “Revealed Religion or Relevant and Radical?“

He points to a re-alignment that is underway in Christianity, drawing a major fault line not between denominations but rather between those in all denominations who view religion as a matter of revelation and about absolute truth, and those, again in all denominations, who view it as a human construct which is, like all things, relative, and has to be made or kept relevant by getting rid of or changing things not palatable to contemporary folk. This is a very real development which holds out hope for some type of unity among those who believe in God’s revelation, but Fr Longenecker unfairly puts conservative Evangelicals such as he once was into the “Relevant and Radical” camp. He does so by inaccurate, misleading, and even false statements.

1. Zondervan and “Today’s New International Version”

Fr. Longenecker points to Zondervan Publishing, which he calls “the largest Evangelical publishing house,” and their plan to publish a “gender free” version of the Bible called “Today’s NIV.” This is supposed to be evidence that Evangelicals belong in the “Relevant and Radical” camp for having swallowed the feminist agenda, but the document he links to to explain what’s wrong with such a “gender free” version of the Bible is written by — Wayne Grudem, a respected conservative Evangelical theologian. The truth of the matter, and I believe that Fr. Longenecker knows that full well, is that opinion on the subject of feminism, and how it should or should not influence Bible translation, interpretation, and theology, is just as divided in the Evangelical camp as it is in the Roman Catholic church, where nuns, who still play a major role in educating young Catholics in many countries, are often in the forefront of feminist theology. Zondervan started out as a conservative Christian publishing house, and indeed publishes many Evangelical titles including the popular NIV, but it is no longer owned by Evangelicals, but by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., hardly a paragon of Evangelicalism or any form of Christianity. And while Zondervan publishes the NIV and TNIV in North America, it is actually a project of the International Bible Society, now known as Biblica.

It is worthwhile pointing out that less than 30% of changes between the NIV and the TNIV involve gender, and none of these refer to God or Jesus Christ.

By the way, TNIV is not a planned version, it has been on the market since 2005, and Biblica has announced a new version for 2011 which will replace both the NIV and TNIV, which suggests that unless they want to lose a large share of the market, they will correct some of the more controversial attempts at “gender neutrality.”

2. Luther’s opinion on James

Fr Longenecker says that while Protestants accuse Catholics of adding to the Scriptures, they have been in the business of taking away from the Scriptures from the very beginning, when they “took away” the (Old Testament) Apocrypha, and Luther wanted to eliminate the Epistle of James and Revelation. Fact is, Luther was not the only one of his time who doubted the canonicity of James and the Book of the Revelation (as well as others, such as Hebrews and Jude); notable Catholic contemporaries of Luther, such as Erasmus of Rotterdam and Luther’s opponent at the disputation in Augsburg, Italian Cardinal Thomas Cajetan, expressed similar sentiments in their writings. Much more important is the fact that the Epistle of James and the Book of the Revelation have always been part of the Protestant Bible, Luther’s personal views notwithstanding. As for the Apocrypha, that was not so much a “removal” by the Reformers, but a return for the Old Testament to the canon of Judaism, to the Scriptures that were in use in the Palestine of Jesus’ day. Judaism never considered the Apocrypha part of the Scriptures; they made their way into the Christian canon by way of the Septuagint, a translation produced in Egypt by Greek-speaking scholars.

3. Radical Protestants and Sola Scriptura

Fr Longenecker asserts that radical Protestants and conservative Protestants both believe in the principle of Sola Scriptura, i.e. that Scripture alone is the ultimate authority, and also in the principle of Private Interpretation, i.e. that everyone can make the Scriptures say what they want them to say. I think Fr Longenecker knows full well that radical Protestants, also called liberal Protestants or revisionists, have pretty much given up all pretense of considering the text of Scripture authoritative. They hold to the idea that “the church created the bible, the church can change the bible”¹ which is as far removed from Sola Scriptura as the Roman Catholic teaching the phrase was supposed to counter, that Tradition is as authoritative as Scripture. Fr Longenecker also knows that what he calls Private Interpretation was formulated to  counter the medieval Church’s position that the ordinary believers could not understand Scripture and thus it was best to not make it available to them. No credible Evangelical theologian holds that “you can make the Bible say what you want it to say;” every credible Evangelical theologian will tell you that Sola Scripture rightly understood involves the consensus of the church as a key to interpreting the Bible, and that the phenomenon of “every believer a little pope” is an aberration and not the way it is supposed to be. But this is not simply an Evangelical phenomenon: in Roman Catholicism there are plenty of people who fervently believe in the private interpretation of what the Church teaches, which is why there are “Catholics for Choice”, “Catholics for Women’s Ordination”, and the many who are sometimes called “Cafeteria Catholics.” Their tastes (and therefore what they pick from the Catholic Cafeteria) may differ between the US and my country of Austria, but the phenomenon is very real everywhere, among Catholics, Evangelicals, and probably in every other Christian tradition.

4.Evangelical Literalism

In another post, “A Catholic Way of Seeing“, Fr Longenecker complains that his suggestion that Moses’ Burning Bush was a foreshadowing of the Virgin Mary burning with the fire of divine love prompted the accusation by a Protestant that he was reading back into Scripture something that wasn’t there.

He blames this on Protestants having “imbibed … the cynical, literalistic, rationalism of the historico-critical methods of Biblical interpretation”, and says that “Like the village idiot, who took apart the clock to discover time, then couldn’t put it back together again, they dissect sacred Scripture looking for the ‘true meaning’ which they never find and then ridicule people, who through a mystical exegesis propose that they have found the true meaning.”

The Catholic, on the other hand,

(or at least a certain kind of Catholic) will say, “Ah, the burning bush. It is not simply a burning bush. It is a miraculous moment. It is a divine revelation to humanity of more depth and wonder and meaning than we can articulate. It is  the burning love of God. It is a the Holy Spirit fire. It is the Sacred Heart of Jesus–burning with an unquenchable fire–aflame always and yet never consuming the human heart. It is the Blessed Virgin Mary who was overshadowed by the burning love of the Holy Spirit, who became the mother of the burning babe while never having her virginity consumed. It is not just a burning bush it is the burning radiance of the mystery of the Immaculate Conception. It is the burning fire at the heart of the altar of God in heaven. It is the candle on the altar, the charcoal in the thurible, the blaze of the pillar of fire and the tongues of flame at Pentecost. …”

I believe that Fr. Longenecker knows that not all Protestants are the same, and his consistent dismissal of their differences as unimportant is part of what I am talking about. When Evangelicals talk about interpreting the Bible, and I am sure Fr. Longenecker learned that at BJU, they speak of the need to first determine what the Biblical text says, and then, secondly, to determine what it says authoritatively to the church, to the people of God, and finally, perhaps, to determine what it says, devotionally, to me. The first is the objective meaning determined by language in its historical context, with all that includes concerning the person and situation of the author, the surrounding culture, etc., and in that context no Evangelical would say that  “It was a tree in the desert of Horeb that had bright red flowers on it, and in the radiating waves of heat in the desert, and being a bit light headed from hunger and heat exhaustion, Moses thought it was ‘on fire’ and he then had a ‘mystical experience’ which he interpreted as a revelation from God.” In that context, they will say that it was a bush, and that somehow, by divine intervention, it burned without being consumed by the fire.

The second is the way we are to understand it as the authoritative Word of God for the whole people of God, and that is determined both by the natural, historical meaning, and by the consensus of the church.

The third is the way that we, thousands of years removed from the author and his situation, find meaning in the text for our personal lives. And it is pretty clear that Fr. Longenecker’s description of a “Catholic vision” of the Burning Bush is a whole slew of possible “what this means to me” while the Protestant was concerned with the objective meaning of the text. In fact, the Protestant in this case understands the word “is” in exactly the same way Catholics understand it in the Words of Institution, when Christ said, “This is my body. … This is my blood.”

To come back to the re-alignment of those who believe in revealed religion versus those who believe in relative and relevant religion, Fr. Longenecker would do well to recognize that in this re-alignment most Evangelicals, and certainly conservative Evangelicals, will end up on the same side of the divide as himself. It does not behoove him to withdraw into a Catholic Fundamentalism which is just as separatist and judgmental of others as the Protestant Fundamentalism of which he once was a part.

1.  Among revisionists, the one most frequently quoted with this statement is Charles E. Bennison, discredited-but-still-hanging-on Episcopal bishop of Pennsylvania. But some Catholic apologists have also been heard to use this argument, for what purpose I do not understand.↑

Share on Facebook