Why Jordan Peterson is helpful in Resolving the Modernist/Fundamentalist Feud in the Church and Western Culture
We have to get beyond our misuse of the word "literal" in battles over the Bible
In today's video I do a bit of commentary on the recent @jordanbpeterson @TOEwithCurt conversation.
It addresses the century long fight in Protestant Christianity over the word "literal".
The rise of modernism brought with it assumptions about truth and language that were meant to squeeze out corruption and superstition from religion. Those who believed "Christianity must change or die" sought to "demythologized" it in order to try to save it.
With this the modernist/fundamentalist war was born and it has raged for over 100 years. As is true of many such in-house conflicts they were fighting about some shared assumptions that were too close for both sides to appreciate.
At the heart of modernity is a lab trick that became an epistemic lab leak. It was an attempt to secure non-subjective TRUTH by imaginatively removing any observer from the analysis. Truth-seeking moved away from the texts because of pervasive interpretive pluralism.
Europe slowly tried to establish public truth by establishing it upon observations of physical states of being. If you can't find agreement interpreting Biblical texts maybe you can by measuring states in the physical world.
Because of this the "is/ought" problem developed and so Christian theologians continued to look to texts to establish "ought" and physics to establish "is". As long as deep Christian assumptions were disguised as "secular" this kludge was worked.
The fight over this kludge theologically was fought between modernists and fundamentalists. Modernists insisted that a mythological reading was sufficient and that physical concordism was increasingly incidental for the flourishing of the church.
Fundamentalists weren't having it and would double down on their assertions while neither side noticed they were wedded to the same assumptions. I've got way more to say about all of this than I can put in this Substack.
The word that was used to prosecute this fight was "literal". Both sides employed it to fight over whether or not a text demanded a sort of physical representational concordism and the implications therein.
Many like myself from traditions that predated the modernist/fundamentalist fight were always caught in the middle, recognizing that the Bible does make historical claims while struggling with language for how the epistemic landscape changed under our feet.
All of this has been changing because of realizations from psychology and cognitive science. My struggle in wrestling with these issues first drew me to CS Lewis but also @jordanbpeterson @vervaeke_john and @PageauJonathan
While it's rather coded in technical language @vervaeke_john touches on some of the issues in this conversation with @jordanbpeterson @PageauJonathan and @BishopBarron
Today when both sides fight over "literal" use of the Bible neither quite knows why they are using that word and why it's the wrong word. It takes a good bit to figure this out and to figure out how to move forward from it.
Here is @jordanbpeterson and @TOEwithCurt wrestling with an element of it and I was ecstatic to see JBP break through because this language problem in this 100+ year old church feud needs resolution.
A lot of people don't understand why I am so excited about the developments in "this little corner" of the Internet for the church. We are addressing longstanding conflicts that have divided the church and society, and we are making headway.
Yep. There's a definite level of stealth eisegesis there -- when fighting over "literal." Found myself defaulting to "directly referent"; letting the text breathe just a hair.