True Fundamentalism. I know fundamentalism gets a bad rap at times and quite frankly most of the time it is deserved, but there was a time when true fundamentalism was a great idea. True fundamentalism was about exactly that -- the fundamentals of the Christian faith. In short what is fundamental (basic) to Christianity and Christian belief. Now i am speaking of Protestant belief here so keep that in mind. The fact was that in the beginning fundamentalism was about making the list short and basic what doctrines Christians hold to.
The first one True Fundamentalism upholds about the Scripture. There are two factors: 1) Inspiration by God and 2) Authority.
In the question of inspiration, the original fundamentalist felt that is was not so important to get bogged down with discussion about how the Bible was inspired only to say that is was inspired by God. Verbal, Plenary , etc. were not their concern -- the issue was simply who did it. The Bible to them was not ultimately the product of man and that is what need to be ultimately said. It was written by men but was God inspired.
The question of authority was simple -- it is the authority over everything we believe and do.
I like this -- it keeps things to the basics and allows room for discussion about the role of mankind in the inspiration. It also means that I can accept as a brother in Christ someone who has different views on how god inspired the Scripture as long as we all understand that that it is God's Word and has authority over us in what we do and believe.
This makes things a lot easier.
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I've been reading your posts on Calvinism... and I think I see an inconsistency here...
ReplyDeleteIf verbal inspiration is true, so that God did not allow any error to be introduced into the original documents, how is that so different from the doctrine of irresistible grace? In both cases, the idea that whatever the man might have chosen on his own, God is overriding that choice and "forcing" His own.
Just so you know, I'm not knocking the verbal inspiration of Scripture, nor am I a 5-point Calvinist. I'm just wondering how you can so adamantly reject the latter but uphold the former!
Matthew Neal
Firstly, I a fairly sure that there is error, inconsistency and so forth in my theology because I am human. To me theology is a continual, never ending process because we can never come to the end of knowing and understanding God.
ReplyDeleteThat being said no where in this post do I say flatly that I beleive in verbal inspiration and that would be because I do not beleive in it. My view on inspiration is far more complex than that as I find verbal inspiration overly simplistic when we deal with the question of inspiration.
I beleive in inspiration of scripture, how that process works and the God-man dynamic involved is still in the works for me. The closest I have gotten to truly defining it was a series of posts on my newer blog - rabydtheologian2.com called Troubling Passages of Scripture.
Actually every post of theological significance from this blog is there as well so you could save some time by doing your reading there. Plus, some of my series here that are unfinished are finished there.
The problem I have had with defining how I think inspiration works is ever time I think I have a way to explain it, it slips through my fingers like mercury. Being an open theist has caused me to rethink the God-man relationship to inspiration in terms of dynamic future not static future so that does change things quite a bit.