2.1 from submission to freedom: ideology informing baptist women  (Page 36/5)

One of the basic tenets of orthodox Christianity in all ages has been adherence to the teaching of the Bible. Clerics and scholars have searched its contents for precise meaning; differing interpretations, even on minor points, have led to decades of warfare, national schism, and, ultimately, the geographical and psychological shaping of Western civilization. These searches have produced diverse results because of variation in the skill and bias of the group involved in the research, the evaluative material available to them, and the weight of other authoritative traditions.

Nineteenth-century Baptists, as inheritors of the European and American tradition of religious dissent, supplanted the authority of the church with the authority of the biblical message, personally interpreted and confirmed by a salvation experience. The emphasis was on the individual and, in some cases, insights were arrived at by the lone believer with Bible in hand, but this picture is overdrawn. As soon as groups of believers gathered and formed churches, an organizing principle began working against this atomistic, totally individualistic formula. The movement toward stability often took the form of credal statements and uniform interpretive methods that sought to certify the purity of the gospel that was proclaimed. Granted, subjective sectarianism always carried within it a tendency toward disagreement and division, but there is invariably another pull toward credibility and rationality. Among Baptists, that cohesive power has been tenuous enough to be defined as "a rope of sand and an exceedingly slender rope at that," L. R. Elliott, ed., Centennial Story of Texas Baptists, Chicago: Hammond Press, 1936), p. 6. but one of its strongest links has been complete acceptance of the literal accuracy of the Bible.

The evangelical Protestant groups that proliferated in America's early national period shared a common objective: to return to the "pure conditions of primitive Christianity" Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1962), p. 83. that had been lost or obscured by the corruption of the institutional church. They, like other groups before them, believed that the key to the discovery of that ancient order was the record preserved in Holy Scripture. Without the mediation of priests or ecclesiastical tradition, this written record was viewed as the sole source of religious authority. Although more learned seekers utilized conservative commentaries that referred to New Testament Greek to define key words such as baptizo (to dip, to plunge, to immerse), most church members' religious library consisted only of the English Bible. Their methodological approach to this body of literature has been criticized as being haphazard and unscientific, but it actually partook heavily of the rational scientific method of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. David E. Harrell, Jr., Quest for a Christian America (Nashville: Disciples of Christ Historical Society, 1966), pp. 26-7. They granted that some mysteries lay beyond the human realm, but believed that those aspects of the Bible that called for man's perception and response were obvious and held no contradictions. "Revealed religion" could pass the same tests of reason and evidence to which any hypothesis or experience was subjected. The evangelicals added an important assumption—specifically, that the biblical record was divine revelation of truth—but their approach was similar to that of the deists, freethinkers, and republicans who affirmed that truth was apparent to and congruent with the rationality and common sense of ordinary men and women. The method and presupposition remained in scholastic good graces until they were discounted by Darwinism in the latter half of the nineteenth century and appear strongly anachronistic in the cynical, pluralistic society of the late twentieth century. The Fundamentalist movement, spawned in the 1920s, was a nationwide reassertion of this early nineteenth-century view of rational biblical authority. Its religious and social dimensions are discussed in Louis Gasper, The Fundamentalist Movement (The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1963); Ernest Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); and LeRoy Moore, Jr., "Another Look at Fundamentalism: a Response to Ernest Sandeen," Church History, 37 (1968), 195-202.