J. D. Watson of Meeker, Colorado, wrote a plaintive letter to Modern Reformation magazine. A Fundamentalist pastor and the director of a “Bible-defense ministry,” he was annoyed that an article had said the Bible should not be used as “a command manual” and that “the Bible does not address all things.”
“Then who or what does?” he asked. “Where, then, is any final authority for anything? . . . If we do not cling to the principle that every single problem or question we might have can be answered either in explicit word or implicit principle from the Scriptures, we have no authority of life except human reason and/or Church tradition. And this plunges us back into the clutches of the papacy.”
Indeed it does. If a Fundamentalist were to drop the principle that the Bible is omnicompetent—”that every single problem or question we might have can be answered” by it—then he would have no choice but to abandon Christianity for unassisted human reason or to fall “into the clutches of the papacy.” There are no alternatives.
This does not mean that people do not try to situate themselves elsewhere. Millions of Protestants who reject Fundamentalism think they need to settle neither for agnosticism nor Rome. They acknowledge that the Bible does not answer every question man can pose and that it is much more than an extended list of do’s and don’ts. They know that mere human reason is not enough—unbelievers have that, but where has it led them? They also think, like Dr. Watson, that the papacy must be avoided at all costs. If there ever were a safe truth, they say, that is it.
So they float in a kind of no man’s land, not unsatisfied with where they find themselves but vaguely aware, when they put their minds to it, that their position has logical flaws. Their attitude may be more “sophisticated” or “respectable” than Dr. Watson’s, but he is closer to the truth than they are. He rejects more vehemently than they the possibility that Catholicism is true, but at least he knows the real alternatives. If his “Bible Christianity” is not true, then either rationalism is or Catholicism is. He well knows that reliance on mere human reason will not work—which leaves the awful alternative of Catholicism. And that, as Churchill said in a quite different context, “is something up with which we will not put.”
What will Dr. Watson do in the long run? His complaint against Modern Reformation reads as though he is hoping someone will pat him on the shoulder and assure him that his present posture is correct. But the note of desperation in what he says leads one to think that he may be on the verge of doing the one thing unimaginable. He might “pope.” He has the logic down right. Today he closes his eyes to the notion that his biblicism is untenable. When he opens them and lets the truth shine in, he might find himself welcoming those “clutches.”