Biblical Contortionism

Fundamentalists like to claim that they believe the plain and simple literal statements of the Bible. But this is not true. I know this from my own painful experience.

It happened in high school. I had joined (by my own choice) a little Church of Christ cult. To them, belief in Jesus was not enough; even Biblical literalism was not enough. They believed that you could not do anything during a worship service that the Bible did not authorize. For example, the Bible did not authorize the use of instrumental music in church, therefore you cannot use it. (Incidentally, the Bible says nothing about this.) In particular, this little cult said that, since the Bible did not authorize the use of multiple little cups during communion, then you could not use them; you had to use a single large cup for everyone in the whole congregation. This was how they identified “saved” congregations: any congregation that uses multiple cups (individual cups) during communion was damned. This cult was hyper-über-literalist.

Except when they weren’t.  The Bible talks about God creating new heavens and a new earth, both in the Hebrew Bible (Isaiah 65:17) and the New Testament (Revelation 21:1). The old heavens and old earth will pass away. After all the blood-soaked apocalypsing, God was going to make all things new. I loved this idea, because I was then as now a great lover of the natural world, the clean and green forest, and at that time I thought it was God’s pure creation. I did not understand why God would create something so beautiful as the Earth and then destroy it forever. And so, one Sunday, when I was invited to give a sermon at a small congregation, I preached on this subject: we can look forward to not just heaven but a new earth as well.

Brother Bob was following every word. And the next Sunday, he went for the kill. Remember, I was a high school kid and he was in his upper middle age years. He said that the very idea that there was going to be a new Earth was a damnable heresy that would lead anyone who believed it to hell. Of course, that meant that I was going to hell.

But how could he say this, against the clear and plain teaching of the Bible? Here is where the contortionism comes in. A skillful Fundamentalist can take sentences of scripture and weave them into pretzellations (I just made that word up right now) and tie them into knots that make them mean the exact opposite of what they say. What Bro. Bob said was this. The old earth, he said, referred to the Old Testament, which is where the ancient Israelites lived: they lived in or on the Old Testament. Therefore the new earth was the New Testament. The old heaven and old earth had already passed away, and we were already living on the new earth. Therefore, when John wrote Revelation 21, he was wrong; he referred to the new earth in the future tense, and he should have referred to it in the present tense. Or even the past tense: the “new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven” in Revelation 21 had, from Bro. Bob’s viewpoint, already happened. So, this is where we ended up: when the Bible says there will be a new heaven and a new earth, what it means is that there will not be.

There I was, wilting in a front pew as I heard myself denounced as a heretic in front of the congregation that I thought was uniquely saved. This borders on abusive behavior on the part of a man who was supposed to be the spiritual leader of our congregation. It took me weeks before I got out from under the cloud of depression from this. Couldn’t there have been a private discussion with me first? But no; the first I heard about it was in this public forum.

So you can see why I sneer at the idea of Biblical literalism. The “literalists” aren’t really literalists. They certainly ignore the parts of the Bible that are inconvenient for Republicans. For them, the Bible is only a source of rope to hang people with. They have no more respect for scripture than does any atheist.