Fundamentalism

Ross Woods, 2022. Rev. 2024

Fundamentalism affects some religions more than others, but it has mostly affected Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. It can take different forms, but this article is only concerned with Christian fundamentalism.

To some extent, fundamentalism is more a collection of tendencies rather than a set of beliefs with distinct boundaries. It is difficult to define, and any description can only be indicative.

It has taken some extreme forms. For example, some fundamentalist schools have banned all books except the King James Bible, and some churches have enforced totalitarian discipline on members. Others have made brash predictions about the imminent end of the world, which of course never eventuated.

The idea of a continuum is helpful, ranging from fundamentalists on the far right and liberals on the far left. In this mentality, fundamentalists characterize anything to the left of themselves as some kind of liberal.

In Christianity, their main feature is their view of Scripture, to some extent deriving from the bibliology debates that commenced in the late nineteenth century. In fact, the term “Fundamentalism” derives from a series of booklets circulated at that time.

The current view

The current view of fundamentalism is that it is totalitarian system of governance. Followers must obey the leadership of the group and must simply accept their teaching. Followers may not think for themselves nor question their teaching.

The older view

The older view had particular aspects of their view of culture, Scripture, and theological formulation. First, they tend to be culturally conservative,.

  1. They try to separate themselves from the perceived evils of the world and from churches that they believe are doctrinally impure.1
  2. They tend to want to create a Christian culture rather than a contextualized Christianity. They use some norms of ancient biblical culture as religious rules for today, and disparage modern culture.
  3. They view scientific progress and cultural change as plots to undermine their beliefs and values.
  4. They tend to read Scripture according to their own cultural predispositions. For example, US fundamentalists have seen God as an American, and the British created British Israliism, which is the belief that the British people are the ten lost tribes of Israel.

Their high view of Scripture causes problems:

  1. Their high view of Scripture often attracts accusations of bibliolatry (i.e. worship of the Bible). By believing that the Bible is the Word of God, they are seen to fail to clearly separate the Bible from God.
  2. They rigidly hold to the inerrancy of Scripture.
  3. By believing that the Bible is the Word of God, they tend to assume a dictation theory of inspiration.
  4. They see other theological views as a threat to Scriptural teaching.
  5. They are biblicist, that is, a “Bible only” movement. While they see Scripture as authoritative, they have little understanding or interest in the definitions of orthodoxy and heresy of the ancient Church Fathers. While they usually comply with orthodoxy, they claim only a biblical basis.
  6. They argue for the historical accuracy of the Bible and tend to interpret Scripture as literally as possible, seeing less literal interpretations as liberal threats to the veracity of Scripture. This particularly applies to:
    1. their view of creation, so they tend to believe that the earth is quite young.
    2. a literal Adam and Eve who were the ancestors of all humans.
    3. Noah’s flood, the origin of nations from the Flood, and the tower of Babel.
    4. the Book of Revelation, which has been the source of doomsday beliefs.

They tend to have particular views of theological formulation:

  1. Theology cannot evolve.
  2. They tend to rely on proof-texts, which are individual passages of Scripture that support their views. They view any limits on them as a denial of Scripture, even though they sometimes might interpret those verses out of context.
  3. They tend to see passages of Scripture as building blocks that, when put together correctly, create a perfectly biblical theology.
  4. They tend to be intolerant of paradox, mystery, and ambiguity.
  5. Some have historically favored the King James Bible (the Authorised Version), some even claiming that it is the authoritative transmission of the biblical record, and have tended to distrust modern textual scholarship. Some even reject the nineteenth-century revision and revert to the 1611 version, and a few prefer the Geneva Bible as the true version.
  6. They read the New Testament as a set of laws to be obeyed.
  7. They tend to be dispensationalist.
  8. They rigidly define salvation and conversion.
  9. They rigidly define evangelism in confrontational terms.
  10. They are rigid in any denominational church practices that they believe to be biblically based.

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Based on Kevin L. King Sr. “The Crisis of Truth and Word: A Defense of Revelational Epistemology in the Theology of Carl F. H. Hery” [sic], Ph.D dissertation, University of Pretoria, 2008. p. 61