Saturday, November 22, 2008

Of Fundamentalist Platypodes

In jumping around from link to link in an idle moment, I came upon The Skeptic's Annotated Bible. I had known it had existed before, but I hadn't really bothered to read any part of it before; it turns out I was missing out on an interesting specimen of the quirks of human thought. Here, for instance, is what the SAB says about "What the Bible Says about Non-Christians":

They are without God.

"Whosoever ... abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God." -- 2 John 9

They are all antichrists.

"For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist." -- 2 John 7

They should be shunned. Neither marry nor be friends with them.

"Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? ... Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord." -- 2 Cor.6:14-17

They should be killed.

"If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers; Namely, of the gods of the people which are round about you ... Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die." -- Dt.13:6-10


Never mind, of course, that the people discussed in II John are specifically people claiming to be Christians -- hence the warning about people who 'confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh'. The letter, like all of the Johannine epistles, is about distinguishing what merely claims to be Christian from what really is. There is no suggestion that all non-Christians are antichrists; nor, in fact, would this fit with the probable meaning of the term 'antichrist' in this context. The real claim is that some who claim to teach Christian doctrine are antichrists, i.e., people who are setting themselves up in the place Christ alone should stand. Never mind, again, that the Deuteronomy passage isn't about non-Christians at all. Never mind, yet again, that the separation in II Corinthians is explicitly about behavior linked to pagan, and particularly idolatrous, practice.

I'm not really interested in criticism here, which I imagine would be pointless. It is interesting, however, as a specimen. What this is, of course, is not a skeptical reading of the Bible; rather, it is an uncritical collecting together of various fundamentalist and fundamentalist-like readings of passages without regard for the actual context of the passages, either the immediate context or the context of the whole work, in order to reject the interpretation that arises from this sort of approach. This fits with the thrust of the work, a counterattack on fundamentalists that is based on the assumption that only fundamentalists read the Bible correctly:

I don't insist on a literal interpretation, but only that all of the Bible be taken seriously and that none of it be ignored. It seems to me that most non-fundamentalist Christians don't really believe in the Bible; they only pretend to do so. Some don't even pretend -- yet all claim to base their beliefs upon it. This seems dishonest to me.


Thus the SAB is a fundamentalist interpretation of the text; the only difference between itself and the fundamentalists it opposes is that whereas the latter assume a posture of deference, the former assumes a posture of defiance. In that sense it serves as a sort of platypus of order Fundamentalista: entirely within the order as to the essential matter, the manner of reading, despite the possession of features that deviate sharply from quotidian expectations.