This past summer I found myself involved behind the scenes in a squabble between the chair of my department and another department colleague. Their disagreement was about the proper interpretation of the Faculty Handbook on an issue related to my colleague’s upcoming promotion case. Both asked me, as a former department chair, to offer my opinion. I felt that my colleague’s interpretation, based on a charitable “spirit of the law” reading of the relevant portion of the handbook, made more sense than my chair’s more rigid “letter of the law” interpretation.
“Geez,” my colleague complained in an email, “he’s reading the handbook like an originalist reads the Constitution!”
“He’s reading the handbook like a fundamentalist reads the Bible,” I replied. Little did I know how closely those are linked.
I was reminded of this conversation when the new U. S. Supreme Court session began last month. The new session includes cases involving gerrymandering, collective bargaining, the Trump travel ban, voter registration purges, anti-discrimination LGBT laws, and more. All eyes are on new Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, who takes the seat last occupied by Antonin Scalia for thirty years until his death in 2016. Scalia was an eloquent and forceful advocate of “originalism” and SCOTUS watchers will observe closely to see if Gorsuch will continue Scalia’s commitment to this interpretive approach.
With regard to the U. S. Constitution, “originalism” requires that a judge ask questions such as “What was the writer’s original intent?” and “What would reasonable people at that time have understood this text to mean?” Advocates of originalism strongly emphasize the difference between judges and legislators and are particularly concerned to root out judicial activism. They contend judges should strive to apply the law as they find it, focusing backward on text, structure, and history, not forward on their moral convictions or the policy consequences they consider best for today’s society. Scalia defined it this way: “The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring. It means today not what current society, much less the court, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.”
Scalia’s definition positions originalism in opposition to a “living document” approach. In this understanding, a document’s meaning and application is intended to change and grow within identifiable parameters as each generation’s new issues and concerns arise. The “originalism vs. living document” debate often falls into familiar conservative vs. liberal political categories, in which originalists advocate a narrow use of history and reading of the text in order to push back against the perceived liberal tendency to make the text “relevant” and update it to contemporary concerns.
The term “originalism” was coined in the 1980s; constitutional scholars have been interested, among other things, in understanding why this interpretive strategy has become so influential in the U.S., particularly since originalism has little or no influence in other constitutional democracies with similar legislative and judicial histories to the United States, countries such as Canada and Australia. In a recent interview with the New Yorker, Harvard historian Jill Lepore listed a few reasons suggested by scholars for the strong influence of originalism in this country; one caught my attention. Originalism arose in the United States because of the unique historical influence of fundamentalist Protestantism on this country’s history and development—an influence missing both in Canada and Australia.
I was born into the fundamentalist Protestant world that Lepore references, and I am thoroughly familiar with how they read their sacred text. I was taught that the Bible is the inerrant and infallible word of God, dictated by divine inspiration to specially selected human beings, then gathered into the Word of God that we call the Bible. The Bible is God’s final word to us, I was taught; all the guidance a Christian needs to live a life pleasing to God can be found between its covers. Many of the vehicles in our church parking lot sported a bumper sticker expressing the appropriate attitude toward Scripture: “God Said It. I Believe It. That Settles It.”
Lepore points out that there is a great deal of similarity between how fundamentalist Protestants treat the Bible and originalists treat the U. S. Constitution. In both cases, the text is a special document that must be treated with the reverence and care that it deserves. Join that conviction with the belief among many conservative Christians in this country that the founding fathers were divinely inspired when they wrote the seminal texts of the United States of America, and originalism becomes a familiar interpretive strategy. Originalism is attractive to many Americans because they are accustomed to treating important texts with deference, even reverence.
The parallels between originalism and fundamentalist Protestantism also provide reasons to be suspicious of both strategies of interpretation. It is worth remembering, as Lepore points out, that the founding fathers themselves were not originalists by any stretch of the imagination. They wanted to break sharply with tradition; the Declaration of Independence includes a litany of injuries caused by the king, deliberately intending to set history aside in exchange for creating something brand new. The last thing on the framers’ minds was to bind future generations of citizens with documents that would not and could not grow and evolve.
A parallel case can be made with regard to Scripture. Christians often forget just how earthshaking and groundbreaking the message of the Gospels truly is. The reported words of Jesus tell us much about how to continually grow and change while following Him; at the same time, Jesus is frequently critical of attempts to rigidly apply what we believe God said in the past to new situations and circumstances. As soon as words of life are treated as fixed and unchanging, doctrine and dogma become substitutes for a faith intended to fruitfully engage with a changing world. Just as Jesus was a living, breathing human being, so the faith that grows from following him should also live and breathe. That means it should never stop being open to change.
One Sunday evening many years ago, I heard a Baptist minister, a family friend who was the godfather of my firstborn son, say something shocking from the pulpit. He lifted his well-worn Bible above his head with his right arm and said in a loud voice: “This is not the Word of God!” Gasps filled the sanctuary, followed by an uncomfortable silence. After a dramatic pause of several moments, he continued. “This is just ink on paper between leather covers. This becomes the Word of God when the Holy Spirit makes it so to each of us individually.”
My son’s godfather was right. The divine word changes and grows in each of us, often in apparent conflict with what we thought was already fixed and settled. When temptations arise to find security and safety in inflexible interpretations of important texts, whether the Constitution or Scripture, it is worth taking the words of Paul to the church at Corinth to heart: “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6).
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This article speaks many of my feelings and I’m appreciative. Write on.
Fundamentalism and biblical literalism wasn’t a thing until the Age of Enlightenment when Science started offering rational alternative answers to the fundamental questions of life.
Perhaps so, but this does not account for why Biblibal literalism is so strong in the US.
How else should one take the scriptures in the Word of God, but literal? As a Sunday School and Bible Study teacher we are to dig deeper in the historical background, analysis, composition, classification, preparation and the composition in order to deliver (like a preacher) a full-packed lesson for our Bible students.
Most scholars say that there are at least four types of Biblical interpretation, with literal being the first and most basic. Others include moral, allegorical, and anagogical. The text, in others words, can mean many things on many different levels. As I quote at the end of my essay, the Bible is not the Word of God as it sits on the page. It becomes the Word of God when the Holy Spirit makes it so to the individual person. You might want to check out this link if you are interested in reading about the various methods of interpretation: https://www.britannica.com/topic/hermeneutics-principles-of-biblical-interpretation
Many have made a similar point, paralleling originalism, or “textualism,” as Justice Scalia sometimes also called it, to Biblical interpretation. It’s tempting, but the difference is significant.
Our Constitution applies to all people who live in and are citizens of the United States, whether they agree with a court’s interpretation of a particular statute or not.
The Bible, on the other hand, is a law that an individual believer chooses to follow. While the Constitution is essentially an involuntary association, following the Bible is a free choice, and no person is required to follow its many rules. Yet, as believers in the Risen Christ, we know the stakes of that biblical obligation last for eternity, not just a lifetime.
Certainly, one who dissents from this or that court ruling may continue to live in the United States. Yet they must follow it, under penalty of law, even as they may work within our system of government to have it changed.
The Bible is different. There is no appellate court. There is no amendment process. There is only advice to “put on the whole armor of God,” and reminders that “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”
The choice of the dissenting Christian is limited to not being a Christian. And it is here that the battle really exists. Those who try to argue that Scripture means something different from what it actually says face the burden of showing not that the Scripture is “living” into a different meaning, but that 2,000 years of Christian understanding of what it means have been wrong all along, a far higher bar.
For American Protestants who believe in some level of group discernment, this poses a huge question: Which parts of the Bible need further discerning, and which are self-explanatory for all times? We’ve struggled with it for centuries, over things like slavery, temperance, divorce, abortion, and homosexuality. This last issue has so severely rent the Church in American society that most of the mainline denominations are dying. They are not “reforming,” they are passing away, in direct proportion to their moves toward the kind of theological “activism” that you seem to be suggesting.
In matters of law, we respect the majority. In matters of what the Bible says and means, no majority overrides the author. Ever.
All fine until there is disagreement about what the author’s text means, which is the case in virtually every Biblical text.
Yet, they refuse to apply originalism in any form when it comes to gun control. Interesting.
…. and they refuse to apply originalism as it applies to the LGBT community either.
How to ‘settle it’
The first wholly new interpretation for two thousand years of the moral teachings of Christ has been published. Radically different from anything else we know of from theology or history, this new teaching is predicated upon the ‘promise’ of a precise, predefined, predictable and repeatable experience of transcendent omnipotence and called ‘the first Resurrection’ in the sense that the Resurrection of Jesus was intended to demonstrate Gods’ willingness to reveal Himself and intervene directly into the natural world for those obedient to His Command, paving the way for access, by faith, to the power of divine Will and ultimate proof!
Thus ‘faith’ becomes an act of trust in action, the search along a defined path of strict self discipline, [a test of the human heart] to discover His ‘Word’ of a direct individual intervention into the natural world by omnipotent power that confirms divine will, law, command and covenant, which at the same time, realigns our mortal moral compass with the Divine, “correcting human nature by a change in natural law, altering biology, consciousness and human ethical perception beyond all natural evolutionary boundaries.” Thus is a man ‘created’ in the image and likeness of his Creator.
So like it or no, a new religious teaching, testable by faith, meeting all Enlightenment criteria of evidence based causation and definitive proof now exists, and carries all the implications that suggests. Nothing short of an intellectual, moral and religious revolution is getting under way. To test or not to test, that is the question? More info at http://www.energon.org.uk