Fundamentalism as Godless Presumption

Fundamentalism is foot-stomping. If it sounds childish, it’s because it indubitably is. It is the equivalent of a child clapping their hands to their ears and screaming, “I want it!”

When I refer to fundamentalism, I do not just refer to the historical theology that developed in response to modernist or “liberal” theology (as a side note, I think we often mistake liberation theology for liberal theology and get our knickers into a knot for no reason. I believe fundamentalist is a foot-stompy way of looking at the Bible and faith with absolutely no humility or self-awareness whatsoever; it is a way of looking at a world… a philosophy. But let us backtrack a little.

With the European Enlightenment and the rise of modern science came a new branch of theological thinking, one based on Enlightenment rationalism and that attempted to reconcile belief with modern science. Anything supernatural was rejected as myth, evolution trumped the creation narrative, and the Bible was regarded a text like any other. In a sense, liberal theology stripped Christianity of any kind of supernatural element beyond what humans could study and know objectively using scientific inquiry.

Fundamentalism came onto the scene in reaction: “No”, fundamentalists asserted, “The Creation narrative is true. The Bible is infallible and inerrant.” Fundamentalism crafted a new relationship between Christianity and modernity/science. Seven-day creationism today is an example: fundamentalists take the Biblical narrative to be true in a rationalist and scientific sense. So, instead of proclaiming science as infallible truth, fundamentalists proclaimed truth (as they interpreted the Bible to teach), as science and as scientific.

The problem is, of course, that “scientificism” was and is a product of modernity. In attempting to make the Bible true according to a mashup of the Bible and science, fundamentalists have been neither true to the Bible, nor legitimately scientific. They have created an odd hybrid that is not truly a hybrid, because it has little respect for either the Bible or science. If you read what the early church up until Augustine believed about creation, you will find many different interpretations of Genesis, none of which are seven-day Creationism. Mix ahistorical Biblical interpretation with made-up facts, and you get a self-righteous political movement.

Fundamentalism is modernity gone awry. With absolutely no self-awareness, the 20th and 21st century thinker disregards all Biblical context or personal context and believes what he or she reads in the Bible is rational and questionable truth. Disagree with his (usually his, sometimes her) dogma, and you question God Himself.

Let me give you an example: I believe human theology is always a product of one’s individual story, whether it is one’s walk with God and the revelation of God to that individual, or whether it is the result of trying to justify one’s sin or cunningly say what people want to hear to gain and maintain influence. God is greater than our rational axioms, doctrinal proclamations, creeds, or systematic theologies. None of these things are objective or Biblical truths that are separable from human subjectivity. Every teaching, every book, and every theological system, however “logical” and Biblical (proof-texted) has within it human fallibilities that can be questioned. We can test the fruit (end result) and origins of any given doctrine or system. We can even still choose to hold to them as being consistent with our faith and solidly biblical without holding them up as infallible and objective.

Descartes during the Enlightenment conceived of a realm of pure abstract knowledge (a.k.a. science) untainted by human subjectivity and experience. However, the conceit of science is that is has no body, no materiality, no history, no human frailty, no “errancy”. I believe that systematic theology is such a conceit. The fact that no criticism of fundamentalist beliefs or of their creators (and their motives/fruit) is allowed is very concerning

You might object that Descartes came after Calvin and Luther. That is true, but Calvin essentially created a theological system based on legalities and rules (as a lawyer), and Luther with his Two Kingdom dualism created two separate realms of existence: the spiritual kingdom, where one is holy and justified, and the physical realm, where one remains a sinner. In the spiritual kingdom, one may fulfill Jesus’s teachings and love one’s enemies, but in the physical realm one may kill them with the sword. This kind of abstraction of righteousness and of the ethics of the Kingdom of God alienates both righteousness and Kingdom ethics from any kind of materiality. Sola fide really became about creedalism, about doctrinal orthodoxy.

You can trace this further back to Aristotle and Grecian mind-body dualism. You can also see threads of this in the Council of Nicea and the advent of the Constantinian church, whereby bishops sought to achieve doctrinal and ecclesial uniformity and exert control stressed purity of creed (abstract beliefs). I may agree with the Nicene formulation, but what is suspicious to me is that creedalism and control was concurrent with a rejection of the pacifist ethics and love-embodied-in-action that characterized early Christians faithful to Jesus’s teachings. It always seems like an emphasis on “right doctrine” came hand in hand with unrighteous action and the taking up of the sword. Jesus placed zero emphasis on getting a doctrinal formula of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit perfectly correct.

We have Aristotle, Constantine, Luther, and Descartes all part of the cast of characters who have influenced the way we look at the world and that make it impossible for anyone to come up with objective axioms about the Christian faith that cannot be put to the test and examined, for example, as a product of human history and culture. Enlightenment thinking and rationalism is about the creation of these perfect abstract systems of thought with each idea perfectly organized and no ideas conflict or contradict. These abstract systems are usually totalizing in that they always claim infallibility and objectivity based on some kind of universality. Christians who put together verses about such and such belief and then claim based on these verses that their conclusions are therefore God’s eternal truth are employing Enlightenment thinking, even if the logical framework they create is distinct from and contradicts the dogmas of Enlightenment science.

Black-and-white thinking, and drawing a straight line from your dogma to poorly or cleverly constructed proof-text-based argumentation is fundamentalistic. Someone may differ from early 20th century fundamentalism proper, but still approach the Bible in a fundamentalistic way, this time with their interpretation being the true and correct one, and everyone else’s being wrong.

Often, specific practices (i.e. communion and baptism) are argued to be only correct practiced the way they or their group practices it. Sola Scriptura gave us this uniquely Protestant phenomenon, because the Roman Catholic church never bothered to make an argument solely from the Scriptural text but also from the evolution of tradition. Truth for Roman Catholics is found in the authority of apostolic succession.

Of course, fundamentalists believe in human errancy — the difference is that they do not allow their doctrines to be judged and critiqued as human doctrines. Fundamentalism is thus wholly modernistic in its view of truth. It is a world in which man can claim himself supreme and in the place of God, in which he is able to establish objectivity. For example, KJV-only-ists act as if God thundered the exact wording of the Authorized Version from Mount Sinai, refusing to acknowledge its shortcomings and errors, let alone its troubled political origins.

I believe in truth, but that this is found solely in God. God alone is transcendent. When Jesus said “I am the truth”, He distinguished truth from logical systems and axioms and made it an embodied being rather than a state of abstraction to which intelligent humans with the right credentials could arbitrate and determine. You will notice that nothing in the Bible is truly “logical” in the modern sense, which makes it not errant or inerrant, but trans-errant. Inerrancy is a human box into which we try to consign truth, a logic that cannot satisfactorily contain the greatness of God.

I agree with Barth’s description of God as “wholly other”, but also that God who made us in His image is wholly other in a way that is wholly other from what we envision objectivity, power, and greatness to be. God is an upside-down wholly other, if you will. God has emotions and subjectivities. He is a rock, but He is not a timeless logic. God made us like Him, to have subjectivities too. Yet the greatness of God and the truth of God cannot be claimed, possessed, and held in one’s hand any more than a preacher can hold up a yellow balloon and claim that he has within his hands the Sun. At best, he has a drawing he personally has made of the sun, interpreted through his own eyes and the knowledge he has.

Humans cannot hold the sun, moon, stars, or our Milky Way galaxy in the palm of our hand, and so we cannot hold God in the box we call theology. We can have theologies, like pictures and photographs and models, but each of these is mediated, fallible, incomplete, and perhaps even completely wrong. In fact, some of these are compromised, deceptive, and colored by selfish and evil motives — we should never claim any doctrine is free of motive and agenda.

Our beliefs about hell are a product of culture and literature, yet we hold to them as if they brook no questioning. Even the Bible we have in our hands is also mediated through human history and human fallibility, surviving in fragments and manuscripts that sometimes wildly contradict — yet somehow God does not need perfection to come to us, to speak to us, and teach us. God can use broken things to do perfect work, yet that does in no way project the perfection of God onto imperfect (and often abusive) humanity. This can confuse some folks: God may have touched someone’s life through and despite sinful and compromised churches and ministers. Perhaps this is God’s mercy, not an endorsement.

The Bible tells us to judge the fruit. The teaching is only ever a product of and synchronous with the teacher, the art an extension of the artist. We cannot judge another as if we were in the place of God, nor can we rely on our logical processes, Biblical knowledge, and doctrinal foundations alone. We can however, recognize evil and violence and harm, and know in our hearts, minds, and consciences that evil is truly evil, that lies are truly lies. All we have to do is hold something up to the person of Jesus, dying on the cross, and know if it is cruciform, that is, imitative of Christ but humanly imperfect, or if it is lupine and deceptive. Sometimes we need time to tell, but Jesus promises that we eventually will.

The difference between fundamentalism and legitimate Biblical exegesis is epistemological humility, the acknowledgment of subjectivity and positionality, and the rejection of totalizing universalities. It means that I alone cannot come to God without my brother, because my brothers and sisters perceive something of God that I do not, especially my brothers and sisters who are suffering, marginalized, and poor. Those who insist that all can know God and know truth equally show their true colors, in that their faith is built on the sand of pure intellectualism and has nothing to do with the wisdom of experience. This means that, effectively, someone who is intelligent and says the right things to be recognized by them as legitimate does not need walk with God or live the journey of a lifetime. Such intellectualism actually erases the existence of the person doing the theologizing by making their work on par with the divine.

Such intellectuallism also erases the existence of God.

A idol we make with our own hands is an object of knowledge, and does not truly need to exist. God is then a phenomena that comes to us on our terms and according to how we determine it: we essentially comandeer a puppet-God that serves our own ambitions.

On the other hand, a transcendent, creator God is a Someone whom we come to know through experience and relationship, which leads us to value experience and relationship and embodiment more than words and dogmas alone.

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