There’s no question but that evangelicals and other Christian conservatives feel that they are under a cultural squeeze. In the main, the ‘culture’ (which here means ‘the culture of the educated classes’, because popular culture remains far more conservative and still a force to be reckoned with) is marked by disdain for or even outright contempt for traditional Christianity. Evidence for this is not hard to find. The Opening Ceremony of the Paris Olympics celebrated diversity by way of a celebration of Bacchanalian orgy at a scene that evoked da Vinci’s The Last Supper. It was essentially a display of the rude finger to those Christians who want to maintain a biblical stance on sex and sexuality.
Twin Temptations in the Face of Cultural Change
One temptation for the church is a simple concession to the intellectual and ethical norms of the age. But the church’s Lord is Jesus Christ, who rules by his word, not the alleged ‘arc of history’, new technological discoveries, or the ethical consensus of the times. Churches that tend toward mirroring the culture are currently being propped up only by their real estate holdings and their committees. They will soon disappear, blown away by the winds of historical change. They always try to play catch-up but never catch up. Their buildings will become Yoga centres and Chinese restaurants.
However, if faith in Christ demands that we do not concede to the age, it also calls us not to reject it out of hand. We are called to exercise discernment. The biblical wisdom literature is a great model: it combines observation of the universe and human affairs with the revealed knowledge of the character of the LORD, the Creator, and Redeemer. The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: its anchor point and frame. But it is not the totality of human knowledge. The Bible is not an exhaustive source of information, nor does it claim to be. As John Calvin says, Scripture is the spectacles we use to observe and interpret our experience.
And here we must beware of an anxious overreaction to cultural pressure, namely, fundamentalism.
What Is Fundamentalism?
What do I mean by the term? Fundamentalism is a form of Christianity that is marked by cultural separationism and biblical literalism. That is, it has a stance that is inherently suspicious towards secular knowledge. It reads the Bible literalistically and claims that this is the only way to read it or to recognise its authority. As a distinct historical movement it, emerged in the 1920s, especially in response to the rise of the theory of evolution but also as a reaction to other forms of modern knowledge.
There were and are those who would identify with the label ‘fundamentalist’. But it is worth saying that the label works on something of a spectrum. You could, for example, hold to young earth creationism and not be a fundamentalist—because you would argue for the young earth interpretation as one possibility amongst others, rather than the ‘literal’, and so definitive, one. It is also possible that a person might not identify with the label ‘fundamentalist’ but still betray fundamentalist tendencies. We do have to be careful here because the use of the term can slide into name-calling. Anti-intellectualism and literalism of fundamentalism are key characteristics that identify fundamentalism.
An Evangelical Alternative to Fundamentalism
In the 1940s and 50s, the neo-evangelical movement in the USA, John Stott and others in the UK, and the leaders of Moore College in Australia (together with the leaders of other evangelical groups) rejected the accusation that they were fundamentalist and distinguished themselves from fundamentalism. Continuing this trajectory in Sydney, influential late-twentieth-century Moore College principal Broughton Knox, and vice-principal and later archbishop of Sydney Diocese Donald Robinson were both conservative, but they were not separationist or literalist. They addressed and incorporated modern knowledge where it did not contradict Scripture, and they saw themselves as intellectuals.
In doing so, they stood in a long tradition of Reformed and orthodox theological thinking that was most certainly not fundamentalist. Here’s Calvin again:
if we regard the Spirit of God as the sole fountain of truth, we shall neither reject the truth itself, nor despise it wherever it shall appear, unless we wish to dishonour the Spirit of God. For by holding the gifts of the Spirit in slight esteem, we condemn and reproach the Spirit himself. (Institutes II.14–16)
This is most assuredly not a fundamentalist approach. And you can read this sort of thing in Reformed theology and piety all the way on from Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century to B. B. Warfield in the nineteenth century to Herman Bavinck in the twentieth. Reformed evangelicalism is most certainly not a fundamentalist type of Christianity.
The Flaws of Fundamentalism
Fundamentalism is a Christianity that is as paranoid as liberalism is complacent. It sets up too sharp a contrast between ‘the world’ (or ‘the culture’) and the gospel. It is thus unable to discern its embeddedness in history and culture (and indeed its worldliness). It regards knowledge gained by secular knowers as inevitably contaminated. It regards intellectual endeavour, even by Christians, with deep suspicion. This means that it is often dismissive of apologetics. It urges the church to retreat from culture rather than teaching it how to live in a discerning way within it. Even worse, it indulges in the sin of nostalgia, imagining that it can put the genie of social change back in the bottle. It tends to combativeness when it comes to ‘the world’.
But above all, fundamentalism is not good at reading the Bible. This is true on several fronts. Fundamentalism insists that hermeneutical considerations such as genre, composition, and original context of the text are merely ways to obfuscate the text’s true meaning. Ironically, in attempting to get at a pure Bible, it understands God’s word less well. In seeking to honour the Bible as a supernatural text, it thinks less clearly about how the individual texts of Scripture function canonically. In not interrogating interpretive issues it leaves itself open to begging the question based on culturally located assumptions.
The best response to social change and the ‘cultural squeeze’ is not anxious fundamentalism, but deeper confidence in the Lord Jesus Christ and in the sovereign grace of the Father.
