Abstract
Historians commonly agree that the understanding of the Bible as a supernatural text conveying both spiritual and historical truths came under devastating assaults from the natural sciences and German historical critics in the nineteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, among many intellectuals, the image of the Bible as a supernaturally inspired and infallible text eventually crumbled under the relentless assaults of secularizing forces—so the story goes. The Erosion of Biblical Certainty corrects this narrative. I argue that in America, the road to skepticism was ironically and unintentionally paved by the Scriptures’ defenders. From the eighteenth to the first half of the nineteenth century, theologically conservative Americans defended the Bible from critical attacks. However, the Bible’s able and ardent defenders altered their conceptions of revelation to preserve their faith in light of changing standards of plausibility. In doing so, they gradually yet radically undermined the traditional understanding of Holy Writ by denuding it of its supernatural nature. That is to say, skeptics were not solely responsible for knocking the Bible off its throne. Some of the fault lies with the Scriptures’ Protestant apologists.
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Notes
For the European Enlightenment and skepticism, see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Norton, 1995 [1966]); Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Gerard Reedy, The Bible and Reason: Anglicans and Scripture in Late Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985); Roy S. Porter and Mikulás Teich, eds., The Enlightenment in National Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974); and Israel, Radical Enlightenment; Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985); Roy A. Harrisville and Walter Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture: Baruch Spinoza to Brevard Childs (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002 [1995]); and Paul Hazard, The European Mind (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1967 [1935]).
Robert E. Brown, Jonathan Edwards and the Bible (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), xvi. See also Frei, Eclipse, 1–16, 49–50.
The Society of Biblical Literature published several biographies of American biblical scholars. All deal with nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures. Mark Noll’s Between Faith and Criticism also focuses on the era after the Civil War. Mark Noll, Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986).
There are a few exceptions. In The Bible in America, a collection of essays, Harry Stout deals with the use of the Bible in the eighteenth century. In the same book, Noll discusses the uses of the Bible in the period between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. In Opening Scripture literary scholar Lisa Gordis examines American Puritan hermeneutics. These works do not deal with the challenges of skepticism. Jerry Wayne Brown, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 1800–1870 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1969); Mark Noll, Between Faith and Criticism; Harry Stout, “The Word and Order in
Colonial New England,” in The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Mark Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 19–38; Noll, “The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation, 1776– 1865,” ibid., 41; and Lisa M. Gordis, Opening Scripture: Bible Reading and Interpretive Authority in Puritan New England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 3.
For example, see Joseph Haroutunian, Piety versus Moralism: The Passing of New England Theology (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1932); Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953); Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). Conrad Wright, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1976); James Jones, The Shattered Synthesis: New England Puritanism before the Great Awakening (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973); and Mark Noll, Princeton and the Republic,1768–1822: The Search for a Christian Enlightenment in the Era of Samuel Stanhope Smith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
Similar to Winship, Robert Middlekauff observes that Cotton Mather placed greater emphasis on an understanding of the Newtonian natural world than his father and grandfather. Doing so challenged some of his traditional Puritan certainties. Michael P. Winship, The Seers of God: Puritan Providentialism in the Restoration and Early Enlightenment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Robert Middlekauff, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596–1728 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). See also Theodore Dwight Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Bozeman, “Biblical Primitivism: An Approach to New England Puritanism,” in The American Quest for the Primitive Church, ed. Richard T. Hughes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 19–32; and David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
Brown, Jonathan Edwards and the Bible.
Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).
Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 6–7.
Norman Fiering, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 300. For Common Sense philosophy, see Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 93–113. See also Sydney E. Ahlstrom, “The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology,” Church History 24, no. 3 (1955): 257–72.
Christopher Grasso, “Deist Monster: On Religious Common Sense in the Wake of the American Revolution,” The Journal of American History 95, no. 1 (2008): 67–68.
For accounts of skepticism, see for example Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols., vol. 1 (London: Harbinger Books, 1962 [1876]); Paul Hazard, The European Mind (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1967 [1935]); Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650– 1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Diego Lucci, Scripture and Deism: The Biblical Criticism of the Eighteenth-- Century British Deists (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008), 13, 44–52. See also Robert E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); and E. Graham Waring, Deism and Natural Religion (New York: Fredrick Ungar Publishing Company, 1967).
John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xix, 148, 432. See also Alan P. F. Sell, John Locke and the Eighteenth-Century Divines (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997); and Lucci, Scripture and Deism, 44–48.
Norman Fiering, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); John Locke, “The Reasonableness of Christianity: As Delivered in the Scriptures,” in John Locke: Writings on Religion, ed. Victor Nuovo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 85–210; Locke, “The Preface: An Essay for the Understanding of St. Paul’s Epistles by Consulting St. Paul Himself,” in John Locke: Writings on Religion, 51–66; Locke, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul, ed. John W. Yolton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); and Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (New York: Norton, 1961), 252.
See Lucci, Scripture and Deism, 44–48.
For a discussion of the mutual intellectual influence between Locke and Newton, see James L. Axtell, “Locke, Newton, and the Elements of Natural Philosophy,” Paedagogica Europaea 1 (1965): 235–45; Axtell, “Locke’s Review of the ‘Principia,’ ” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 20, no. 2 (1965): 152–61; Margaret J. Osler, “John Locke and the Changing Ideal of Scientific Knowledge,” Journal of the History of Ideas 31, no. 1 (1970): 3–16; G. A. J. Rogers, “Locke, Newton, and the Cambridge Platonists on Innate Ideas,” Journal of the History of Ideas 40, no. 2 (1979): 191–205; and Rogers, “Locke’s Essay and Newton’s Principia,” Journal of the History of Ideas 39, no. 2 (1978): 217–32.
Winton U. Solberg, “Science and Religion in Early America: Cotton Mather’s ‘Christian Philosopher,’ ” Church History 56, no. 1 (1987), 77; Solberg, introduction to The Christian Philosopher (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), xliv, lv, xxxvi. For the related issue of Natural Theology, see Charles E. Raven, Organic Design: A Study of Scientific Thought from Ray to Paley (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 9–15. For the Christian examination of nature in this period, see also James L. Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 83, 193, 198; Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 168–69, 264; and David S. Katz, God’s Last Words: Reading the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 100.
Hans Frei argues that the historical credibility of the miracle accounts became particularly important in the eighteenth century. This move rose in response to the critiques by deists. Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 54, 56. For attacks on miracles, see Hazard, European Mind, 155–79; and Stephen, English Thought, 192–97.
For Anglican attempts to defend the Bible by reason and evidence, see Robert E. Brown, “Edwards, Locke, and the Bible,” The Journal of Religion 79, no. 3 (1999): 361–84; Gerard Reedy, The Bible and Reason: Anglicans and Scripture in Late Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 56–80; Reedy, “Interpreting Tillotson,” Harvard Theological Review 86, no. 1 (1993), 81–103; and Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
Frederick C. Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 15; Reedy, Bible and Reason; and Frei, Eclipse, 18, 80.
The sixteenth-century Protestant reformers believed in the inspiration of the Bible. Luther believed that “God is in every syllable.” Calvin believed that the biblical writers were “secretaries of the Holy Ghost.” However, inspiration did not ensure inerrancy in all details. Calvin and Luther accepted that there were minor historical errors and inconsistencies, and this did not trouble them. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Protestant views of the Bible hardened into literalism. By 1800, evangelicals read the Bible with what James Turner calls “a flat-footed literalness unparalleled in the annals of Christianity.” James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 144. Barbara E. Bowe, “Inspiration,” in Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, ed. David Noel Freedman (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 641; Geoffrey Bromley, “Inspiration, History of the Doctrine of,” in The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia: E–J, ed. Geoffrey Bromley, 4 vols., vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 849–54; Jerry Wayne Brown, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 1800–1870: The New England Scholars (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), 5; Frei, Eclipse, 18–41, 55–56; Roland Bainton, “The Bible in the Reformation,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day, ed. S. L. Greenslade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 12–13.
Isaac La Peyrère, Men before Adam (London: [n.p.], 1656).
Richard H. Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676): His Life, Work and Influence (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Academic Publishers, 1987); Anthony Grafton, “Isaac La Peyrère and the Old Testament,” in Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 204–13; Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997 [1982]), 77; and David N. Livingstone, Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
David Rice McKee, “Isaac La Peyrère: A Precursor of Eighteenth-Century Critical Deists,” Publication of the Modern Language Association 59, no. 2 (1944): 466.
The emerging history of pagan nations threatened the unique status of the Bible. Anthony T. Grafton, “Joseph Scaliger and Historical Chronology: The Rise and Fall of a Discipline,” History and Theory 14, no. 2 (1975): 156–85; Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: Textual Criticism and Exegesis, 2 vols., vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: Historical Chronology, 2 vols., vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle, 271–72; and Arthur McCalla, The Creationist Debate: The Encounter between the Bible and the Historical Mind (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 36–39.
Livingstone, Adam’s Ancestors, 28; Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère, 11.
Robert Morden, Geography Rectified (London: Robert Morden and Thomas Cockerill, 1688).
Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère, 47–48; McKee, “Isaac La Peyrère,” 461–70. See also Grafton, “Scaliger’s Chronology: Philology, Astronomy and World History,” in Defenders of the Text, 104–44; Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Bowe, “Inspiration,” 64; Bromley, “Inspiration, History of the Doctrine of,” 849–54.
Cotton Mather, Manuductio ad Ministerium: Directions for a Candidate of the Ministry (Boston: Thomas Hancock, 1726), 83; Thomas Walter, The Scriptures the Only Rule of Faith & Practice (Boston: B. Green, 1723), 31.
Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 16; Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère, 1; Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts, 237; Livingstone, Adam’s Ancestors, 48; and McKee, “Isaac La Peyrère,” 458.
Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 410–13; Paul D. Cooke, Hobbes and Christianity: Reassessing the Bible in Leviathan (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1996); and Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 265.
Hobbes, Leviathan, 261–63, 268.
Seymour Feldman, “Introduction,” in Theological-Political Treatise, ed. Seymour Feldman (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2001), vii. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 230–85; Samuel Preus, Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion; Stuart Brown, “ ‘Theological Politics’ and the Reception of Spinoza in the Early English Enlightenment,” Studia Spinozana 9 (1993): 181–200; Roslie L. Colie, “Spinoza and the Early English Deists,” Journal of the History of Ideas 20, no. 1 (1959): 23–46; Colie, “Spinoza in England, 1665–1730,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 107, no. 3 (1963): 183–219; Richard Popkin, “Spinoza and Bible Scholarship,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. Don Garrett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 383–407.
Stephen, English Thought, vol. 1, 33.
Benedictus de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2001 [1670]), 86.
Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 448; Feldman, “Introduction,” xxix; Preus, Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority, 8.
Martin I. Klauber, “Between Protestant Orthodoxy and Rationalism: Fundamental Articles in the Early Career of Jean LeClerc,” Journal of the History of Ideas 54, no. 4 (1993): 614. John D. Woodbridge, Biblical Authority: Towards an Evaluation of the Rogers and McKim Proposal (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1982), 94–95. Regarding the debate between Simon and Le Clerc, see Woodbridge, “German Responses to the Biblical Critic Richard Simon: From Leibniz to J. S. Semler,” in Historische Kritik und Biblischer Kanon in der Deutschen Aufklärung, ed. Henning Graf Reventlow (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1988). For Simon and the Bible, see also Hazard, European Mind, 180–97.
Richard Simon, Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament (Rotterdam, Netherlands: Chez Reinier Leers, 1678), 20–41. Klauber, “Between Protestant Orthodoxy and Rationalism,” 624–25; John D. Woodbridge, “Richard Simon’s Reaction to Spinoza’s ‘Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,’ ” in Spinoza in der Frühzeit seiner Religiösen Wirkung, ed. Karlfried Gründer and Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann (Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1984), 201–26; J. A. I. Champion, “Père Richard Simon and English Biblical Criticism, 1680–1700,” in Everything Connects: In Conference with Richard H. Popkin: Essays in His Honor, ed. James E. Force and David S. Katz, Brill Studies in Intellectual History (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 37–61.
Jean Le Clerc, Five Letters Concerning the Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures (London: [n.p.], 1690), 187.
Woodbridge, Biblical Authority, 97.
Klauber, “Between Protestant Orthodoxy and Rationalism,” 623–24; Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 466–67. Israel also includes Locke in this claim.
Sullivan, Toland, 232.
Lucci, Scripture and Deism; Preus, Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority; Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion; Stephen, English Thought, 78–136, 170–83; J. A. Redwood, “Charles Blount (1654–93), Deism, and English Free Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 35, no. 3 (1974): 490– 98; Roger L. Emerson, “Deism,” in The Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener, 5 vols., vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973– 74),: 647–52; Popkin, History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle; Roger L. Emerson, “Latitudinarianism and the English Deists,” in Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment: Essays Honoring Alfred Owen Aldridge, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), 19–48.
Lucci, Scripture and Deism, 51; Peter Byrne, Natural Religion and the Nature of Religion: The Legacy of Deism (New York: Routledge, 1989), 77; Frei, Eclipse, 66–85.
Frei, Eclipse, 52–53. Gerald R. McDermott, Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 17–33.
Herbert of Cherbury, De Religion Laici, trans. Harold R. Hutchinson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944 [1645]), 95.
Lucci, Scripture and Deism; A. Owen Aldridge, “Natural Religion and Deism in America before Ethan Allen and Thomas Paine,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 54, no. 4 (1997): 836; and Hazard, European Mind, 252–65.
Charles Blount, The Oracles of Reason (London: [n.p.], 1693); John Toland, John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious: Texts, Associated Works, and Critical Essays (Dublin, Ireland: The Lilliput Press, 1997 [1696]); Toland, Nazarenus, ed. Justin Champion (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999 [1718]); Anthony Collins, Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (London: [n.p.], 1724); Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as Creation (Newburgh, NY: David Denniston, 1798 [1730]); Lucci, Scripture and Deism, 14, 32–38; and Sullivan, Toland.
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Lee, M.J. (2013). Introduction. In: The Erosion of Biblical Certainty. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137299666_1
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