What's so bad about fundamentalism?

I think I might be a bit of a fundamentalist. This would probably be a bad thing if I wanted to be a high-flying careerist in the Church of England.

I realised that I was becoming a bit of a fundy when I noticed how annoyed I get with attempts to do theology whose raison d'etre was to avoid being labelled fundamentalist. I started to feel that perhaps avoiding fundamentalism was more trouble than it was worth since these highly sophisticated and incredibly complex philosophical approaches to theology were totally incomprehensible to virtually everyone in the entire world, both Christians and non-Christians, who generally do not possess doctorates in Foucault, Nietzsche or MacIntyre.

Many some good-old-fashioned religion like Mama used to make is still an option. I don't mean that I think the world was literally created in six days or something. But I do mean that the fashionable but rather cheap dismissals of naive, simple Christianity miss out. Here are some examples Gaby and I thought of. I subtitle them,

A bit of fundamentalism never hurt anybody

1. The gospel is primarily about particular people being rescued from eternal separation from God and being given the gift of eternal life through the death of Jesus on the cross. There are many implications of this, but they all flow out from this.
2. What's so wrong with proof-texting? Jesus and Paul did it all the time.
3. Naivity and simplicity are not vices but in fact are requirements of the Christian faith: Jesus told his followers they had to be like little children. Anyone can understand the Bible because God wrote it for everyone. Theology is the province of stupid people, not the preserve of the elite.
4. Why is it such a sin to think that you are right about something? What would be the point of thinking anything unless you think it is true? At the same time, one must be committed to learning more (this is ingredient to the notion of disciple, which means, 'learner'.)
5. The obssessive need to question and doubt everything, to suspect every doctrine and never take anything on trust is not Christian and deprives people of assurance. Certainty is nothing to be ashamed of! Rather, it is a gift of the Holy Spirit.
6. Doing the right thing is not a matter of agonising and confusion. God does not want us to live in confusion but to do the right thing - which is why he has told us what the right thing is. Grey areas are mostly invented by people who don't want to do as they are told.
7. Religious coercion is not always wrong. This might sound looney at first, but I do not mean converting people at sword-point. Rather, those who criticise religious coercion don't seem to realise that, to take an obvious example, church schools are coercive.

Comments

[Tiffer Robinson]

This sounds familiar...

I mostly agree - certainly about the pussyfooting stuff. And the proof texting. And the being right. Grrr.

[Greg Bannister]

I heartily agree.

It seems to me to be a serious mistake for anyone to try and define themselves as "I'm anything but an X" - here X being fundamentalist. Simply because, in what is presumably an attempt to establish your own theological distinctiveness you lose control over what that distinctiveness actually is. Why let the people that you disagree with set YOUR theological agenda.

In my experience this is can be a double mistake since what people dislike about a given person is sometimes a facet of their personality, but they react against that by rejecting their theology. I can think of a number of a good friend who would "be aconservative evangelical if they weren't so horrible".

[Richard Turnbull]

Too bloody right! Well said lad...

[michael jensen]

Well, I think you are going to have to come to Sydney...