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.