Welcome back to Alhaj! I had interactedwith him for a few months back in 2007. Then one day his blog disappeared and I didn’t hear from him again. Having turned into a pseudo-blogger myself, I only pop back in every so often to see what’s up. Today I see that Alhaj has left me a number of comments. While I don’t have time right now to respond, I want to at least leave a quick note. Alhaj, I will be happy to converse with you again. Thank you for stopping back.
I have been reading The Sales Bible: The Ultimate Sales Resource in order to become better at my day job. The author, Jeffrey Gitomer, gives lots of little tidbits and ideas to get you thinking. I came across a quote today that got me thinking. I thought it worth sharing with my readers. He writes, “An hour of learning a day will make you a world class expert at anything in five years.“ Now of course there’s some hyperbole here. You can’t be a world-class expert in literally anything, but I’d bet you can become quite close to expert in quite a lot of things. I read a Rick Warren quote that said that we tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in a year and underestimate what we can accomplish in ten years.
The hard part is to pick just one thing to focus in on. I want to be an expert in about a dozen different things, and every one seems like the most important thing while I am thinking about it. I am challenged to narrow it down to one. How about you? What would you like to become an expert in? Are you willing to make it a priority?
Why is it that all the Bible and theology blogs — whether on the right or on the left – insist on being so dang tied to the liturgical calendar. I grew up in a liturgical church. I hated every single stupid minute of it. Liturgy is an easy way for a pastor to get away with not thinking — after all, we know what we do in each part of the year; no point in seeking God on it or anything. And all through the blogosphere, happy easter, blah blah blah. Like I care. As my friends at church say every year at Christmastime, Constantine is the reason for the Season. 
This video serves as a great wrap-up to my week of meditations on Fundamentalism. I am not a Fundamentalist, but I have friends that are self-described Fundamentalists. I am more positive towards Fundamentalism than probably any of my friends on the internet, though not uncritically so. So I write this post in defense of my friends, the Fundamentalists, just as I would defend the orthodoxy of my online friends to the Fundamentalists.
Dom Crossan is an entertaining scholar. He is generally a lot of fun to listen to. Better is one hour in a Crossan lecture than thousands elsewhere. But in this video, Dom demonstrates that he is a schmuck. He has created a straw man of Fundamentalism. No Fundamentalist believes that “true” Christians should persecute “false” Christians. This is because, as Dom so aptly points out, all Fundamentalists are (so-called) literalists. And it is difficult to mistake “turn the other cheek” or “love your enemy”, especially when you are committed to a hermeneutic of literalism. Fundamentalists are quite fond of the Bible, so this is not likely to be a point that is missed. The Fundamentalist way to deal with unbelievers is to preach the gospel to them. So while Crossan may find their behavior obnoxious, it can hardly be described as persecution of unbelievers.
It’s not as if this is the first time Crossan has overstated his point. A few years ago in a lecture in Madison he stated that if Jesus were in the US today we would crucify him again. Now if you believe Jesus was predestined to be a sacrifice for sin, you have reason to agree (as Fundamentalists would be inclined to do). But apart from theological reasons, I find it very unlikely that Jesus would be crucified today. During the Q&A time I challenged him on this and he quickly backpeddled. Okay, he admitted, Jesus wouldn’t be executed but he would be marginalized; we would put him on Oprah with a whole panel of people who believe they are the Messiah. Everyone laughed. But being marginalized is a far cry from being executed.
The fact is that nuanced comments to the public don’t get much publicity. That’s why Rush Limbaugh gets so much press. It’s what makes Dom Crossan so fun to listen to, but it also makes it hard to take him seriously.
Hope you’re not feeling too Maundy today.
I mentioned yesterday that I have come to appreciate much that is good within the Fundamentalist movement. But this does not mean that I accept everything about the movement unquestioningly. I am still disturbed by the tendency to make culturally relative issues into absolutes. I still wonder if they unwittingly place barriers against the movement of the Holy Spirit in their churches. But I think they are sincere and generally on target with issues I would deem important.
The primary issue I have with Fundamentalism is the same issue they have with Evangelicalism: separation. Fundamentalists insist on doctrinal purity, and will not associate with churches that do not do the same. This includes secondary separation – separating from churches who refuse to separate; and tertiary separation – separating from churches who refuse to separate from churches who refuse to separate. I suppose the levels could be multiplied indefinitely. Before my association with Fundamentalists, I assumed that separation meant retreating from the culture, as I told the story of the movement a few days ago. But my Fundamentalist friends gave me a different definition. They are no longer opposed to engaging the culture. The issue for them is: whom will you work with? Evangelicals (they say) have no qualms about working with theological liberals. They point to a Billy Graham Crusade in New York in the 50s as evidence. The liberal churches partnered together with Graham and he did not turn them away.
Certainly the Fundamentalists have a point. We cannot work together with everyone. Some things put a church or denomination outside of Orthodox Christianity. The Bible is clear that there are certain beliefs which define Christianity, and denial of those beliefs constitutes a denial of Christian theology. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. But the Bible is just as clear that there is to be unity within the true church. No part of the church has the right to reject any other part of the church simply because they disagree. Or as Paul wrote to the Corinithian church, the eye cannot say to the hand, “Because you are not an eye, you are not part of the body.” Fundamentalists err on the side of too much separation. And this is not a minor error. It is absolutely wicked. It is not acceptable to draw boundaries where God has not established them. Impure separation is the major sin of which Fundamentalists must repent.
Until a few years ago, my only exposure to Fundamentalism came from friends in my church who had left the movement. I perceived Fundamentalists to be closed-minded, rock-and-roll-hating, strict, legalistic, argumentative sectarians who rejected any movement of the Holy Spirit. I was offended by Fundamentalism and rarely passed up an opportunity to mock it.
It would seem that God is not without a sense of humor. We moved to Watertown where there is a very active Fundamentalist college. I needed to fulfill my requirements for Biblical Hebrew, and the college offered it for a third of what I would pay at Trinity. Add the fact that it is 7 minutes from my house rather than 2 hours and you can see why I might have been inclined to overcome my disdain of Fundamentalism, at least temporarily.
I ended up taking an entire year of Hebrew through the college. In addition, my daughter started taking violin lessons through their strings prep program, and my son started in cello this year. I have found that Fundamentalists are good people. In general, there is very little where they disagree theologically from the more conservative Evangelicals. But it was the little things that most made me appreciate Fundamentalism. The people actually act like Christians. They seem to want to order their lives around what God wants. My first semester of class ended up being free, a policy they have just to bless people in the community! The violin teacher prays before every lesson – not just out of routine, but actual heartfelt prayers. In general, everyone just seems to really love God.
Fundamentalism is not without its flaws. I still hold to some of my original critiques of the movement. But it is much harder to judge and criticize your friends, especially when they seem to be the real deal. So what I originally saw to be God’s sense of humor turned out to be an opportunity for me to be challenged and changed. I learned a valuable lesson.
Have you had a similar experience some group or someone you used to be judgmental towards? Drop me a comment.
I am well entrenched in the 8am-5pm work world now. Many days it is a lot of fun. Today was really crappy. Nothing seemed to go right. After a lousy day, there’s nothing like sitting down with a good beer and a good theology book. This is where I find solace. In fact, I have decided that drinking a beer and reading a good theology book are my two favorite things to do in life… okay, two of my three favorite things.
Perhaps the greatest theology book of all time to be read while drinking beer is N.T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God. Indeed, does not nature itself teach that Tom Wright and Leinenkugel’s go hand-in-hand? Here is a great quote about the nature of Jesus’ “hell” passages:
The next comment ought to be unnecessary, but misunderstanding has been so long-lasting here that perhaps it is as well to be clear. The warnings already mentioned, and those about to be discussed, are manifestly and obviously, within their historical context, warnings about a coming national disaster, involving the destruction by Rome of the nation, the city and the Temple. The story of judgment and vindication which Jesus told is very much like the story told by the prophet Jeremiah, invoking the categories of cosmic disaster in order to invest the coming socio-political disaster with its full theological significance. The ‘normal’ way of reading these passages withing the Christian tradition has been to see them as references to a general post mortem judgment in hell; but this betrays a fairly thorough lack of historical understanding. Jesus’ sayings may have wider implications. That is a topic outside the scope of the present book. But as historicans we are bound to read at least the passages [traditionally taken to refer to hell] as warnings about a coming national disaster. (p. 323)
I think Wright is absolutely on target with this. What do you think? Does Gehennah refer to the afterlife or is it a metaphor for this-worldly judgment?
I am sometimes called a Fundamentalist. I am not. I am a Charismatic Evangelical Christian. This makes me twice-removed from Fundamentalist. Let me explain.
The Fundamentalist movement began in the late 1800s. It began to harden and take form in the first quarter of the 20th century. This is the same period that Pentecostalism was developing after the Azusa Street Revival in California in 1906. Pentecostals held the same core beliefs as these early Fundamentalists, but they were largely excluded or simply ignored within Fundamentalist circles. After all, Pentecostals spoke in tongues, appealed to the lower class of society, and had blacks and whites co-mingling. Fundamentalists in this period were trying to win the intellectuals back to orthodox Christianity against the pervasive liberalism that was making inroads into the churches.
By the mid 20s, the Fundamentalist movement had largely failed. They formed their own denominations or becoming independent. They determined that liberals could never be persuaded and the best response was to retreat from the mainline denominations and form their own enclaves to resist the evils of secular society.
The fundamentalists carried the torch of Evangelical Christianity during this period, carrying on the revivalist traditions of Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, Charles Finney, and D.L. Moody. But after another 25 years, many began to be frustrated with the movement. A new movement was formed based on the conviction that Christians are called to engage the world, not run from it. The leaders of the movement rejected the term Fundamentalism because of the isolationist connotations the word had taken. Instead, they called themselves neo-Evangelicals. The “neo” would soon be dropped, creating the modern Evangelical movement.
The Charismatic movement developed when the Pentecostals began making inroads into the very churches the Fundamentalists abandoned a generation earlier. The Charismatics tended to form their own churches and denominations, just as the Fundamentalists had. Over time, Charismatics have eventually been accepted into mainstream Evangelicalism (as have most Pentecostals). So as a Charismatic Evangelical, I trace both sides of my spiritual family tree in opposition to Fundamentalism. I am not a Fundamentalist. Yet surprisingly, I have come to appreciate Fundamentalism in ways I never expected.
In popular media the term Fundamentalist has come to refer to anyone that adheres to a religion that is considered extreme by our society. A fundamentalist Christian is anyone that takes the Bible as the final authority for all matters in his or her life. The quick-and-dirty way to figure out if one is a fundamentalist or not is to find out if he or she “believes the Bible literally.” This is a sloppy criterion on a number of levels. Take for instance the fact that no Fundamentalist believes that God is literally a rock despite the Bible’s assertion that God is a Rock. But the main problem is that it completely ignores the history of fundamentalism. It lumps true fundamentalists together with Evangelicals, Pentecostals, Charismatics, and even conservative Catholics, all of which are certainly not fundamentalists. To further make the point, Fundamentalists are generally united on the point that Roman Catholics are not truly Christians.
The fundamentalist movement began in the late 1800s and early 1900s as a reaction to liberalism in the mainline Christian denominations. It takes it’s name from a series of books, The Fundamentals, first published in 1909. These volumes contained articles that defended traditional Christian doctrines: the reliability of scripture, the virgin birth, the reality of miracles, etc. The movement narrowed, so that a church must be an independent Baptist church that reads the Bible according to a particular interpretive strategy called Dispensationalism.
Fundamentalism has acquired a bad name in popular culture. “Enlightened” liberals use the term contemptuously of anyone with religious convictions that differ from theirs: Bible-believing = Fundamentalist = bad. I disagree with both equal signs. It is as ignorant as declaring that all Muslims are Arabs (or all Arabs are Muslims) – and then proceeding to speak scornfully of both. We ought to allow Fundamentalists to define their own movement, especially if we actually believe in tolerance rather than just giving it lip-service.
Tomorrow I will delve into the differences between Fundamentalists, Evangelicals, and Pentecostals.
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