[Dialogue] Fundamentalism Part 1

[KroegerD at aol.com]

March 7, 2007 
The Rise of Fundamentalism:  Fundamentalism's Roots -- Part I  

Is the escalating conflict, which is public in mainline Protestant  
Christianity and private in Roman Catholic Christianity, really about  homosexuality? I 
do not think so. Homosexuality is only the content of the  present dispute, 
even being called by some right wing ideologues "the final  straw" that drove 
them into a stance of militancy. If, however, one looks at  religious history, 
even superficially, one will discover that the roots of this  present conflict 
are hundreds of years old; perhaps they have always have been  present in 
Christian circles. In order to help us understand that history I  inaugurate 
today a series of articles designed to probe the roots of our present  day 
ecclesiastical disputes. I begin at the tap root of fundamentalism..  
Behind the rhetoric and even the hyperbole that engages so many, there is an  
almost pathetic quest for security among religious people. This quest always  
seems to be attached to the conviction that human beings actually possess an  
ultimate and unfailing source of truth. Even here, however, there is 
conflict.  For Roman Catholic fundamentalists that source is the infallible papacy, 
while  for Protestant fundamentalists it is the inerrant Bible. Above all else 
these  claims give a sense of absoluteness to which their adherents might cling 
while  they seek to resist what they experience as an enveloping darkness 
gathering  around them. There is a martyr's mentality about this attitude. 
Literal minds  pretend that the clock can be stopped and that change is not a fact 
of life.  They portray themselves as standing firmly on God's side while 
everyone else  compromises with modernity, betraying clearly revealed truth and thus 
leading  the whole religious institution down the road to perdition. The 
so-called  "decisive issue" changes in each generation, but the emotions in the 
"true  believers" remain the same. In my lifetime, this claim to be able to 
quote an  inerrant Bible has been employed against the church's move to be 
racially  inclusive, to treat women with full equality and to open the church's doors 
to  its gay and lesbian members. In each intense debate the "historic faith 
of the  Church" or the "clear teaching of the Bible" has been cited to justify  
continuing the practices of racism, sexism and homophobia on the part of 
church  people. We are witnessing today what is simply another phase of this age 
old  mentality. Most ecclesiastical disputes are thus really about security and 
fear.  Each reveals how easily a challenge to perceived truth can be turned 
into  hysterical anger.  
Before analyzing the content of the divisive issues of our day, I must first  
examine the claim upon which the battle is fought, namely that ultimate truth 
 can ever be captured in a propositional form, either in the infallible  
utterances of an ecclesiastical leader or in the inerrant words of a sacred  text. 
Neither claim can finally hold water.  
I note first that no reputable church historian in the world today buys the  
traditional argument undergirding ecclesiastical claims that church leaders 
can  speak with the authority of God. This argument states that Jesus chose the  
apostles to be the leaders of the Church and that they in turn chose their  
successors and that in this divine hierarchy truth was preserved in some pure  
and catholic form. That idea was imposed on history to serve the propaganda  
needs of ecclesiastical authorities who claim to represent "Christian  
Orthodoxy." Orthodoxy, however, does not mean that this point of view is true;  it 
only means that this point of view won! The facts are that what we now call  
"orthodox Christianity" evolved out of many early competing factions and they  
were settled not by appeals to truth, but by those who had the political power  
to enable them to be the winners and thus to write the history of the movement. 
 People seem to forget that once the Catholic Church had two "infallible" 
popes,  one in Avignon and one in Rome, each claiming to speak with the unerring 
voice  of God and each condemning the other. There is also documentable 
evidence that  when new, indisputable truth emerged in history, challenging the old  
ecclesiastical formularies, even "infallible" church leaders found a 
remarkable  ability to adapt the old certainties to the new realities. For example,  
originally the claim was made that Jesus alone of all human beings had escaped  
the infection of original sin, since the Holy Spirit was his father and his  
virgin mother had no part in his conception other than to be the receptacle to 
 make human his divine life.. Then in the early years of the 18th century,  
science discovered that women had egg cell from which every life ever born  
received half of its genetic code. Women were thus equal, co-creators of every  
life. Since Mary was clearly a child of Adam like everyone else, she too would  
have been tainted by and would inevitably pass on Adam's "original sin" to 
her  son regardless of the virgin birth claim. So the idea of Jesus being 
without  taint of sin, so essential to the view of salvation in that era, was 
threatened  with being made inoperative. "Not a problem," said the Vatican leaders 
and,  before too many years had passed, a new dogma was proclaimed for the 
faithful to  believe. Mary had been "immaculately conceived." Therefore, she was 
cleansed  from Adam's sin even before she was born. It was a wonderful, but 
deeply  revealing, accommodation forcing upon us the compelling realization that 
truth  is never ultimate and that infallibility for any claim on the part of 
anyone to  possess such truth in propositional form, is at best delusional and 
at worst,  ridiculous. Yet Catholic fundamentalism still makes this claim. Few 
people,  however, actually believe it.  
The countering Protestant claim for the inerrancy of the Bible developed  
because the Reformation could hardly accept the papal infallibility against  
which they were so busy rebelling, so they elevated the scriptures to the status  
of the "revealed word of God." One wonders first which version of the Bible 
was  the inerrant one since they differ widely. Second, people are generally 
unaware  that the original texts of the gospels had no punctuation, no 
paragraphs, no  capital letters and no space between words. All of those things were 
imposed on  the gospels by interpreters hundreds of years after they were 
written. Were  these grammarians also inerrant? It next needs to be stated that we 
have no  complete manuscript of any single gospel that dates any earlier than 
the 6th  century of the Christian era. We have only handwritten copies of 
handwritten  copies of handwritten copies. Were all of the copiers inerrant? Finally 
we  recall that Jesus spoke in Aramaic but the gospels were written in Greek. 
Thus  before the first word attributed to Jesus was recorded, it had to be 
translated.  Were the translators also inerrant? How many layers of inerrancy 
claims can  rationality absorb before collapsing?  
We can even go far beyond this point. For example, we now know that both  
Matthew and Luke had Mark in front of them when they composed the gospels that  
bear their names. Yet neither Matthew nor Luke copied Mark verbatim. Both  
omitted things from Mark with which they disagreed, added things that were not  in 
the Marcan original and actually corrected Mark from time to time. Does one  
edit, correct, omit from or add to the "inerrant word of God?" Of course not,  
but you might well do those things to the words of Mark.  
Finally, what happens to the inerrancy claims when you confront places where  
the Bible contradicts itself? In Mark and Matthew there are two versions of  
Jesus feeding the multitude with a limited number of loaves and fishes, while  
Luke says there is only one. Mark says the appearance of the risen Lord will  
occur in Galilee, but he never describes any such appearance. Matthew says 
the  resurrected Jesus did appear in Galilee on top of a mountain. Luke says no  
Galilean appearance ever took place and that all appearances occurred in the  
environs of Jerusalem. Mark says the women in the garden on that first Easter 
 did not see the Risen Lord. Matthew says they did. Luke says they did not. 
How  can the inerrant "Word of God" be contradictory?  
Still infallibility claims for church leaders and inerrancy claims for the  
sacred texts are the accepted presuppositions of fundamentalism in Christian  
history, yet neither claim is capable of being sustained rationally, but in  
every dispute in church history one or the other of these two hysterically  
absurd claims becomes the weapon of choice of the fundamentalists. They shout  
these claims with authority, defend them with anger and invest them with the  
virtue of antiquity. All of this, however, is little more than the pitiful claim  
of frightened people whose security has been disturbed by emerging truth. 
That  is what lies behind today's fundamentalism, but to my surprise people still 
pay  attention to these strange claims. They even give credibility to the 
propaganda  of the fundamentalists that suggests that homosexuality is really the 
issue by  listening as their condemnation of homosexuality is said to be 
based on the  "clear teaching of the word of God." It is not! It is rooted in the 
fear and  prejudice of the frightened and ill informed few who feel like the 
world is  changing and they cannot adjust. Yet because they clothe their fear 
in religious  language people continue to give it a credibility it does not 
deserve, since  these claims come very close to being little more than the 
delusions of the  mentally ill.  
That is the real nature of the problem that Christian churches now seek to  
solve by debate, compromise or anger. That will continue until either the new  
consciousness is accepted or those who cannot adapt to the new world depart 
this  life. Then their children will adapt until a new issue draws a new line in 
the  sand and we repeat this strange religious dance once more. In the 
following  weeks in this column, I will examine specifically the content of 
Christian  fundamentalism and its many manifestations, so that the battles of our day 
might  be placed into the context of history and fantasy separated from 
reality. I  doubt if fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell and Albert Mohler, or 
evangelicals  like Pat Robertson will be "convicted of their sins" by this series 
but in the  last analysis that does not matter. Truth is never deterred by the 
human  inability to face it. So stay tuned.  
John Shelby Spong 



************************************** AOL now offers free email to everyone. 
 Find out more about what's free from AOL at http://www.aol.com.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20070322/5ae3526e/attachment.html