By Michael Jensen

ABC RELIGION AND ETHICS | 25 OCT 2010

FUNDAMENTALISM IS A MENTALITY TO BE AVOIDED IN WHATEVER GUISE, BUT ONE DOES NOT ESCHEW THE NAME “FUNDAMENTALIST” ON ACCOUNT OF WISHING TO LOOK RESPECTABLE. CREDIT: JENNIFER INGALL (ABC LOCAL RADIO).

“Fundamentalism” is a disagreeable word, and someone who is a fundamentalist is usually thought to be a disagreeable person. It is a playground bully among words, a word hissed through clenched teeth. It could be argued on this account that it isn’t worth taking the concept of fundamentalism seriously, because it usually means “a religious person who is more conservative than me, and in an irritating way.”
But however rude a word it is, there is such a thing as fundamentalism.

The original “Fundamentalists” were a broad movement that began in response to theological modernism. A wealthy American commissioned a group of writers to write a series of defensive books and tracts that were to be labelled The Fundamentals.
These tracts appeared in great numbers between 1912 and 1916. Some of the tracts were by scholars of note; others were not quite so impressive. The word “Fundamentalist” however was the lasting label given to the conservative form of Christianity that it represented – especially as it was determined to defend Christianity from radical modernism in theology and culture.

Quickly, the fundamentalists lost credibility and their reputation became tarnished. They seemed ignorant of the issues they were addressing, of the Bible they were defending, and especially of science. They became more zealous, and they were despised. They came from, and appealed to, the less educated parts of the Christian world.

Things happen a little more slowly in Australia. In a piece entitled “What Shall We Do With The Bible?” published originally in 1987, Anglican Archbishop Donald Robinson recounted the shift in the usage of the term.

When he went to Sydney University in 1940, he was not unhappy to own the label “fundamentalist.” It merely indicated then that he was not a modernist, and that he was committed to the authority of Scripture.

As the term increasingly was being used by the opponents of evangelicals to caricature and abuse them, prominent evangelicals began to disavow it from the 1950s on – especially in the UK. Leading British evangelical Anglican John Stott was in the vanguard.

As Robinson writes: “He said we ought to discard [the term fundamentalist] because it had become associated with three extravagances, first, a total rejection of all biblical criticism, secondly, excessively literalist interpretation of the Bible and thirdly, certain rather mechanical theories of the nature of biblical inspiration. Those extravagances, he said, were no part of the orthodox evangelical position or of the IVF in particular.”
Another leading British evangelical J.I. Packer likewise detested the term as a description for evangelicalism, and authored a book called “Fundamentalism” and the Word of God – with the inverted commas in the title indicating that he thought that the word was not something he could now own.

It was clearly a word that made evangelicals wince, and so their opponents continued to use it. And evangelicals continued to seek to distinguish themselves from it. An American evangelical scholar named E.J. Carnell argued that fundamentalism had become more of a religious attitude than a theological position.

Fundamentalists claimed to sit under Scripture’s authority, but in fact they followed their own traditions and habits in interpreting the Bible. They had fail to develop an affirmative world view and would not try to connect their convictions with the culture.
Their only goal was to negate modernism. But once modernism itself had died away, fundamentalism had no obvious raison d’etre. It became a highly rigid and ideologically driven form of Christianity, incapable of recognising incompleteness and inconsistency in their own position or of tolerating it in anyone else.

As Carnell wrote: “Fundamentalism is a lonely position. It has cut itself off from the general stream of culture, philosophy and ecclesiastical tradition. This accounts, in part, for its robust pride. Since it is no longer in union with the wisdom of the ages, it has no standard by which to judge its own religious pretense.”

This characterisation of fundamentalism as a mentality rather than a particular position was taken up by the British Biblical scholar James Barr in his 1977 book Fundamentalism, in which he offered a sweeping critique of the Inter-Varsity Press and its publications.

Barr’s chief target in his book was the evangelicalism of the British scene. Yet the British evangelicals had always been adamant that they were not fundamentalists, and that they held none of the tenets of fundamentalism as it was found in the USA: they were not creation scientists, they were not pre-millennialist, they were not sectarian, they were not prone to the worst excesses of the holiness movement, and so on.

For Barr, these things were beside the point. The specifics of dogma were irrelevant. What counted was the defensive mindset.

I would accept that “fundamentalism” is descriptive of a kind of religious mentality which is in evidence most egregiously in a kind of epistemological double standard. That is, it is a mentality that confidently asserts the objectivity and interest-free status of its own reasoning while at the same time decrying the prejudice and interest-laden nature of the reasoning of its opponents.

This is the kind of “rationalism” that Harriet Harris decries in her book Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism, and which she claims to find evident in much of conservative evangelicalism. Why is it bad?

It is chiefly bad for spiritual rather than intellectual reasons. That is, it fails to be a posture of humble confidence rather than belligerence. It claims to know what it cannot. It is pastorally irresponsible, because it relies on intellectual short-cuts which people may accept for a time and then begin to doubt, to their spiritual detriment.
I would also argue that it is bad because the fundamentalist mindset is actually not faithful to Scripture.

As I noted above, fundamentalism in the strict sense had its origins in a reaction to the modernism of the mainline churches and the academy in the 1920s. It exists because orthodox Protestant Christianity was being attacked at the very root. That is, the biblical criticism of the nineteenth century had led to a wholesale questioning of the normative Christian doctrines of the Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement and so on.

The attacks of liberal Christianity on these fundamentals were themselves a type of rationalism – that is what John Henry Newman called them in the 1840s. They were made in full confidence that the methods of academic theology could be sufficiently objective as to establish verifiable truths – that we might be able to see through the supernaturalist accounts of the gospels to the real Jesus, and so on.

For someone like the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, this rationalist approach had a rather more negative function in that it demolished the notion, held dearly in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, of orthodox Christianity as a faith established on rational grounds. The thought of Hume and then Kant had proven that route to be a dead end.

But Schleiermacher did not despair. All this meant was that an account of Christian faith had to move into the more subjective and experiential realm. Christianity could not be primarily a set of truths to which one gives assent. Rather – and here Schleiermacher drew on his roots in German Pietism, from which the evangelical John Wesley also drew – the Christian faith schooled the believer in the “feeling of absolute dependence.”

Schleiermacher gave a very sophisticated and highly original account of the Christian faith in these terms in his The Christian Faith – perhaps the most remarkable piece of Christian theology of its era. Christianity could self-describe as a spirituality, but it was not a coherent or plausible rational system.

So, the liberal Christianity of the Enlightenment reacts against the cerebral rationalism of the previous generation because it believes that the rationalist method has actually disproven orthodoxy. Instead, it starts to emphasise the experiential aspect of faith – which is all it has left to it.

The evangelical movement of the same era, though conservative in belief, had also found real strength in its emphasis on the experiences of conviction of sin, conversion and sanctification.

Conservative minded Christians responded to this attack on the rational foundations of their beliefs by seeking a surer ground on which to stand. For Newman, a Calvinist evangelical from his youth, this meant seeking the embrace of tradition and the Church.

In the US, the great Princeton theologians Charles Hodge and Benjamin Warfield sought to defend orthodoxy on more rational grounds and through appeal to an inerrant Bible. Hodge and Warfield were men of the highest intellectual calibre. They had, however, accepted the terms of their opponents. Their defence of orthodoxy was on the same grounds that it had been attacked.

That is to say: the claim was that rationalism had overcome orthodox Protestant Christianity and left us with no objective ground. Instead of challenging rationalism itself, Warfield and Hodge accepted the challenge to prove orthodoxy on a rational and apparently objective basis.

They were redoubtable. Warfield in particular remains an under-rated scholar. Yet his scholarly achievement – and personal integrity – was immense. But by the time of the 1920s, with modernity advanced even further in its attack on the rational basis for religious belief, those who to became the fundamentalists had little room to move.
They were right to insist on and appeal to the authority of Scripture. However they adopted a rather odd tactic.

On the one hand, they attacked the presuppositions of their opponents, denying that there was such a thing as a purely rational approach. Darwin and Freud provided a convenient excuse to deny Christian teachings rather than having anything really objective to say.

On the other hand, they insisted on the pure objectivity and rationality of their own views, based on Scripture. A rationalism based on Scripture was acceptable, where a rationalism based on nature was ruled illegitimate.

What is overlooked in this picture is the fact that “rationality” as such does not exist without people who think. Scripture read with the eyes of faith provides, as John Calvin says, the spectacles through which all reality may be rightly observed. But this was not merely a rational thought process in his description of it. It was an operation of the Holy Spirit on corrupted human reason.

We can see from this account that the emergence of the fundamentalist mentality was more a matter of epistemology – what, and how, we can know things – than it was about specific theological convictions.

Appeal to the supreme authority of Scripture does not make one a fundamentalist. What might rightly be called “fundamentalism” indeed appeals to the authority of Scripture but establishes that authority by appeal to a kind of rational argument – a rational argument that is supposedly not exposed to the effects of sin on human knowing in the way that all other reasoning is.

The privilege of making such an argument is not granted to its opponents, who are held to be in the sway of some agenda or other.

If appeal to the authority of Scripture does not make one a fundamentalist, then neither does confidence in one’s own theological positions. Christians of all stripes are called on to affirm the creeds week by week. There is a kind of insistent doubting scepticism that is its own terrible and self-indulgent vice.

However, it is a grave theological mistake to accord one’s theological convictions the finality that only the judgement of God can give them. Belligerence is not the necessary complement of confident conviction.

Let me be clear. Fundamentalism is a mentality to be avoided in whatever guise. But one does not eschew the name “fundamentalist” on account of wishing to look respectable. The term is treated with such a mixture of alarm and contempt in the contemporary world that you could be forgiven for not wanting to be the target of such opprobrium.

But respectability is not a category that ought to interest Christians if it means compromise of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Christians are those for whom being killed by one’s neighbours for what one believes is a consideration! After all, it was not dignity or status that Christ himself pursued. Respectability is not a Christian category.

If being fundamentalist means “not one of the respectable people,” then I would happily accept it.

Michael Jensen is lecturer in theology at Moore Theological College, Sydney.

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2010/10/25/3047789.htm