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Theology

Fundamentalism – again

By Rowland Croucher and others ⋅ October 28, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

From a friend, quoting Dr Peter Cameron, former Principal of St Andrew’s College, Sydney University which trains Presbyterian clergy:

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According to Jung , ‘God stands, omnipotent and free, above his Bible.” p.131

… the Fundamentalist will never ask what lies beyond the Bible, or what sort of religious experience was possible before there was a Bible. He speaks and behaves as it is was impossible to be a Christian before there was a New Testament. He may be too self-conscious to state that he believes the Bible to have been divinely dictated, but that is really what he does believe. pp 131-132

In fact, then, the Bible is a collection, a human collection, of very human response to the divine … If it were literally the word of God it would be unintelligible to us, just as divine music would be meaningless to human ears. To speak or behave, therefore, as the Fundamentalist does, as if Christianity is a question of responding to the Bible, is to fail to do justice to what the Bible is – it is itself response. What the Christian is invited to do is to make his own response to what the biblical writers were responding to … we only do justice to it, rather than simply obeying it or imitating the responses which it contains, we allow it to form in us the capacity to make our own unique responses. p. 134

… the Bible may be the initial impetus in the religious life of a believer, and it may be the source to which the believer constantly returns. But equally it may not: it is not necessarily so. There is no reason – other than convention or Fundamentalist propaganda – why the Bible should have a monopoly in the area of religious experience, so that ‘if it’s in the Bible it must be so, and if it’s not in the Bible it can’t be so’. There are other sources of revelation. p. 134

… the Fundamentalist is more or less obliged by his own presuppositions to take a closed view of the Bibhle. If the Bible were not the final word then he would have to review the whole basis of his religion. … to insist that God was behind the formation of the canon is both to assume what you are trying to prove and to legislate on God’s subsequent freedom to act and reveal himself in any way he choses. p. 135

… if the Bible is the necessary and exclusive precondition for a Christian’s religious experience, it must logically follow that none of the New Testament writers were themselves Christians, since by definition the canonical Bible was not available to them. p. 135

We are entirely free, therefore, to explore the possibility that there are indeed ways of approaching or understanding or questioning God which are alternative to those contained in the Bible and which may have nothing at all to do with the Bible and may even contradict it. p. 136

… a religion which considers itself bound exclusively and finally by an arbitrary collection of documents, abruptly and artificially sealed up in the fourth century AD, is misunderstanding its own essence and indeed closing itself off from the God whom it professes to reveal. p. 137

… an approach which seeks to legislate on what can and cannot be called religious experience or revelation, according to whether or not it takes its point of departure from the Bible, is simply closing its eyes to what actually happens. pp. 139-140

The Bible in fact, if it is approached in accordance with the spirit which permeates it, cries out to us to use our imagination, free from all constraints, in our search for, or response to, God. p. 140

From Peter Cameron’s “Fundamentalism and Freedom” (Doubleday; Sydney: 1995.)