I was a teenage fundamentalist - part two

Who’s in charge here? asks Barry Gittins

What do you do if you are told something is sacred? You place it above other things.

For me, as a young Queenslander (who occasionally conceded he was also an Australian) that meant honouring rugby league as the football code of all football codes.

My support of a) the Brisbane players-populated Canberra Raiders rugby league football team, b) the Brisbane comp’s Souths club and, later, c) the Logan City Scorpions, all subsequently devolved into my devotion to (ta da!) the Brisbane Broncos and, latterly, a sneaking, partly-held fondness for NRL premiers the Melbourne Storm.

As a sport, rugby league may have a few obvious flaws or obstacles for the uninitiated. What may be occasionally lacking in grace and gaining in brutality, however, is always equal to the sum of my memories: it is the code of football that I grew up playing and loving.

I put it, unequivocally, on a pedestal as the ultimate example of football. That statement is revealing and, perhaps surprisingly for some, highly relevant to any discussion of faith, religion and spirituality.

Coming from French and Italian terms to describe the ‘foot of a stall’, the term ‘pedestal’ originated as the support that was given to a statue or a vase. In some instances a lamp or a lit candle would be placed on a pedestal as an act of worship.

In that context, my love of rugby league is either worship of a thing of grace and terrible beauty (?!) or merely a blatant form of idolatry.

More importantly, we are quick to do exactly the same with forms of knowledge or belief. When we venerate something and place it on a pedestal, such as our conception of ‘who God is’, we are either worshipping God in truth and beauty or making our own little idol - our own conception of who God has to be in order to please us.

As a teenager I readily signed on to be a senior soldier of The Salvation Army. As such I accepted the Salvos’ second doctrine: ‘We believe that there is only one God, who is infinitely perfect, the Creator, Preserver, and Governor of all things, and who is the only proper object of religious worship.’

Those words, like all of the Salvos’ doctrines, were based on ancient church teachings and first ratified in the 1800s. They provoke a cattle call of caveats for postmodern pundits because they imply God is squarely in the driver’s seat when we are supposed to be behind the wheel ourselves as the symbolic Body of Christ.

Let’s talk creation. I have no problem with creation, if we accept that a creator can create anyway he wants to, i.e. by using or mandating a full or partial process of evolution if it seems the best way to go (some creationists accept this possibility by advocating ‘adaptation’ in their views).

 If I buy into this belief of God as creator, however, does that mean I’m linked cheek and jowl with those earnest literalists (disparaging term removed reluctantly) who insist on a 6,000 year-old planet and a word-by-word reading of the Genesis creation account?

Do I have to ‘own’ folks who advocate (loudly) that the mythos (story) of Adam and Eve, with its inherent acceptance of incest as race-spawning origin story, is to be taken as a factual rendering of humanity’s arrival at the top of the food chain?

Then there’s this preserving business. Preserving a social strata/order or economic scale/structure that may include a) slavery and b) landed gentry (part of the anti-meritocracy of privilege) is horrendous to anyone who advocates social justice or human rights.

The concept of social rigidity that the ‘preserver’ role advocates is more at home with the medieval church than with the church of the 21st century.

If my faith in God means the Almighty is neither a fantasy nor an unsubstantiated entity who is currently on leave (the atheist and agnostic positions respectively), then does that mean I have to believe that God is actively preserving a planet that is a) falling to pieces climate-wise through human agency, b) depending on your scriptural interpretation either on divine autopilot, under the power of Satan (literally ‘adversary) or under human stewardship, and c) constantly hosting human (as opposed to spiritual) conflicts between individuals, families, communities, creeds, nations and cultures?

What happened to the concepts of the divine image, free will and original sin that the Genesis accounts enshrine and human actions embody?

And if we say God governs us in this day and age, are we in effect passing the buck for our own hubris and failings onto our ‘fall God’ of choice? Moreover, does that mean we remain, as with the superstitions of the Greeks and Romans and other fallen empires, convinced that every normal and abnormal weather pattern is the result of a cheesed-off God punishing humanity for the abundance of our crimes, or for the lack of our piety?     

When you read about Christ’s encounter with a sick child and his dad (Mark 9: 14-32) you get one of the most revealing and helpful cries of all the gospel-recorded encounters. I’m with you, says the father, but I’m not with you all the way.

We can’t claim an interventionist, all-powerful God and then insist on notions of free will. That does not compute. We can’t, with any measure of credibility, believe God is in control (and ask God to do the legwork for us through prayer) when we are patently called to be his hands and feet - to be his agents, in the footsteps of Jesus.

Paradox is a beautiful thing, but logic would suggest it has its limits. As Jesus noted, a house divided against itself will fall (I tend to think he was borrowing from the Roman doctrine of divide et imperium).

We have to take responsibility for human action, especially concerning the state of a planet suffering the effects of global warming. That is, we have to take responsibility for how you and I live; for the size of our homes; the petrol we pump into cars, the burgers we guzzle down, the extent to which we consume the world we live in without replenishing it or fulfilling our biblical mandate to care for the Earth. 

We are conditioned to take God stuff on faith, and rightly so; without faith, we are reminded, it is impossible to please God. But a blind faith is just not up to it.

Blind faith will not bear the fruits that we need to grow. It will not accept the biblical invitation to test our God; to taste and see that God is good.

Thousands of years of faithful worship and service, thought and deed, underpin our pursuit of God through Christ. Much of it, however, flies in the face of the knowledge and understandings we have reaped from God-given intellects and curiosity in numerous fields of enquiry, such as medicine and biomechanics, psychology and psychiatry, physics and astrophysics, chemistry and bio-chemistry, archeology and history, and philosophy and theology.

As that father cried out to Jesus, when caught in a tight spot between his desires and his dilemmas: ‘I believe; help me with my unbelief.’

May my doubts add to my faith. May empirical and intuitive knowledge deepen that faith. And may my faith, alongside the word of God, guide my steps.

‘A lamp unto my feet’ is not much use if I don’t I walk down the path with my eyes open.

 

Writer: Barry Gittins is a Melbourne-based writer, lifelong Salvationist, husband (to Trudy) and father(to Emily and Benjamin) who seeks God in everyday encounters. A frustrated poet and playwright, he has worked for the Salvos’ Australia Southern Territory in various roles since 1991: as a journalist (for Warcry, The Young Soldier/Kidzone, The Musician),technical writer and CD-ROM author in corps program (mission development), senior review editor (Warcry) and editor (On Fire). He currently works as a social program and policy consultant (writer/researcher) for the social program department. 

6 Comments to I was a teenage fundamentalist - part two

1. Hi Barry,

   Once again, brilliant article, and excellent questions to ask! I asked similar questions in a post that was put up back in February entitled ‘is the Bible the word of God?’

   I believe we do need to struggle with this. The Apostle Paul said to the Phillipians ‘Work out you own salvation with fear and trembling’ (Phil 2:12). He didn’t say ‘work out a group salvation’, or ’salvation for all mankind’, or ’someone else’s salvation’. He said ‘your own salvation’. What you understand, and struggle with, will be different - must be different - to other people’s struggle and understanding of salvation. We have a personal God, not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ God.

   In order to make the kind of literal statements that fundamentalists do, we need to be able to explain why/how Biblical strories appear in many of the religions, thousands of years before they appear in the Bible. The story of a virgin birth, the son of the King of the Gods, who preached that we can all know our god personally, and that sacrifices were not the way. Who dove into the depths of the underworld and defeated the ruler of the underworld, and set all its’ inhabitants free after defeating death, and who rose to sit at the right hand of his father; appears in ancient Greek Mythology at least 1500 years before Christ.

   Just about all (if not all) the Bibilcal stories and narratives are not new. They would have been commonly known at the time of Christ. What was different was the actors involved and the way they were linked together.

   This for me (and I believe the church universal) is the greatest thing we need to struggle with and understand.

   Just something more for us to struggle with.

   Yours in Christ,
   Graeme.
Graeme Randall on October 13th, 2009

2. Barry is this a serious article or are you trying to be satirical? I’ll take the bait and I’ll imagine it’s serious and make a few observations.

   Yes, you can believe in a creator God, believe the world is older than 6,000 years and keep your jowls to yourself. And yes, even evolution depends on incest for the start of the human species. Did you imagine that lots of fertile boy and girl versions of homo erectus emerged at the same time so that nobody in our ancient ancestors was ever related? Sarah was Abraham’s half sister. There was probably a lot of that about! Read Bill Bryson’s book the History of Nearly Everything to understand the mathematical impossibility of you not being a distant cousin of pretty much everybody who looks anything like you.

   And re Adam and Eve, whether you are a Christian evolutionist or creationist you still believe that God’s relationship with humankind started somewhere with the very first person to whom he spoke, ergo Adam. Myth does not mean untrue fairy tale. And by the way, lots of fields of human endeavor are sustained by defining myths, including Freudian psychiatry, psychology, physics, anthropology, the theory of evolution etc. That’s what the whole postmodern critique of Western history speaks to. And I think the Foucault et al got that right.

   And yes, God preserves humanity. That’s what the Wesleyan doctrine of prevenient grace is about. And by the way it is always helpful to differentiate between God’s, decretive, perceptive and permissive will.

   And of course we Wesleyans believe that we can have an all-powerful God and free will. Free will is his gracious gift to us. God, in his grace, allows us to say no to him. How is that hard to understand? God lets us make real choices. Read some of Clark Pinnock’s latest stuff on this.

   And actually I think I can credibly believe in a God who is in control and at the same time know that I am called to be his hands and feet, his physical presence in the world. I’m not even sure why you think I couldn’t.

   Re paradox and logic, you of course know that by definition a paradox is illogical (its this statement from a man of words that made me think you were being satirical).
   Barry, I’m not saying I, or anyone else, have all the answers; faith is a journey that is never complete till we see him face to face. There is always something more to learn, something more to understand. But there are some great Christian thinkers out there who have wrestled with pretty much every question you have raised (Brian Maclaren’s “A Generous Orthodoxy for example). They don’t all agree, they probably never will this side of heaven. But it is not blind faith to think that there are some pretty good answers to your questions. It is possible to believe in an all-powerful creator God who is intimately involved with his creation and his children, who speaks to us through Word and Spirit and still retain a modicum of intelligence. And I’m sure you know that, so I’ll assume this article was a provocative conversation starter and leave it at that.

   Grant
Grant on October 14th, 2009

3. Hi Barry,

   Thanks for these posts, it’s a very useful discussion. In response to both parts of this post:

   (1) I agree with your separation of the veracity of the Word of God from our subjective understanding of it. I would also reflect that we put too much emphasis on the bible as the word of God, rather than seeing Jesus as the Word i.e. the ultimate revelation of God. To paraphrase Karl Barth, the word is threefold: Christ the living word, the written word and the preached word. The second and third are only the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully testify to the revelation of God in Christ (the Living Word). The bible should only ever serve as a pointer to Christ, not replace Him, much as Jesus said to the Pharisees, “You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me” Jn 5:39.

   (2) I think we need a renewed hermeneutic that sees the bible less as a magic book full of tricks that will enable us to manipulate God and reality by invocation of a propositional truth, and more as a narrative that testifies to the gracious involvement of God in the daily messy dealings of humans. Because I think if we read the Bible faithfully, to understand what the life of faith looks like, we will see many people in the Bible who had little epistemological certainty and far more trust in the character of God and in the process of relationship with Him. Abraham is a good example of this; called whilst a polytheist, given gracious promises by God, questions God’s promises at various points, struggles with understanding how God will do what God has promised when reality seems to contradict, but ultimately held up as an example of a life of faith. This theme of struggle and doubt, and working through the implications of faith in a messy world reoccurs again and again. Modernist, “the Bible says it, so I believe it” hermeneutics are reductionist in that they don’t leave room for this process of struggle in spiritual formation. There is something in the struggle that internalises the truth in a way that doesn’t happen if we blindly accept ideas at an intellectual level.

   (3) We need to critically appropriate the useful insights of postmodernity that help us to acknowledge with Paul that, “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” 1 Cor 13:12

   (4) I think Protestant traditions have separated the role of sanctification, and growing into the image of Christ too much from justification. The issue of salvation is bigger than believing the right doctrine. The NT emphasises that obedience is a part of believing. I think people react against the type of Christianity that has people believe certain things, but not practice their faith (hypocrisy) - which is what I think happens when we focus exclusively on orthodoxy - we become Pharisaical. I agree we need to demonstrate our faith through love, that is what will testify most faithfully to Christ.

   Thanks for your insights!

   God bless,
   Bec
Rebecca on October 15th, 2009

4. Thanks for your points, Bec.

   Just one thing in response to your first point - I don’t think we can put ‘too much’ emphasis on the Bible as the Word of God, as that is what the Bible is, and it is the ‘… Scriptures that testify about …’ our Lord Jesus, as you rightly show. It is they that are His precious gift to us that we might know Him.

   I’m sure we can put a ‘wrong’ emphasis on the Bible as the Word of God, as the Pharisees show. However, it is vital that we have a ‘right’ emphasis on the Bible as the Word of God, that we might truly know Him and live for Him.

   Regards.

   Bernard
Bernard Martin on October 16th, 2009

5. Excellent two-part series, Barry. You can find my own response over at http://www.slightlyirreverent.blogspot.com. Thanks for challenging our fundamentalism leanings.
Joe Noland on October 18th, 2009

6. I read some articles a few weeks ago on atheist web-sites. One point that was emphasized was that the Bible has repeated many stories prior to the writing of Scripture. Pretty much the names were changed to protect the “innocent” was the thought. Then on a Universalist web page , I read that you should not only set aside the Old Testament but much of the New testament because it was twisted by the Catholics.

   The “All Saved” writer stated that the Apostle Paul revealed the “Mystery of Christ” and that was that God’s grace is so unlimited that all will be saved and that we do not have any free will. So many opinions! One danger that we have before us is what part of the Bible do you pick and choose and determine is “The Word of God” and which part do you ignore?

   If it is annoying and old fashion why not throw out that part? If the Word does not match with today’s trends drop it and move on into the new age of do what you want. Did God really mean that? Would a loving God punish anyone with eternal punishment? How could a loving God do such a thing? What we have been seeing for some time is more then questioning God in earnest.

   It is the doubt of anything definite and final in the Word of God. I feel that balance is a good word to use.How about “Rightly Dividing The Word”? How about watching out for “Doctrines of Devils”. How about a further study of Hebrew and Greek and the cultures of the day of the time of the written Word? If God is God, “And we are not” then He has revealed in His Word His plan and direction. That does not discount the leading of the Holy Spirit in todays world either. By the way, is Christ going to come again on a horse as stated in Revelation ? Or is that symbolic?

   Either way Christ is coming again . He can do what he desires and still keep all of His promises because our God is an awesome God. He can reign and be sovereign and still give us choices that fits in His will and even choices that may not be good ones that He will work “around”. Our human minds cannot fathom how he does His work. Were we there when God created all things that were created? Maybe it takes some “fundamental” “foundational faith” in God and His Word.

   God gave us minds to use and He wants us to ask questions and turn our doubt and fears over to Him. I think that God is depending a lot on us also. I think that He wants us to use our free will and to lovingly serve Him and make the right choices. We all need to watch our minds and our thinking patterns. If not we tread dangerous ground and we are open to believe deception from the enemy.

   Bob
Robert Deidrick on October 20th, 2009

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