How to Believe without Being Fundamentalist

Because of the prevalence of fundamentalism (and what I have here called “neo-fundamentalism”) in American religious life, many moderate Christian pastors struggle with how to preach and teach Christian truth, doctrine, without being absolutistic, narrow, presumptuous and exclusive. I receive questions like that all the time and it seems to be a question hanging “in the air,” so to speak, in many, if not most, moderate Christian churches and educational institutions.

I have been critically reviewing chapters in The Gospel as Center. I often have the impression that these authors, all members of something called The Gospel Coalition, have a fundamentalist mentality. That is, they approach and exposit doctrine from within a fundamentalist ethos. In varying degrees they treat truth as black and white (absolutistic). Beliefs are either “gospel truth” or heresy. (There are, of course, exceptions to this. One came up in the chapter I most recently reviewed. It had to do with tolerance of both cessationism and continuationism. However, the author condemned belief in the baptism of the Holy Spirit as a second definite work of grace as “horribly mistaken.” That kind of language is, to me, fundamentalist. It was the kind of rhetoric used by fundamentalist forces that tried to keep Pentecostals out of the National Association of Evangelicals when it was formed in 1942.)

One way I describe fundamentalism (as an ethos) is its tendency to shift most beliefs from the “opinion” and “doctrine” categories into the “dogma” category. (I’ve explained these three categories and their inevitability and importance in detail in several of my books.) That is to say, beliefs most Christians view as important but not essential get re-placed in the category of essentials of the faith (“fundamentals”). One example of that in the current neo-fundamentalist phenomenon is monergism.

In this climate, dominated as it is by neo-fundamentalists and (in the social and political arenas) the religious right, many moderate to progressive evangelicals struggle with how to preach and teach Christian truth. Some even struggle with the idea of truth itself. The result can be the reduction of Christianity to a spirituality consistent with anything and everything. I have spoken in churches that would not consider themselves “liberal” that have deacons or elders who do not believe in the deity of Jesus Christ, the Trinity, miracles, etc. They are afraid to deal with them, that is, exclude them from leadership positions, lest they come across as fundamentalistic.

In this atmosphere of absolutism and fear the traditional evangelical middle, what I call moderate evangelicalism, is disappearing. Oh, it’s not gone; it’s just not as prominent as it used to be. The result is that many people who are not prone to fundamentalism can’t find an evangelical church that preaches and teaches the gospel and essential Christian doctrine without apology or compromise. So they join a fundamentalist or neo-fundamentalist church and get sucked into that ethos or just endure sermons and lessons that harshly condemn anything other than rigid, narrow, absolutistic conservative Protestantism and that promote as “biblical truth” things like youth earth creationism, TULIP Calvinism, restriction of salvation to the evangelized, dispensationalism, etc. Or, they join a liberal church that promotes a culturally accommodated version of Christianity in which therapy and social transformation totally replace doctrine and virtually anything goes in terms of beliefs and lifestyles.

So what is the disappearing middle ground I talk about and seek? It holds firmly and uncompromisingly to Jesus Christ as God and Savior and lovingly excludes from leadership persons who claim to be Christians (are may very well be saved) but who do not believe in the divine Lordship of Jesus Christ or his sole Saviorhood. At the same time, people inhabiting this middle ground admit that they do not know or fully understand all that this confession means, that they are not privy to God’s own mind so that they can explain how the incarnation works. But THAT Jesus Christ was and is God incarnate is part and parcel of authentic Christianity.

People inhabiting this middle ground do not look around for Christians who do not agree with every slight interpretation of the incarnation and condemn them as heretics. For example, one conservative evangelical theologian-philosopher I know argues that the kenotic theory, that the Son of God set aside his attributes of glory so that he did not always know he was the Son of God from heaven, the second person of the Trinity, and that his power to do miracles was a gift from the Holy Spirit rather than his ability to use his deity, is heresy. I suspect that if that theologian-philosopher explained to most evangelicals who read and listen to him what HE believes about the incarnation (viz., that Jesus was omniscient even as a baby) they would be shocked and ask him what Luke 2:52 means.

My point is that it is possible to hold firmly to, proclaim and teach, the incarnation of God, the deity of Jesus Christ, even a full bodied doctrine of the Trinity, and not do it in a rigid, narrow, absolutistic way. One mark of fundamentalism and neo-fundamentalism is going beyond belief in and proclamation of the incarnation to insistence on a certain theory of how it worked as essential to the incarnation and deity of Jesus Christ.

We can say lovingly and unapologetically that we believe in Jesus Christ as God and Savior, the only Mediator between God and humanity, without including in that confession interesting but non-essential theories of how that can be the case. We can share with each other and non-Christian inquirers our theories (e.g., kenoticism) without implying that they do not “really” believe in the incarnation or the deity of Christ unless they agree with us. In other words, we can have our secondary doctrines and interpretations without absolutizing them. (Actually, I know very few if any people who do this with the kenotic theory of Christology. More commonly it’s the other way around—neo-fundamentalists tend to confuse their own theory of Jesus’ deity and humanity, the incarnation, which usually is something called the “two minds theory,” with belief in the incarnation itself so that people who do not agree are suspect of not even believing in the deity of Jesus Christ.)

Surely it is possible also to preach and teach that Jesus is the one and only Savior of humanity, Lord of creation, redeemer, friend, without insisting that people who have the disadvantage of never hearing his name have no hope of being saved through him. Now that might be your opinion and you might share that in a teaching situation, but only neo-fundamentalists feel the need to preach that (restrictivism) as part and parcel of the gospel itself.

If a person lacks confidence that Jesus Christ is God and Savior, the one Lord of everything, the only Mediator between God and humanity, friend of the friendless and hope of the hopeless, then he or she should not be in the Christian ministry. Does that sound fundamentalist? If so, then you’re confused about what Christianity is. There’s nothing fundamentalist about holding fast to belief in the incarnation and even insisting on belief in it as intrinsic, essential to mature Christian life and faith.

The same MUST be said about universal sin and need of redemption, salvation through Christ’s death and resurrection alone by means of God’s grace alone through faith. The same MUST be said about miracles, especially the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The same MUST be said about every person’s need for repentance and faith as trust in Jesus Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit, for reconciliation with God and a right relationship with him. These are not the private preserve of fundamentalists. Fundamentalism appears when these essentials of Christian belief are loaded with non-essential theories and when Charles Hodge’s (or some other Protestant orthodox) systematic theology is equated with the gospel itself.

Who are some balanced, sane, moderate evangelicals to read in this regard? I recommend John Stott (e.g., Authentic Christianity), Donald Bloesch (e.g., Essentials of Evangelical Theology), Alan Sell (e.g., Doctrine and Devotion), Stanley Grenz, (e.g., Created for Community). There are others, of course, who strike the right balance, but these have been among my guides in seeking balanced evangelical Christianity that avoids both fundamentalism (and neo-fundamentalism) and theological liberalism.