19 - Fundamentalist readings of the Bible

Summary

Fundamentalist readings of the Bible are not literalist, necessarily. Fundamentalist readings are inerrantist readings. They are governed by a concern to uphold the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. This chapter examines the ways in which the doctrine of inerrancy determines fundamentalist readings of Scripture by considering why the doctrine is so important to fundamentalists, and how they arrive at it. This is done after an initial discussion of the difficulties of using the label fundamentalist. Even people who call themselves fundamentalist are wary of anyone else putting that label on them, for it is usually used pejoratively and the position it denotes is often caricatured. Some instances given in the chapter of fundamentalist approaches to Scripture come from people within the mainstream evangelical world, including the British evangelicals James I. Packer, John Wenham and John Stott, and the Pentecostal theologian Wayne Grudem.