Last week Collin Hansen, of Christianity Today, posted on The Decline of Modern Fundamentalism where he linked here to Luther's Stein which, as Barker and Logan pointed out, marks the end of my 15 minutes. Michael Bird offered a personal response on why he would never become a fundamentalist. Then Piper responded to Collin's post saying that he was thankful to God for fundamentalists. Bird then responded to Piper's response listing six reasons he could not thank God for Fundamentalists. On a personal note, I've been carrying on a conversation with Dr. Doran about the CT article here.As Bird mentions in his second post, there are extremes to the right and to the left. How does a Church create an environment that best holds together the poles of Christ's Lordship and Grace? Fundamentalism rightly emphasizes that Jesus is Lord and that following Christ entails repentance and submission to his will. However, their tendency toward high control and legalism virtually emasculates the grace of God -- and this can amount to a serious perversion of the gospel (Gal. 1).
Evangelicalism, on the other hand, has done well in emphasizing that God is gracious and an experience with the gospel must be one in which God's kindness is enjoyed. However, the tendency of some to emphasize grace and minimize Christ's Lordship can lead to the toleration of sin and a cavalier attitude regarding God's holiness.
Perhaps in this way, Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism reflect our struggle to balance the "iustus" and the "peccator." Having had time to process my fundamentalist heritage, I find my emotions about it are very mixed. On the one hand I am thankful that God allowed me to grow up in a home where God's Word was trusted and taken seriously -- where Jesus wasn't just a bumper sticker but was the Lord. On the other hand, I've experienced more than my fair share of legalism and divisiveness.
On the whole, I would say that my heritage in Fundamentalism has sobered my theology of Christ's Lordship and my emergence from Fundamentalism has heightened my experience of grace. So, maybe there is a happy ending after all. How do you process your experience of these two movements?
4 comments:
How to turn a nice preacher boy into a flaming evangelical in three easy steps.
1. Fundamentalism is Reactionary
I don't necessarily mean this in a bad way. All I'm saying is that Fundamentalism cannot exist in a vacuum--it reacts against liberalism and/or bumper sticker Christianity. It exists to do battle royal. Take away the bad guys and you take away the battle so you take away Fundamentalism. In essence Fundamentalism holds out the promise that it is the answer to liberalism and bad evangelicalism. At one point or another each one of us probably bought into that. But then…
2. We saw the warts of Fundamentalism
We've all sat through the sermons where the dude condemns John MacArthur to hell as an apostate teacher because he denies the power of the blood. Some of you are even former NBT Nazis (you know who you are--and someday when the list comes out you will be properly blackmailed). Most of us started looking around because we hoped that there was SOMETHING better out there. Fundamentalism promised to be THE antidote to all theological problems in Christianity but we were willing at least to look around.
3. We started reading Piper
So sue me already—you all know it’s true. Sooner or later we found out that not all charismatics are whack jobs. And wait a minute….a conservative resurgence in the SBC…last I heard (Beale) no conservatives would ever be able to save a denomination. Then we realized Driscoll is reaching pagans while Greenville hosted Outreach 2000 only to see the BiLo center filled with church people every night. As for battle royal…evangelicals were battling areas of inerrancy, authority, gender, open theism, new perspective, etc. while fundamentalist were still talking about music. Not to be cute, but Fundamentalism was a promise left unfulfilled…and evangelicals were delivering.
Ironically, I became a Christian right before Macarther was debating the disinsationalists over his book "The Gospel According to Jesus." There were some tooling around Germany (where I lived) bashing MaCarthur on his non-baptist name, and his non use of the King James, and his view on "the blood." They would have called him a neo-evangelical at best. Yet he would probably put himself somewhere in the fundie camp. I had someone call me a liberal once because I use the NIV. It seems where one falls depends on who is asking and who is answering. "Can we all just get along?" Evidently, not yet.
Roger
P.S. Yes, I know I mispelled MacArthur's name.
bobby,
i'm with you...
just still trying to get over the fact that baylor actually used/coined
"scmick-schmack" in a post.
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