Astronomy and Politics Through the Lens of Epistemology
How do We Know What We Know?
What is Our Method of Evaluating Truth?

Historical Background

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Actually, it began at the very origins of the current evangelical movement when evangelicals began to break away from the larger Protestant denominations.  Two principal events took place in Protestant denominations in the 1880's which stimulated a fisher that would result in outright rebellion and total separation from Protestant denominations over the next century.  Yet those two events cannot be understood separate from the historical perceptions of the time.  That spiritual perception was greatly moved by the awareness of the Abolitionists who were the Christian activists who lobbied our government to free the slaves both long before and during the Civil War.  That story is brilliantly reported from a Christian perspective by a PBS documentary called, “The Abolitionists”.  If the reader goes through the intensive Bible study that follows on why Christians should be involved in politics, I would highly recommend it as an absolutely, astounding inspirational work and an example of Christian action done the right way--Biblically speaking.

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The church in the 1870s and 80s was properly abuzz with the inspirational knowledge that a mere hand full of Christians had transformed a nation into overcoming the sin of slavery.  That success was the catalyst that encouraged many legitimate believers to wish to do the same, but for varied, yet still developing theological reasons.  It was in this environment that two deceptions would rock the very purpose of the Christian Gospel in mainline Protestant circles.  If I am to be successful in the following Bible study, it will be essential that one recognizes two critical historical deceptions and why they are wrong by rightly dividing the Word of God.

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Deception #1

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The first major deception was introduced in Germany in 1886.  Julius Wellhausen published his Prolegomena to the History of Israel.  This would later develop into what is known as the “multi-documentary hypothesis” of the Bible, otherwise known today as the J.E.D.P theory.  It was not that doing Biblical analysis from a document perspective was in itself a problem.  Rather, it was Wellhausen who argued that, “the Bible provides historians with an important source, but that they cannot take it literally” (New World Encyclopedia).  That quote and the rest of his treatise meant that what Christians call the five books of the Pentateuch and what Jews call the Torah was merely a manufactured invention of scribes over the centuries, who later stitched together the various documents to form the early Bible.  This denied the authorship by Moses and his scribes, but more importantly denied that the writings were God’s inspired accounts of those historical events.  It was the prophet Isaiah who would refute any such future notions when he wrote, "The grass withereth, the flower fadeth; but the word of our God shall stand for ever." (Isa 40:8 JPS).  More importantly, the hypothesis would effectively deny that it was God who had sovereignly guided the author and maintained sovereign protection of the holy text from later generations of human degradation.  Yet many variations of this type of skeptical documentary analysis were expounded on in the following 100 years.

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In the 1900's this would spark theological wars in all the main-line Protestant denominations.  As early as 1926 and likely earlier, the theological answer to this heretical theology was the tenet of “Biblical Inerrancy” of the original Hebrew autographs (Kirsopp Lake, Boston Houghton publishing).  Later, this would result in denominations breaking apart, like the Presbyterian Churches of American who broke ranks from the traditional United Presbyterians.  That process resulted in far more groups breaking away from their denominational names altogether with identities like such and such community church.  Although those were more recent denominational breaks, the whole history of these theological battles was documented by one of its major combatants in 1978 with his book, The Battle for the Bible by Harold Lindsell.  As Lindsell points out, in more recent years, Billy Graham was a major factor even though his preaching rarely referred openly and directly to the controversy as a whole.  Graham would instead mention individual concepts within that controversy.  Yet many decades before Graham, Lindsell, had become a major proponent of Biblical Inerrancy.  Tragically, many amateurs and less professional theologians have tried to criticize the Biblical text and inerrancy by pointing out the slightest spelling or punctuation error as if the inerrancy expression meant 100% pure perfection.  These amateurs had failed to understand the seriousness and the purpose of the textual expression was to prevent an interpreter from extracting a new theology by modification or elimination of suspect portions of Biblical text.  This is antithetical to Biblical hermeneutics.

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The result of that impact on hermeneutics, between the world wars in Germany, there was a movement to purge all Jewish influence from their theology.  By logical deduction, that must have added to the German church’s insensitivity to the Jewish people and their plight. While that did not develop in the rest of the world, the idea that most of the Bible was unreliable except for the sermon on the mount did become popular everywhere.  This idea added to the theological view, mostly in liberal Christian circles, that Jesus’ sermon on the mount was the highest revelation of scripture, which then warranted their sole focus and justifying their theological world view.

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Finally, 2 years after Lindsell’s book on inerrancy was published, a wide spectrum of evangelical theologians met in October of 1978 to define what evangelical meant in terms of theology.  The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy would define what being an evangelical meant with only a few respectable exceptions or variations.