LRC, Houston - the weekends-free church in Houston, Texas

I still have some Scofield’s scars and trying to make them vanish is very difficult because theywere built from the inside out. It’s amazing how much influence this Texas preacher, name C. I. Scofield (1843-1921) has had on those of us who live in the Southern Bible belt. Thankfully, it’s only down here in the deep South that the Scofield Bible is known. You can find it in every Southern ‘Christian bookstore”. So they say.

If you live in Manhattan, Chicago, or Seattle you can’t find a single Scofield Bible- not even at the public library. Even most historical reference books on American religion never mention what has to be one of the top ten influential books for the twentieth century- the Scofield Bible.

The Scofield Bible became the antithesis of the Jefferson Bible. Or as it has been said, Jefferson’s chaff was Scofield’s wheat.

Unfortunately, Scofield knew two important things about about Southern fundamentalists. First, they hardly ever read any books on theology and they read the Bible infrequently. Second, they wanted certitude, not complexities, contradictions, and ambiguities. And the Scofield Bible gave those things to them in spades!

And to add certitude to certainity, Scofield offered his theological conclusions as if:

1-They were beyond question
2-They were the historical traditional opinions
3-Any other opinion was a departure from the faith

To embrace any other thought was tantamount to heresy of maybe even a manifestation and validation of one’s lost nature. Charles Strozier put it that way, ” The Scofield Bible is the inerrant text of God in the minds of many unsophisticated fundamentalists believers who saw his “notes as canonical”. And anything gnostic was definitly a cult.

And while I have known a few loving fundamentalists, love is seldom a word that drips from their lips. Instead they possess a vocabulary of judgment, stern words, retributive punishment, eternal hell, and other less than pleasing attitudinal catch-phrases.

The GOOD NEWS is that I only walked around the fringes of Scofield, and while I owned a Scofield Bible, I seldom used it a a reference. Maybe that’s why I see God as so loving and also why some others see me as marginally saved, if at all. Thankfully, my Scofield scars are minimal.