Pastoral Musings

Liberal says that those who don’t admit that are not well informed of historical theology.

I am sorry for the fate of anyone who tries to argue with a fundamentalist on the basis of authority. The Bible and the corpus theologicum of the Church is on the Fundamentalist side.

via Hip and Thigh: Fundamentals and the Bible.

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In most of everyday life we understand how groups work. We understand that if two entities are in the same group, each is not necessarily in all the same groups as the other. In a bowl of apples, all are in the group “apples,” but only some are in the group “green apples” or “rotten apples.” The red and ripe apple is not less of an apple for failing to be green or rotten. Greeness and rottenness are not components of appleness.

My dog, Sweetheart, is in a group called dogs. To her chagrin (don’t ask how I know) she shares that group with the strays that wander the neighborhood. But Sweetheart behaves differently from the strays. She doesn’t produce patches of dead grass in people’s front yards or raid the garbage cans in strangers’ garages or breed at random. (Whether she would do all of these if she could is beside the point!) It would be silly to reason, “Sweetheart is a dog; strays are dogs; therefore Sweetheart is a stray.” It would be even more absurd to surmise, “Sweetheart is a dog; strays are dogs; being a dog means being a stray.”

It’s absurd because strayness is a distinct quality from dogness. She is no less of a dog for staying home, raiding only her own trash cans and never breeding at all. Would anyone suggest she is only 75% dog?

But when we talk about the group “fundamentalists,” many seem to slip into a group logic fog of some sort—a strange world in which apples should become oranges because so many apples are rotten and dogs should become cats because so many dogs are strays. Some enter an even weirder world where appleness is the same thing as rottenness and dogness is the same thing as strayness.

In the world I live in, even if every dog but Sweetheart became a stray, she should hold her head high and be proud to be a dog.

With that as context, I’ll say it again: I am a proud fundamentalist.

 Be sure to read the rest at   Proud Fundamentalist | SharperIron.

Related articles

• Historic Fundamentalism part 3 (pastoralmusings.com)
• Fundamentalist/fundamentalist will no longer do. What will? (pastoralmusings.com)

The gravest threat we face from terrorism, as the killings in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik underscore, comes not from the Islamic world but the radical Christian right and the secular fundamentalists who propagate the bigoted, hateful caricatures of observant Muslims and those defined as our internal enemies. The caricature and fear are spread as diligently by the Christian right as they are by atheists such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Our religious and secular fundamentalists all peddle the same racist filth and intolerance that infected Breivik. This filth has poisoned and degraded our civil discourse. The looming economic and environmental collapse will provide sparks and tinder to transform this coarse language of fundamentalist hatred into, I fear, the murderous rampages experienced by Norway. I worry more about the Anders Breiviks than the Mohammed Attas.

via Chris Hedges: Fundamentalism Kills – Chris Hedges’ Columns – Truthdig.

HT

Such irresponsible writing.

Fundamentalism is not extremism.  The words are not synonyms.

Neither can an atheist be a Fundamentalist, as Fundamentalism is uniquely Christian.

A Fundamentalist cannot be a terrorist either.  Christian Fundamentalism will take us back to the basics of the faith of Jesus Christ, whose teachings direct us to love our enemies.

I truly wish that people would study and think before they begin their uniformed spewing of vitriolic nonsense.

This from the comments on Jim’s blog:

The difference between a (so-called) “Christian fundamentalist” terrorist and a Muslim fundamentalist terrorist is not really between them – they are fairly similar – but between the responses of the Christian and Muslim communities.

via The Norway Bomber is a Christian Fundamentalist: Anders Behring Breivik | Zwinglius Redivivus.

Now that’s a dilly!  There is far too much ignorance in that statement.  One need only search my blog here using the term “Fundamentalist” to learn what a Fundamentalist truly is.

From Get Religion:

We learn that he’s a Protestant (of his own “free will”) who wishes that the Church of Norway would just convert back to Rome, he dislikes priests who wear jeans and support Palestinians, and that he thinks the modern church is dying. We know from other evidence that he is a Freemason.

Meanwhile, the deputy police chief announced that the shooter was a “Christian fundamentalist” but no one has reported either the evidence for the claim or how the police determined that. Whatever the case, he may be the only Freemason, Rome-leaning, Protestant fundamentalist in the world.

Now they get it.  They realize that there’s no way that a Fundamentalist Christian can be what this guy is.

They continue:

Now it’s certainly true that the New York Times printed that a jihad group had claimed responsibility for the attack. An attack that, based on the evidence we have thus far, they didn’t actually commit. And certainly some parts of the blogosphere were either too trusting of this report or too eager to believe that this attack fit into the mold of Muslim terrorism as opposed to anti-government terrorism.

But now the media are committing an equal and opposite rush to judgment. It is certainly true that a police chief said that this man was a “Christian fundamentalist.” But at this point, I’ve seen precisely zero evidence that he was one, much less that he has in any way claimed it as a motivation for what he did. Maybe that will happen. Maybe he is right now telling police that his interpretation of a particular book of the Bible means that you shoot up 80-plus kids on an island. I don’t know.

Until such time as we learn that, though, this seems more like an attempt to force the shooter’s motivation into something equivalent to Islamist terror. Again, maybe it is. Maybe we will discover a trove of writings about how Jesus commands his followers to kill a bunch of kids. I don’t know. But we certainly don’t have that now.

In the end, I no longer expect people to get what a Fundamentalist truly is.  They simply don’t have the desire to understand Fundamentalists.  The media has poisoned the well, and very few truly desire to search and find what a Fundamentalist truly is.

Here’s a hint: Google “J. Gresham Machen Fundamentals” , or “R.A. Torrey Fundamentals.”  If you do so you will learn more accurate information about Fundamentalists than CNN, ABC, NBC, NPR, and Jim will ever tell you.

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It is obvious that the term “Fundamentalist” will never recover its proper usage.

Neither can we distinguish between a theological Fundamentalist and an idealogical fundamentalist by calling one a Fundamentalist and the other a fundamentalist, thus distinguishing them by the “F/f.”

On Joel’s blog I said,

I once naively thought that the term “Fundamentalist” could be recovered.
No longer do I think so.
There needs to be a new term.
Evangelical does not fit, as they don’t even agree on what an Evangelical is.
The Fundamentals provide a good picture of what a Fundamentalist is, and it is nothing like the insanity which is attributed to them.
The big “F” and little “f” won’t do to distinguish.
Oh well…

Why do I think this way?  Because the fact is that the well is so poisoned by the misappropriation of the term such as “Islamic fundamentalists” and “Fundamentalist Mormons” that only the few who truly understand what the Fundamentalist/Modernist controversy was about know what a Fundamentalist is.

Most people think of Muslims as fundamentalists.  Others think of Fred Phelps and his family as fundamentalists.  Others think of the KJVO crowd as fundamentalists.

Too few think of Fundamentalism as a theological movement that sought to get back to the Bible.

I believe that this does a great disservice to men such as B.B. Warfield, R.A. Torrey, Thomas Spurgeon, and even J.I. Packer.  These men are great examples of true Fundamentalists.

Now, we simply need a term that adequately describes one who holds to the Fundamentals of the faith…

Related articles

• Historic Fundamentalism part 1 (pastoralmusings.com)
• The Norway Bomber is a Christian Fundamentalist: Anders Behring Breivik (zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com)
• If You Wish to Speak Against Fundamentalists, Read Fundamentalists (pastoralmusings.com)

I came to Christ after being steeped for several years in the rankest brand of liberal Methodism. In the church I attended as an adolescent, the pastor and nearly all of my Sunday school teachers treated the Bible as a collection of legends, concocted by fallible human authors. They taught me that the Bible is scientifically and historically unreliable—but, they said, it contains moral principles that are good and helpful. Moreover, they said, it is great literature.

He then speaks of being invited to an evangelistic meeting.

I didn’t, however, know enough to bring a Bible to a meeting like that, so when I noticed the guy who invited me was not paying close attention, I reached over and took the Bible off his lap and began checking to verify that these verses giving so much explicit detail about the crucifixion really were in the Old Testament. When I saw it for myself, any doubt I had ever entertained about whether the Bible is to be taken seriously—all the liberal skepticism I had been force-fed by unbelieving Sunday school teachers—vanished instantly and forever.

(The sermon was a pretty good one, too—explaining how Christ’s death on the cross made atonement for sins by satisfying the penalty God demands.)

From that night to this day, I have never entertained one moment’s doubt or uncertainty about the power and authority of God’s Word. The whole course of my life was radically changed by the Word of God alone, and there is only one explanation for it: Because “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart”

via Pyromaniacs: How Skepticism Masquerading as Christianity Almost Cost Me My Soul.

Interesting.  I appreciate his openness on this issue.  We need more who will confess the authority of Scripture above the emptiness of moralism and liberalism.

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I let my subscription to the Sword of The Lord lapse back in December.

That should have been done much sooner.

Never the less, it is now June and I just noticed that I never missed when it stopped coming.

I’m still a Fundamentalist.  I guess it just goes to show that one can be a Fundamentalist without them

I think Joel gets it.  Speaking of the roots of fundamentalists (those who hold the name, but not necessarily the doctrines of Fundamentalism):

It is the fear of the unknown. Fear of uncertainty. Fear that you may not be correct.

It is not an adherence to a certain belief – it is the clinging to your own mental state out of fear of the unknown.

Note, this is about fundamentalism, but in believing what you consider to be Fundamentals.

 

Now, his last sentence should probably be rewritten to say,

This is about fundamentalism, NOT in believing what you consider to be Fundamentals.

I say that, because I’m pretty sure that’s what Joel meant.

That being said, consider what he is saying.  Many people are scared of changing their music, their worship, their translation, their wardrobe, the company they keep, the people they welcome into their churches, and so on.

Many are very, very scared of the challenges that their faith faces.  They respond by becoming angry, vitriolic people.  They lash out at those who disagree with them, or those who appear to disagree with them.  Woe to the one who takes a moderate, seeking position.  NOTHING should be questioned, they think.

Sadly, they silence honest inquiry.

Sadly, they become anti-intellectual.

Sadly, they spend their time propping up failing institutions.

Sadly, they miss loving Christ.

I’m all about the Fundamentals. I despise the harsh, unthinking, vitriolic, acid slinging fundamentalist mindset that many have today.  It gives true Fundamentalists a bad name.

Related articles

• Historic Fundamentalism part 5 (pastoralmusings.com)
• Historic Fundamentalism part 4 (pastoralmusings.com)
• Fundamentalism and Hate (pastoralmusings.com)
• Historic Fundamentalism part 3 (pastoralmusings.com)
• If You Wish to Speak Against Fundamentalists, Read Fundamentalists (pastoralmusings.com)
• Historic Fundamentalism part 2 (pastoralmusings.com)

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In my mind Historic Fundamentalism as a movement was a good thing.  Sure, there were probably excesses.  Human are normally people who go to extremes in almost everything they do.  The goal and the purpose seems to have been honorable, however.

What went wrong?

Why is fundamentalism now distrusted and maligned?

Why is “fundamentalist” synonymous with “extremist”?

One of the issues is the fact that separation became an issue.  Some decided that they would rather not separate from error, but dialogue with those in error in an attempt to win them over.   Personally, I don’t think this has as much to do with the demise of fundamentalism as a movement as the following issues do.

Fundamentalists began to retreat from culture.  Instead of engaging and transforming culture, fundamentalists began to isolate themselves.  They did so to such an extreme that Carl F. H. Henry wrote a book entitled “The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism”.  His contention was that the fundamentalists’ understanding of the Scriptures should have led them to social activism in a redemptive context.  They failed in that respect.

In their retreat from culture and their separation from those in error fundamentalists began to separate from one another over various non-fundamental issues (dress, hair, Bible translations, music, etc.).  They committed a sort of intellectual and spiritual incest by creating their own institutions of learning and actively resisted learning from evangelicals or anyone else, choosing to recycle their students by bringing them into their faculty.  (This is a generalization, but it is an observation from this writer’s experience.)  This led to further isolationism, a clannish spirit within fundamentalism, as well as a growing anti-intellectualism.

Here we are today with fundamentalists struggling to find their identity.  They wonder what a fundamentalist is.  What does he believe?  And, should we even care?

It is this preacher’s contention that it does matter, and that we should care.

It is for this reason that we have this blog.  We long to call people back to the fundamentals of the faith.  We long to help those who have been hurt by extremism.  We long to point out error for the sake of helping those who are in error.

We have been down the extremist route, but we are Fundamentally Changed, though we are Fundamentally The Same.  We are fundamentalists with a capital “F”.  We have not abandoned that.  We have abandoned legalism.  May we encourage you, dear reader, if you are in legalism, to do the same?

Related articles

• If You Wish to Speak Against Fundamentalists, Read Fundamentalists (pastoralmusings.com)
• Fundamentalist Hermeneutics (pastoralmusings.com)
• Fundamentalism and Hate (pastoralmusings.com)
• Historic Fundamentalism and Young Earth Creationism (pastoralmusings.com)
• Fundamentalism, Funeral Protests, and Koran Burnings (pastoralmusings.com)

Hudson, in Religion in America notes that fundamentalism had many moderates at the first.  Later, he states, there arose militant fundamentalists who sought to take over denominations, and were prepared to fight for what they held to be true.

Hudson does not seem to speak of any fundamentalist with favor, but these are certainly not highly esteemed by him.

He later goes on to state that there was not a large revival in the US as a result of fundamentalism.  On the other hand, in less secularized portions of the population, yet the holiness movement was the one that profited the most.

It is interesting to see these things, because it illustrates the tie between revivalism and fundamentalism.   Sadly, much of fundamentalism has drifted more and more into emotionally driven worship and preaching.  At the same time, there has been much neglect of the life of the mind.

Though there were many well educated fundamentalists, there are becoming less and less.  Emotionalism is becoming more prevalent, and fundamentalism more fragmented.  The fighting spirit seems to have dominated the studious heart.

Historically, though connected to revivalism, fundamentalism still held a seat in the university.  There are those who are seeking to recover the intellectual emphasis while retaining a passionate love for God.

May their tribe increase.

Related articles

• If You Wish to Speak Against Fundamentalists, Read Fundamentalists (pastoralmusings.com)
• Fundamentalism and Hate (pastoralmusings.com)
• Fundamentalist Hermeneutics (pastoralmusings.com)
• Historic Fundamentalism and Young Earth Creationism (pastoralmusings.com)
• Fundamentalism, Funeral Protests, and Koran Burnings (pastoralmusings.com)