How I can be called a biblical-fundamentalist

							How I can be called a biblical-
fundamentalist:
Of course, no one really takes the Bible literally; to do so would involve self-mutilationi and even
suicideii. Nonetheless, I’m okay with being called a biblical-fundamentalist, at least when defined a
certain way.

The Bible has had a profound effect on my life. The first time I read it I was thirteen years old and I
suppose that I’ll continue reading it for the rest of my life. I’ve spent more hours reading the Bible than I
have any other book. Even many of the other books that I’ve most appreciated are either biblical
commentaries or books shaped by a foundationally biblical perspective. More often than not, I enjoy
reading it despite the fact that I’ve been challenged and disturbed by things in its pages.

I am a biblical-fundamentalist because I want to practice the fundamentals of the Bible. These
fundamentals are what Jesus called “the two greatest commandments.” When He was asked what the
greatest commandment was, He responded: “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and
with all your soul, and with all your mind’. This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is
like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these commandments depend the whole Law and
the Prophets.’”iii

I think emphasis should be placed on what Jesus emphasized, and that is love. Understanding this
correctly is fundamental to seeing the over-arching message of scripture. Otherwise, the Bible can be
used for some distorted purposes.

I no longer subscribe to adjectives like “inerrant,” “infallible,” “literal,” and “authoritative” when
describing the sixty-six books of the Protestant canon. These terms are found nowhere in the Bible itself,
and they are grossly misleading because they have caused untold confusion for my fellow biblical-
fundamentalists.

Leadership 101 via the Bible
It is hard for Christians to know how to be biblical-fundamentalists in the 21st Century. Much has
changed since the books of the Bible were written, compiled, and canonized into what they are now.
Maybe you’ve experienced something like me: a few years ago I attended a leadership seminar that was
organized by a ministry that called itself “Bible-based.” But during the seminar John Maxwell was
quoted more often than the Bible.

The speakers at this particular seminar may not have intentionally put a higher esteem on Maxwell than
they did on scripture, but they were inadvertently drawing more from life experience and contemporary
authors than sacred pages.
The Bible would make a pretty confusing leadership manual. It has a lot of genealogies and rules about
how to perform animal sacrifice. It includes stories about a lot of flawed leaders like Abraham, Moses,
Aaron, Saul, David, Solomon, and Simon Peter—just to name a few. If these guys were looked to as ideal
role models for leadership, then we’d have nothing higher to aspire to than a collection of insecure,
polygamist, cowardly, materialistic, narcissistic incompetents who had nothing in common but the grace
of God that redeemed them from their mistakes.

This wouldn’t sell very well as leadership seminar material. Unlike the Bible, John Maxwell does a very
good job of pulling examples from a variety of fields like sports, politics, entertainment, and plenty of
great stories to illustrate the leadership principles he wants to communicate. His books are more user-
friendly as leadership training material than, say, the book of Lamentations.

Maxwell, who is a former pastor himself, would know this too. While you can see his respect for the
Bible and the Bible’s God in his writing, he is able to pull from other resources while still maintaining his
biblical foundation. In the words of Pastor Rob Bell, he is able to “claim truth where he finds it.”iv So if a
ministry is really more “Maxwell-based” than it is “Bible-based” you might wonder why they don’t call it
what it is.

This is because for Protestants, particularly Evangelical Protestants, the Bible is central for life, at least in
theory. For an Evangelical Protestant church or ministry to deny being “Bible-based” would risk heresy.

Sola Scriptura: Paving the Way for Bible-worship
The Protestant Reformation was a breaking away from the Roman Catholic Church’s monopoly over
Truth. The pioneers of the Reformation contended with leadership in the Church who had used and
abused their power to tell people some very manipulative things.

One of the teachings circulating around this time in Europe was the “selling of indulgences”; this was the
idea that a person could buy forgiveness for their own sins or for the sins of loved ones who’d already
passed away. It made some extra money for the Church to build Cathedrals, but I doubt it made any
difference in whether a person was forgiven or not in the eyes of God. Being that common people
generally had no education outside of what the Church provided, there was no way for them to
challenge this.

This is why a battle cry of the Protestants was “Sola Scriptura.” Sola Scriptura is a way of saying “the
Bible alone,” or the Bible alone is our final authority. Leaders of the Reformation wanted to liberate
commoners from being dependent on the Catholic Church for spiritual guidance. They knew that this
kind of human leadership was prone to error so their controversial idea was that the Bible—without
church teaching—was sufficient for leading people to salvation.

With this idea of Sola Scriptura came the mass distribution of Bibles. Conveniently, with Johannes
Gutenberg’s invention of the European printing press, Bible-production was made accessible right
around the time that this protest against the Roman establishment first got started. Bibles were
translated into the vernacular of the people rather than just Latin. Tragically, some of the fore-runners
of these Bible translations were either violently killed or persecuted for their defiance of the Church’s
strangle-hold of powerv.

The idea of the sufficiency of scripture brought the concept that the Bible was completely true and that
everything that a Christian needed to know about how to live life was contained within the Bible’s
pages. This empowered people to shake off the control of a corrupt church, but it had some bad side
effects that we are still dealing with today.

If you’ve ever read the entire Bible, you are well aware that there are some very strange things
contained within its pages. When someone embraces the idea that the Bible is all they need for life and
that everything written in it is true, they make themselves vulnerable to the very kind of Church-control
that Reformation leaders like Martin Luther tried to free us from.

Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth?
Imagine a Christian married couple that uses condoms or any other form of birth control because they
can’t afford to provide for a child yet. A pastor or some other spiritual leader who opposes this could
confront them by saying that contraceptives “aren’t biblical.” This may be completely true (nowhere in
the Bible does it condone contraceptive use); however, nowhere in the Bible does it condone the use of
cars, computers, microwave ovens, or the printing press!

If someone has told a pastor or another authority figure that they believe the Bible is their “Basic
Instructions Before Leaving Earth” then they are making themselves open to manipulation for that
leader’s own agenda. A pastor can use his biblical knowledge as a way to corner his congregation into
his own schemes.

This is why the idea of the Bible as an answer book doesn’t really work. I like the notion of the Bible
being more like an algebra book than an instruction book. While it’s true that an algebra book has
answers in the back, its real value is in causing students to wrestle with the problems that it presents so
that they learn how to solve them for themselves.vi

As we know, the Bible is a very difficult book. It has parts that are difficult to understand and the parts
that we do understand are often difficult to apply to life.

We need to move away from allowing ourselves to be limited to the Bible as the only thing trust-worthy
out there. This concept has closed the door for many Christians to listen to science, news media, and
public education as worthwhile sources of information. We also need to be willing to question what the
Bible says for itself.

I repudiate the Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrancyvii and any similar document when it claims that
the Bible is “of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches: it is to be believed, as
God's instruction, in all that it affirms: obeyed, as God's command, in all that it requires; embraced, as
God's pledge, in all that it promises.” Statements like these are dangerous because someone who reads
them may actually try to follow them.
Under the intention of being faithful to scripture, other biblical-fundamentalists have fallen into snares
of manipulation from religious leaders and they’ve blinded themselves from information. Some of these
same biblical-fundamentalists have spread the virus without being aware that they themselves are
infected with it.

Take for example the church that calls its congregation to believe that the Bible is an inerrant book and
that whatever is written in scripture is absolute truth. What should church members do when they read
texts like:

“…everything is meaningless” (Ecclesiastes 1:2)viii?

…Or…

“So I commended pleasure, for there is nothing good for a man under the sun except to eat and to drink
and to be merry, and this will stand by him in his toils throughout the days of his life which God has
given him under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 8:15)ix?

Few churches take these statements literally. Moreover, few would preach these verses as absolute
truth. Nonetheless, many of these same professing Christians would say that the Bible is “absolute
truth”. You can’t have it both ways; these words either are absolute truth or they are not.

“Greet all the brethren with a holy kiss,”x the New Testament tells us. But I have never met a Christian
that actually practices this regularly. The New Testament also says that any woman who prays without a
head covering disgraces her own headxi. We also know that women are forbidden to teach when men
are presentxii, but I have had more female teachers than male teachers throughout my education.

When considering that the vast majority of self-proclaimed Christians in the 21st Century have failed to
adhere to these and other biblical instructions, it seems that either most Christians walk in perpetual
guilt of violation of the mandates of God or they don’t truly believe that every sentence of the Bible is
absolute truthxiii. This exposes a serious vacuum of intellectual integrity within Christianity.

It seems that Christians have modified faith and practice to accommodate for shifting cultural mores.
Views on women and slaves have changed, as have religious customs. 21st Century Christians generally
have sculpted their interpretations of the Bible to accommodate for their lives rather than shifting their
lives to conform to the Bible.xiv

The disparity between the written word and applied practice of believers goes beyond just cultural
evolution and into the heart of the faith itself. While it may seem miniscule that believers ignore obvious
culture-specific instructions like “brethren kissing,” there are larger implications when Christians ignore
other moral codes like “love your enemies.”xv

Law and Order via the Holy Book
Some people who call themselves born-again Christians have had no problem with the United States
launching a pre-emptive war on Iraq in defiance of Jesus’ love commandment. All the while, I’ve seen
some of these same people choose to quote Romans 1:26-27 to condemn homosexuality. I’ve even
heard one woman point out that the same chapter closes with “those who do such things deserve
death” and she believes that all homosexuals should be given the death penalty.

But if we were to apply capital punishment to homosexuals we would have to apply the same standard
to every kind of wickedness including: envy, strife, deceit, malice, gossip, slander, God-hating, insolence,
arrogance, boastfulness, and disobedience to parents because this same chapter condemns these things
as worthy of death too.xvi

No public official would embrace the enforcement of such laws. Every one of their constituents would
be dead soon afterwards anyway. This is why so many Christians play “pick-and-choose” with biblical
texts. As Senator Barack Obama pointed out before he was elected President, the enforcement of the
Bible as the “law of the land” would be a bit more complicated than many Evangelical Christians seem to
think. As he’s rhetorically asked:

        “And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from
        the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go
        with James Dobson's, or Al Sharpton's? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public
        policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is an
        abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the
        faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount - a passage that is so radical that it's
        doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get
        carried away, let's read our Bibles. Folks haven't been reading their Bibles.”xvii

The Story We Might Find Ourselves In (But Isn’t Ever Finished)
I understand that the chronology of the Bible presents a kind of “trajectory hermeneutic”xviii that moves
from the Noahic Covenant to the Abrahamic Covenant to the Covenant with Jacob to the Decalogue and
the Mosaic Law to the prophets and to a radical reformation at the advent of the New Covenant. But
even within the New Testament we find an evolution of understandings of ethics from Jesus to the
Pauline epistles. This brand of metamorphosis of moral code leaves those who live in this era a very
ambiguous understanding of the “absolute truth.” Moreover, evident changes have taken place in our
perspective on race relations and women’s rights since the time of Paul’s letters.

Yet as we consider the heart of biblical trajectory, we find that the Bible’s diversity has common themes
woven throughout its pages. The Bible’s main character is God (even though there are some books like
Esther and Song of Songs that never mention God), and its plot-line revolves around the relationship of
this God and his chosen people, the nation of Israel. Nevertheless, even the departure from emphasis on
Israel is hinted at several points throughout the Old and New Testaments as the focus points towards
“all the nations of the earth”xix rather than just the Hebrew people.

All people can identify with stories told in the Hebrew Bible. Whether these stories are made of
historical events or mythology, their themes can still serve for tremendous value in providing a frame-
work for living. But it would be dangerous to take every written word as absolute, literal truth that is
applicable for today.

The Fallacies of Infallibility
I can’t claim that the Bible is a “perfect” or “non-contradictory” document either. I’ve seen many
Christians react defensively whenever they are presented with an apparent contradiction or scientific
inaccuracy, but this is largely because they hold to a kind of pre-suppositional commitment to the
inerrancy of scripture.

I don’t pretend that the Bible is non-contradictory for a few reasons. It, at the least, has the appearance
of contradicting itself in numerous places. For instance, the books of Matthew and Luke give us two
different genealogies of Jesus. Matthew tells us that Joseph (the man who was thought to be the father
of Jesus) was the son of Jacobxx while Luke records that Joseph was the son of Elixxi.

So did Joseph have two gay fathers? It would at least seem so. But many conservatives would be
offended by this. And why do these gospels bother to record Joseph’s blood-line as if its Jesus’s lineage
when they also indicate that Joseph wasn’t even Jesus’s biological father? Isn’t it irrelevant?

What about Jesus’s resurrection? Each of the four gospels tells a very different account of what
happened. How many women first arrived at Jesus’s empty tomb? How many angels were there? Were
they there before or after sunrise? Which account do we believe: Luke’s or John’s? And isn’t it
interesting that someone added an extra eleven verses (Mark 16:9-20) to Mark’s version of the
resurrection story that weren’t in the earliest manuscripts? This becomes especially troubling when we
consider that Mark’s gospel was the earliest one written out of the four that are canonized in the New
Testament!xxii

Don’t forget about the famous controversy over Mark 2:25-26. When Jesus says that David took the
consecrated bread during the time that Abiathar was the high priest in verse 25, He’s misquoting I
Samuel 21 where the story originally says that Ahimelech was the high priest. Was Jesus wrong? Or did
Mark just make a mistake by misquoting Jesus? Either way, I wouldn’t be honest if I said that there were
“no contradictions in the Bible.” I sometimes wonder if people who make a claim like this have ever
even read the whole Bible for themselves, and then if they have, if they are willing to deceive
themselves about the absence of contradictions in the Bible, what else are they willing to lie about?

Similarly, I can’t pretend that every statement made in the Bible is factual. I’ll just use one quick
example. Jesus said:

         “How shall we picture the kingdom of God, or by what parable shall we present it? It is like a
        mustard seed, which when sown upon the soil, though it is smaller than all the seeds that are
        upon the soil, yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants; so
        that the birds of the air can nest under its shade.”xxiii
Well, we know that mustard seeds aren’t the smallest seeds sown on the soil. Should we pretend that
they are smaller than, for example, orchid seeds? Does the relative smallness of mustard seeds
disqualify the legitimacy of what Jesus is saying about the kingdom of God? I don’t think so.

If you look at the “fundamental” purpose behind what Jesus is saying in this parable, He’s not trying to
communicate a scientific fact. And even if He actually believed that mustard seeds were the smallest, it
doesn’t discount what I think He’s saying: the kingdom of God starts out small and grows to become
very big and accommodating. He’s making a point about the nature of the kingdom of God as a subtle,
growing, and living organism rather than an imperialistic dictatorship.

While we don’t even have the original manuscripts of the books of the Bible, we can quibble about these
details. We can ridicule others for having a different understanding of the scriptures than us. Or we can
go with what the Bible says about itself: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching,
rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped
for every good work.”xxiv

This is why I’m a biblical-fundamentalist. I look for the over-arching meaning behind the story in its
historical context rather than tripping over the details because of debates about whether something
should be called “inerrant” or not. And according to Jesus, the over-arching meaning is really quite
simple: “In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you would want them to treat you, for this
is the Law and the Prophets.”xxv




i
   Matthew 5:29-30
ii
    Galatians 2:20, Mark 8:34-35, Philippians 1:21
iii
     Matthew 22:36-40, New American Standard Bible.
iv
     This was written somewhere in the book Velvet Elvis which was written by the world famous rock-star pastor
named Rob Bell.
v
    Learn about the lives of William Tyndale and John Wycliffe.
vi
     I stole this illustration from: McLaren, Brian. A New Kind of Christian.
vii
      http://www.bible-researcher.com/chicago1.html
viii
       Ecclesiastes 1:2b, New International Version.
ix
     Ecclesiastes 1:15, New American Standard Bible.
x
    I Thessalonians 5:26, New American Standard Bible.
xi
     I Corinthians 11:5, New American Standard Bible.
xii
      I Timothy 2:12, New American Standard Bible.
xiii
       For a look at one man’s effort to do this, read The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs.
xiv
       If you want to learn more about this become familiar with the life work of Bishop John Shelby Spong; most
particularly his books The Sins of Scripture, A New Christianity for a New World, and Why Christianity Must Change
or Die. You can also listen to/watch his lecture titled “The Terrible Texts of the Bible” here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZM3FXlLMug
xv
    Matthew 5:43-44, New American Standard Bible.
xvi
     Romans 1:28-32, New American Standard Bible.
xvii
     Read his “Call to Renewal Keynote Address” here: http://obama.senate.gov/podcast/060628-
call_to_renewal_1/
xviii
      To understand this concept, become familiar with William Webb’s book titled: Slaves, Women, and
Homosexuals.
xix
     Malachi 1:11
xx
    Matthew 1:16, New American Standard Bible.
xxi
     Luke 3:23, New American Standard Bible.
xxii
      For more details about this read Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman.
xxiii
      Mark 4:30-32, New American Standard Bible.
xxiv
      II Timothy 3:16-17, New International Version. Also look at Brian McLaren’s explanation for “fundamentalism”
in his book A Generous Orthodoxy.
xxv
      Matthew 7:12, New American Standard Bible.