Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466 – 1536) is most probably the man who began the science of historical-biblical criticism that has polarised attitudes to the Bible up until this day. Erasmus himself was highly gifted academic, a Roman Catholic priest and in many ways one of the first ever genuine citizens of Europe. He was the son of a Roman Catholic priest (yes, you read that correctly), born out of wedlock, and both his parents died from the plague when he was a teenager. It is doubtless the challenges of his early life that shaped his life-long belief in synergism, as opposed to the monergism preached by Luther and many influential Protestant preachers since the Reformation.
Erasmus was a pacifist who desperately wanted his Christian faith to be lived out by following Jesus in daily life. One of his biggest issues with Luther was that he knew that Luther’s belligerent provocations and theological argumentation would lead to a division in the church, which is of course exactly what happened during the Reformation. So how can it be that placid Erasmus himself inadvertently kicked off the greatest polarisation in the church today?
Erasmus was not only a Christian, but also a product of his time. He was a humanist. He was concerned to move Christianity away from lofty and often hypocritical scholasticism and place it back with sincerity in the centre of the daily lives of ordinary people. This sincere concern logically led to him wanting to have accurate translations of the Bible based on authentic manuscripts and then to place these translations into the hands of ordinary people.
The main version of the Bible used up until the 15th century was the Vulgate, a 4th century translation of the Bible into Latin. By comparing the Vulgate Bible with the manuscripts in their original languages that Erasmus was able to source, he knew that there were many mistakes in the Vulgate, ranging from shocking mistranslations to outright mistakes and omissions. This fact alone, too disturbing for Luther and anathema to modern fundamentalists, raises the question: if the Bible is the infallible Word of God, why did God allow the followers of Jesus to have a flawed version of it in their hands for the first 1,500 of the history of the church?
This leads us on to the second question: if, according to the fundamentalists, Christians are meant to base their lives on the infallible Word of God, what did they rely upon for the first few thousand years during which they didn’t even have a copy New Testament? Especially a New Testament whose canon was and still is, according to all historical evidence, decided upon by chaotic human preferences and choices.
Third question: what if further, even more accurate manuscripts of the Bible were still to be discovered? Then the fundamentalists would have a similar problem to the Jews, who will never be able to prove the authenticity of their Messiah, when he comes, since all the genealogical records were burnt during the destruction of the temple in AD 70.
This also leads us to the fourth question: given that the most accurate manuscripts of the Bible were only discovered in the 18th century – ironically thanks to the research of historical-biblical scholars – why did God permit believers to have an errant text in their hands for at least 1,700 years after the death of Christ?
It is questions such as these that have polarised the church. At the one end we have more pragmatic Christians such a s Erasmus who take the view that a few mistakes in the manmade transcripts in no way negate the overall message of Jesus and His Word. At the other extreme, we have the fundamentalists who claim that there can be no mistakes, even in the New Testament, and that every word is inspired by God Himself. Accordingly, every sentence of the Bible must be correctly interpreted in synergy with the Holy Spirit and then applied in the daily life of every believer. Hence, the fundamentalists claim to enjoy an arrogant monopoly of correct interpretation of an infallible text, even though God permitted the text to have many mistakes in it for at least 1,700 years. Need I say more?
Erasmus thus also planted the seeds of historical-biblical criticism. If we are open to recognising that the text may have mistakes in it, so-called textual criticism, then it should be no surprise that the other three main elements of historical-biblical criticism, source, form and literary criticism should follow on from there. Once again, for most fundamentalists, such methods are tools of the devil who seeks to undermine the authority of God’s Word, divide the church and promulgate atheism. Given that the devil is a mythical figure invented by humans with wealth and authority in order to keep the plebs in fear and obedience, the fundamentalists are really more concerned with their loss of authority over naive believers’ lives, upholding division in the church via their arrogant and flawless interpretation of Scripture and with protecting their sects from the increasing numbers of atheists, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, atheists and agnostics who will, thanks be to God, all be spending eternity burning in hell.
Sadly, Erasmus annoyed many theologians of his day by holding on to his more pragmatic synergistic beliefs. In retrospect, he was well ahead of his time in his Christian Weltanschauung. For example, let’s ask ourselves another simple question. Which type of Christian most closely resembles Jesus? The one who gets up each day of his/her life in grateful communion with God through prayer, worship, Bible-reading and joyfully applying the main tenets of God’s Word in daily life, or the one who vehemently preaches a fundamentalist gospel while walking past a beggar in the street, ranting against homosexuals and actively collaborating in the destruction of the planet? Not only that, but which type of Christianity most closely reflects the heart of Jesus? Erasmus’ synergistic theology that accepts that humans have the choice to co-operate with God in making His world a better place, or Luther’s monergistic theology that proclaims that human beings can only become believers if God chooses by his grace alone to save them, thus leaving all sinful-to-the-core human beings pre-destined from fertilisation for either heaven or hell? After all, Jesus gave the rich young man in Matthew 19 a choice, didn’t he?
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”