Fundamentalism, Christianity and Religion

[….. in Armidale, New South Wales, at the University of New England. And this is the Sir Robert Madgwick Memorial Lecture given late last year by Professor Philip Almond, Head of the University of Queensland’s School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics. And this is Encounter on Radio National, and Professor Almond’s subject is Fundamentalism, Christianity and Religion.]

Philip Almond: ‘The Bible is a plain book’, declared the early Fundamentalist preacher, Charles Hodge, in 1857. ‘It is intelligible by the people’, he said, ‘and they have the right and are bound to read and interpret it for themselves so that their faith may rest on the testimony of the Scriptures and not that of the church.’ (Boone 17). You can hear my Anglican tones already coming through there.

Well here is a central image of Fundamentalism, as true today as 150 years ago. The simple uneducated reader, unchurched and untutored, opens the Biblical text, reads, and finds salvation. For Hodge, the text, read by a reader illuminated by the Holy Spirit, is sufficient. The text itself instructs the reader, and the Church is an obstacle to the true reading of the text.

My aim tonight is to show why Hodge’s claim makes sense within the rules of Fundamentalism, but cannot make sense to anybody who’s not part of the form of life which allows those rules to exist. And I want to argue that this is because Fundamentalism is what the French philosopher Michel Foucault would call ‘a discourse’ and that the Fundamentalist simply reading his Bible is in fact immersed, immersed in a whole mass of texts that belong to a single discursive formation, Fundamentalism, a formation which is written by, as Foucault puts it, ‘so many authors who know or don’t know one another, criticise one another, invalidate one another, pillage one another, meet without knowing it and obstinately intersect their unique discourses in a web of which they cannot see the whole, and of whose breadth they have a very inadequate idea’.(Foucault, 126).

So what I hope to do then in this lecture is to uncover the logic, to lay out the rules of this complex version of Christianity.

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they do see themselves as the true and only Christians. And they reject any involvement with those who do not share their views. The contrast between the true and nominal Christian is, on the face of it, that between those who are on the one hand genuinely committed to their faith, and on the other, those who are not, but in practice it is a contrast between those who hold true Fundamentalist doctrines and those who do not. Here is the core of what many people see as Fundamentalism’s typically arrogant and intolerant attitudes not only to those of other religions but also to other Christians.

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Here then there is a key to Fundamentalist discourse in this uncompromising either/or. It is a tradition with a long history in Christianity which reaches back to Tertullian, and forward to Karl Barth’s dialectical theology in the 20th century via Soren Kierkegaard in the 19th. And it stands in contrast with that other strand of Christian theology which is just as ancient, which in interplay with its surrounding culture, attempts to present a Christianity relevant to the day. Although it would vehemently deny it, as a child of Modernism, Fundamentalism is just as culture bound as any liberal cultural theology. But its rhetoric of the eternal Gospel based on Biblical truth versus the temporal gospel which follows the fleeting fashions of the day, is a very powerful one.

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For further Reading:

Carroll, Robert P., Wolf in the Sheepfold: The Bible as a Problem for Christianity (London: SPCK, 1991).

Goosen, Gideon, Australian Theologies: Themes and Methodologies into the Third Millennium(Strathfield: St Paul’s Publications, 2000).

Hebert, Gabriel, Fundamentalism and the Church of God (London: SCM Press, 1957).

Plimer, Ian, Telling Lies for God: Reason versus Creationism (Sydney: Random House, 1997).

Spong, John Shelby, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism. A Bishop rethinks the Meaning of Scripture (New York: Harper Collins, 1991).

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Publications:

Fundamentalism Author: Barr, James Publisher: London: SCM, 1981

The Bible Tells Them So: The Discourse of Protestant Fundamentalism Author: Boone, Kathleen C. Publisher: Albany: SUNY Press, 1989

The Archaeology of Knowledge Author: Foucault, Michel Publisher: London: Tavistock, 1972

The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative Author: Frei, Hans Publisher: New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974

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Beyond Fundamentalism Author: Stevick, Daniel B. Publisher: Richmond: John Knox, 1964

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From http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/enc/stories/s520400.htm