Members of One Body: Fundamentalism and Ecclesial Faithfulness
11/19/14 
Albert Lee
Imagine a friend were to ask you what he needed to eat in order to have health. One way you could answer his question is by describing the various essential nutrients that you obtain through a healthy diet: an alphabet of vitamins, various minerals, fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. This would be an excellent answer to the question. It is true and precise, and the precision would come in handy, for example, someone had scurvy. You have scurvy, you say? Let me tell you about vitamin C…….
But you also might respond that your friend needs to eat a combination of vegetables, meat, fruits, and grains. This would be a different, but also accurate answer that interestingly-communicates realities that are not evident in the first answer, like the fact that nutrients are found in particular foods that come from somewhere: the soil of gardens, the fields of farms, and from the bodies of razing animals. Your friend needs to eat things that come from the earth. That’s an interesting answer that might help your friend in another way. Or, you might reply that what he needs to eat are breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That response introduces another important aspect to healthy eating: spacing and time. You might even add that health requires meals shared with other people. Healthy eating for human beings-across cultures, time, and space-is social eating.
Now, what if a friend asked you what is required for the health of a church? What would you say? After reading Kevin T. Bauder’s chapter describing his fundamentalism in Four views on the Spectrum of Evangelicalism (Zondervan, 2011), I have a good idea of what a fundamentalist might say. And I think it’s generally a good answer to this question of how ecclesial health is maintained. For Bauder, this question and the related one of how Christians should relate to other Christians and to non-Christians are at the heart of fundamentalism, and he proves to be a sagacious guide to fundamentalist answers to these questions as well as to the fundamentalist movement.
Bauder is restrained and careful, writing with a clarity and steady sensibility that echoes in his style the primacy of identification, distinction and separation to the fundamentalist vision. He notes that this easy is less a scholarly treatment and more a personal perspective, albeit one informed by over a half-century of immersion in fundamentalist circles and conversation outside those circles. My reflections here on ecclesial health and fundamentalism will carry a similar tone of personal perspective, beginning with a summary of the significant elements of fundamentalism as described by Bauder and ending with a few comments and observations I hope Christians of all traditions-including fundamentalism-will find beneficial in their pursuit of ecclesial health.
Fundamentalism
Bauder begins by describing what fundamentalism is primarily concerned for: the “unity and fellowship” of Christians grounded in the gospel. Belief in the gospel creates an invisible and inward unity that contrasts with the outward, external, and tangible unity of ethnic Israel. Bauder if careful to assert that the fundamental importance of the invisible and intangible unity of the church “does not imply that outward, visible unity is unimportant.” But for fundamentalism, outward unity follows a prior invisible and inner unity which is constituted by belief in the gospel.
But what is the gospel? In summary, the gospel is the good news of the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth interpreted in an interrelated complex of essential doctrines (or “fundamentals”) that generally must be known and accepted to believe the gospel. Not all the fundamentals must be explicitly known and affirmed to be saved, though some must. None of the fundamentals, however, can be denied without implicitly denying the gospel itself.
The fundamentals described by Bauder include: sin as personal guilt before God; Christ’s atonement for our sins through penal substitution; and forensic justification involving a double imputation of Christ’s righteousness to his people and of their sins to Christ, resulting in retributive punishment for Jesus and a declaration of righteousness for his people. Further, the gospel presupposes a future second coming of judgment, the reality of hell, the personal union of Christ’s fully human and fully divine natures, the virgin birth, Christ’s perfect obedience to the Father, the ascension, salvation by grace alone through faith alone, the biblical inerrancy. For fundamentalists, these are the fundamentals of the gospel from which fundamentalism derives its name and to which the early church creeds testify.
Separation
The foregoing constitutes a straightforward platform from which fundamentalists decide how to interact with others. Those who accept the basic fundamentals and so believe in the gospel are to be considered Christians at minimum; those who do not should not be considered Christians. Among Christians, the greater the level of unity, fellowship, and collaboration possible. For example, amillenialists and premillenialists are both Christians yet would find it difficult to collaborate on promotion eschatology. At maximum, though, Christians may be united not merely by the fundamentals of the gospel, but by the “entire system of faith and practice, the whole counsel of God.”
Because maximal Christian fellowship (resting on complete agreement with the entire system of faith and practice contained in Scripture) is rare, a process for discerning separation is necessary. Bauder’s version seems rather sensible to me: before joining together, Christians should ask themselves what they believe to be true, whether those beliefs are shared, and whether the degree of likemindedness permits the particular sort of cooperation and fellowship envisioned.
Fundamentals apply these principles and processes of separation in a number of ways Bauder highlights. He argues it is appropriate to separate not merely from apostate teachers of a false gospel, but from Christian leaders who gain “a share in the evil of apostasy” by calling apostates Christian or encouraging or joining with them in the Lord’s work. In particular, Bauder is concerned that recent evangelical collaborations with Roman Catholics?whom fundamentalists believe teach a false gospel?like the Evangelicals and Catholics Together and Manhattan Declaration documents wrongfully recognize Roman Catholics as Christian. He is also critical of populist revivalism and hyper-fundamentalism (movement that overlap with fundamentalism) concluding that mainstream fundamentalism may need to “distance itself from the excesses of its worst exemplars.” It seems more of the tried and true process of separation is in the future for fundamentalists.
Reflections
This issue of separation may be a good place to start asking questions and stating observations that been percolating in my mind. My hope is that these thoughts will prove edifying not merely to fundamentalist readers, but to any Christian reader who desires ecclesial health. The experiences of separation and unity, after all, are not restricted to fundamentalists, but confront every congregation that seeks to be faithful. And the peculiar gloss that such experiences have in American churches (even Korean-American churches) owes much to the wide-spread influence of historic fundamentalism.
First of all, I agree that there are times and circumstances in which the separation of Christian groups is necessary, and the steps and considerations outlined by Bauder are wise. What I am more concerned about, however, is how groups of Christians et to that tragic point in the first place, and not much time is spent in Bauder’s (admittedly introductory) essay on this matter. Almost all the space is spent on the fundamentalist practice of separation, while little is spent on how fundamentalists qua fundamentalism grow in unity. Fundamentalists do division very well, and one might justly point out that it shows.
Bauder admits disunity is an evil but argues that pretending to be unified amidst disagreement is even worse. I think that is true; and yet, the results of division nevertheless may not sustain the health of a particular body of Christians. This is because the fullness of lifegiving love is both outward and inward, and both visible and invisible unity is a part of the fullness of a life of love. However, justified separation may be in a particular instant, it may still ruin communities over the long-term and damage Christian witness(John 13:35). This does not mean separation is never the right thing to do. But it does raise the question of whether there were other right things to do in the life of a given congregation that were not done in the years and decades prior to the culminating decision to separate.
So what can fundamentalists do now to reverse the trajectory of separation? My exposure to fundamentalism and my reading of this introduction lead me to suggest a more biblically structured and ordered emphasis in doctrine and teaching. The fundamentals of the gospel are crucial, but in this introduction to fundamentalism, creation, for example, is not mentioned at all. God is described as “moral lawgiver” but never described as Creator. I realize this is an introductory chapter and some omissions are to be expected due to space constraints and a even agenda that intends contrast with three other views of evangelicalism. But I suspect that, for historically understandable reasons, so much focus is given to defending the fundamentals under attack that the majority of fundamentals not under attack tend to be given short shrift.
Taking the time to immerse fundamentalist congregations more proportionately in the entire set of truths of the gospel(rather than focusing mostly on the controversial ones) will help congregations obey God’s command to be united in a number of ways. First, it will do more justice to the overall biblical picture and so will be more accurate. Second, a deeper immersion with the overall biblical picture will put difficult or unpopular doctrines in a supportive context that will make them more credible and seem less arbitrary than a stripped-down series of selected fundamental doctrines. Third, it will serve to unite congregations and build relationships that will be stronger, more trusting, and better prepared to meet the inevitable strains of controversy or difficult moments in congregational life.
This brings me to a second possibility which may serve to deepen the life of fundamentalist congregations in faithful love and unity. Much of Bauder’s essay describes the fundamentalist emphasis on the individual or personal nature of sin and guilt before God. This idea is certainly true, but the fundamentalist tendency to describe sin and guilt as “primarily” individual and relegating the social dimension of sin to a secondary tier or even to the realm of mere consequences of sin seems unjustified to me.
After all, Scripture is clear that human beings were made in the image of a God-in-three-persons who has never existed apart from social relationship. Since Father, Son, and Spirit are their relations, we should not be surprise that humans made in the image of the triune God are also intrinsically and ontologically social. Individuality and sociality are equally basic. We see this with sin as well: the sins of Adam, Israel, and Christian churches are not merely or primarily an individual phenomenon, but an individual and social phenomenon. It is not merely the consequences of original sin that are transmitted to the race of man, but original sin itself such that all are born in sin. Likewise, just as in our federal head of Adam all sinned, in the federal head of the Second Adam, the people of God are all righteous. We are saved as individual persons, but we are not saved “primarily” as individual persons; Christians are saved into the body of Christ which is irreducibly social. Salvation is irreducibly social(as well as personal and cosmic).
To be explicit, I affirm the personal and individual dimension of sin and righteousness. After all, because the persons of the Trinity exist distinctly, so do humans. However, viewing sin and righteousness as primarily” individual or personal and so belittling the social is a serious mistake that leads to de-emphasizing the common life of the people of God, including their lives interacting with the environment, their neighbors, wider society, politics, the economy, etc. This de-emphasis, because it does not conform to the truth of God’s creation of, judgment on, and redemptive purposes for all of reality, will enervate the church of God rather than nurture a loving congregation and fostering the care and trust necessary for living unity based on a living faith. Congregations that week a healthy unity would do well to learn to ask themselves whether they are downplaying either the personal or social dimensions of sin and/or redemption within their communities and to take concrete steps to build up areas of weakness.
Hope of Renewal
I admire the depth of focus fundamentalists have shown for decades and their ability to zero in on the most important fundamentals of the faith under attack and demand the gospel be upheld with clarity and without compromise. I firmly believe much good has been accomplished through their efforts, and much benefit has accrued to American churches in a range of theological tradition due to their work. The suggestions I have made are by no means certain, being based on a single excellent chapter of a book, my prior scattered readings within the fundamentalist tradition, and my limited personal experience. But they are made from a desire that fundamentalist churches become more of what God desires for them to be: communions united by the invisible Spirit in visible love through faith in Christ by the grace of God.
The way in which fundamentalists have articulated their theological vision is valuable and powerful, and yet I wonder whether the emphases of the vision and the effects over time of battles on that vision have bought fundamentalism to a place where modest reformation might be in order. If I, over the course of decades, had to continually convince skeptics that particular nutrients really are not necessary for health, I might inadvertently skew my community’s overall vision of eating towards those nutrients in questions, leading some to consume too much vitamin C and others to try to live on multivitamin pills or energy bars.
Though noting important is completely lost or denied, the whole vision of healthy eating is skewed in such a way that significant parts of healthy eating are obscured or unintentionally minimized. We might lose the significance of time, or an appreciation of where food comes from, or the sociality of healthy eating and drinking. Over time, this might have real consequences on the life of our communities.
I wonder whether something like this has happened to fundamentalist churches. If so, the solution probably will not be to double-down on prior ways of envisioning church life. It may instead involve an accounting of God-given strengths and man-made weaknesses, and a commitment to build on traditional strengths and shore up weaknesses in pursuit of a fuller, more faithful ecclesial vision. For fundamentalist congregations, this may involve a re-balancing of theological concerns and a recognition of the social dimension of sin and salvation. Dear reader, what might this involve in your tradition?