Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation

Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents.
By James Simpson. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.
349 pp. $27.95 cloth.

James Simpson has an ax to grind. His ax is sharp and his blows are relentless against the cultural textus receptus. Conventional wisdom argues that the liberal cultural tradition is greatly indebted to the Protestant Reformation for initiating a reading culture. Protestant insistence on vernacular Bible translation (even to the point of martyrdom, thus the title) generated a sea change from the unwritten tradition to the centrality of the text as the source of authority. Opponents of the Reformation, both religious and secular, may disagree vehemently with the theology, but they are nonetheless beneficiaries of a culture that began with the sixteenth-century Reformers. The Reformers unwittingly planted the seed that eventually flowered in the Enlightenment. Lutheranism promoted the individual over the power of the institution. Widespread literacy resulted. The foundation of modernity rests on the survival of individual conscience and liberty grounded in unfettered reading. This conventional wisdom, Simpson claims, is all so much sophomoric bunk. It is in fact 180 degrees out of phase. A literalist reading of 2 Kings by William Tyndale and John Foxe, who found parallels between King Josiah and boy King Edward VI, contributed to 200 years of violence in Western Europe, according to Simpson. This, he argues, is not the fruit of the liberal tradition but the fruit of the fundamentalist womb. Simpson argues that the liberal tradition needs to search for its real parents. The legitimate offspring of sixteenth-century literalism is violent, authoritarian fundamentalism, not the liberal tradition. For Simpson, the legitimate offspring of this literalist Bible-reading tradition are in fact cultural bastards.

For the full article and book review by by Dale Walden Johnson (Erskine Theological Seminary), see:

Johnson, Dale Walden. "Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents." Church History 78, no. 1 (March 2009): 200. MasterFILE Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed December 14, 2010).

http://ehis.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=5&hid=115&sid=f76f6550-6915-44d6-ab01-17ce13f811dd%40sessionmgr113&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=f5h&AN=42846321