The Trouble With Fundamentalism

Deeply embedded in current debates about how to present the Christian message with integrity is a clenched-teeth holding to a central core of beliefs as an indispensable sign of saving faith. For all practical purposes, Fundamentalists in all of the major world religions have declared a holy war on the questioning of vesting control of religious institutions and even whole societies in anyone except those who hold the “right” beliefs.

Beyond question, beliefs do have indispensable roles to play in the life of faith. They clarify who or what it is that should be the object of our ultimate trust and loyalty. They set out the grounds for confidence that a religion’s basic message is true. And especially for Christians, they offer vital summaries of what the Christian story as a whole is most importantly about. But beliefs are not the whole of faith. Trusting in God and loving all of God’s creatures as God loves them matter too --- even more than does either clinging to or repudiating inadequately understood doctrines, dogmas, and creeds.

The biggest problem with most forms of Fundamentalism is their overly restrictive view of the language and the logic of beliefs themselves. In specific, the so-called “Fundamentals” of faith tend to be misconstrued as factual statements which only the truly ignorant could possibly deny. On the surface, core Christian beliefs do look very much like assertions of fact whose truth can be confirmed by data and close reasoning available to everyone. Certainly, more conservative Christians look upon beliefs this way. According to their way of seeing the matter, the beliefs that we must affirm as conditions of our salvation constitute the full, literal truth (e.g., a cosmos created in six days) about a transcendent order of things that directly influences the course of events, both throughout the physical universe and in human history on our own planet.

The primary problem with this way of looking at core Christian beliefs is its narrowness. Beliefs serve several functions besides description alone. For instance, affirming that Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary has always had far more to do with doxology than with gynecology. It is more a way of honoring God’s greatness and Jesus’ uniqueness than it is of chronicling yet another surprising occurrence that happened sometime back and someplace out there, determinable “objectively.”

Three mornings a week my first year in seminary, routine and ritual became one: a favorite course, chapel, and then chats over coffee in the “Common Room.” One brief chat that had an especially powerful impact on me followed a chapel service in which I happened to be sitting next to the professor of my morning class. Across several weeks, he had been lecturing on the difficulties of getting behind biblical books to the history underlying them and in the process raised questions about the meaning and authoritativeness of the Christian tradition that many of us had not thought about previously. The impact of his lectures was profound, and often disturbing.

Side by side at the appropriate moment my professor and I both stood with our fellow worshippers and said the Nicene Creed out loud. It struck me while we were doing this that in spite of all the questions this man of faith obviously had about this very Creed, when he confessed it himself, he clearly meant what he was saying. As we walked together to coffee hour following the service, I asked him how he could recite the Creed so forcefully in spite of the questions he raised about it in class.

"Ever since I became an American citizen," he said to me, "one of my greatest joys has been reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. Affirming a creed is like that. This, too, is a declaration of loyalty --- in this latter case, to the church. Not, of course, in the sense of 'my church, right or wrong,' but in the sense of letting members of a group know that you‘re one of them." I still like this analogy. The beliefs that we share as Christians call us not so much to a body of fact as they do to a solidarity with a community of faith whose reason for being is to serve the cause of Christ in the world. Assenting to beliefs is a way of sealing one’s commitment not only to God, but to all of God’s people at work on behalf of God’s creation everywhere. There is indeed an objective order of things to which the core beliefs of faith intend to point. But at the heart of those beliefs is not the distillation of facts, but the confrontation with mystery.

The Resurrection Of Jesus Christ

The Christian story, as I learned about it growing up, is a story about a good man who was badly treated and eventually killed, but who was raised from the dead by God to show us his true identity as the way to, and the truth about, eternal life. The more I learned of the story in later years, even by doing a theology degree or three to learn it, the harder it got to come up with other ways of putting it. And the harder it also became to answer the myriad questions it puts to our ordinary understanding of how things work, in this world and the next.

One question is made inescapable by the Johannine tradition that presents Jesus as the gateway to heaven rather than, as in Mark and Matthew in particular, the proclaimer of a message about God’s coming kingdom on earth. John 14:6 quotes Jesus saying something that seems very out of character, that no one comes to God except by him. While these attributed words may have been comforting to Jewish Christians kicked out of their synagogues late in the first century, they are very troublesome in a 21st century global context.

Believe in Jesus as the gateway --- the only gateway --- to God’s sheepfold, and lo and behold, you’re through the gate. Don’t believe it, and the gate will close before you and remain closed forever. The major problem with this way of thinking is that it is grace-less. It makes getting into heaven a matter of saying and doing the right things, not a matter of God’s saying and doing good things to and for us that we not only do not deserve but can never deserve.

Another question about the Easter story stems from the way it tries to link Jesus’ resurrection with our own. Because he lives, it is said, we too shall live. It is the “because” in this affirmation that gives me pause. No reasonable person doubts the universality of the human hope to survive physical death, either individually or in a larger fellowship or both. And plenty of reasonable people have believed for a very long time that life in a world beyond this one is something not only worth counting on, but even a certainty that we can indeed count on. There should be no surprise, then, that Jesus could make it off a cross alive. Or that the crosses each of us has to bear in this life can be overcome in the next. The real surprise comes with the assertion that our making it to the next life is somehow dependent upon the fact that only Jesus made it.
“In” Christ, it is taught, resides our eternal destiny. The “in” here gives me as much trouble as the “because” just did. It cannot be that we climb into Christ merely by choosing to believe in him. If we are “in” him, it must be because we somehow have already been gathered into him, but the mysticism of all this begins to run riot very quickly. Except that it reminds us of who the Gatherer truly is, with whom we have most truly to deal. When all are safely gathered in, and when the whole of creation cries the Alleluia that has no end, it will be God and God alone who is glorified.

And finally, there is the question of the resurrection of the body. Not even Paul, the greatest Christian debater of the first century on this question, left things quite the way that many people seem to believe he did, with a conversation-stopping either-or to the Corinthians on the order of accept Jesus’ bodily resurrection (“seen” by 500+) or die forever in your unbelief. “Bodily” resurrection? You mean, like my going-to-flab, arteries-hardening, adrenaline-surging, one-thing-after-another-going-wrong body? Or like the body of a friend who was down to flesh and bones at the time of his death from a demonically rampaging cancer? Or like the mangled bodies of a family broadsided at an intersection by a drunken driver who ran a stop sign? No, Paul wrote, not like these. Whatever the spiritual” body is that we will inherit, it will be less like the flesh that Jesus became and more like the Life and the Light that he once was. It will be a body so gloriously changed as to be beyond the power of all our language to express.

The Christian story, as I am thinking about it this Eastertide, is the story of a good man who believed in an even better God, a God whose pure, unbounded Love hallows all things and transforms everything that is less than good in them into something that is good beyond all our thinking and imagining, in worlds without end.