Fundamentalism, Augustine and me

How can it be that many Christians (like myself) often have such difficulty in outing ourselves as such? In a world that is actually very open to spirituality of any kind? Where everyone can believe what they think is right?

• “Good” and “bad” Fundamentalism
• Juvenile fundamentalism
• Luther and Dinosaurs
• Augustine and his approach to fundamentalism
• More questions, less claims

“Good” and “bad” Fundamentalism

I think this is strongly related to the image that parts of society have of Christians. Which we don’t want people to identify us with. Some Christian groups are simply backward, are considered old-fashioned, gullible, fundamentalist. And this view of Christians brings us unpleasantly close to movements to which we see no parallels, like (right-wing) radical Christian fundamentalist groups in the USA, or maybe Muslim fundamentalists.

As long as fundamentalism means that we hold on to the Bible, the foundation of our faith, as long as one understands that he sees the Bible as the inspired Word of God to whom he gives authority - I can live well with it. In that sense I am a “fundamentalist” (ouch, just writing it like that hurts). It becomes problematic for me when someone understands the Bible as “dictated” by God, so to speak, and associates it with the fact that each word is authorized by God exactly as it has been written. Unfortunately, this is what people often understand by fundamentalism. And no: I really don’t identify with that. Or more precise: no more today.

Juvenile fundamentalism

As a teenager, I belonged to the Catholic Church. I remember heated discussions with an acquaintance, a theology student. His attitude to the Bible was suspiciously influenced by “modern” views. He wanted to explain to me that some passages cannot be taken literally. That they must be interpreted. My answer then was: “Do you really think that God is not great enough to have kept His Word pure and unharmed through the centuries? That he can’t express himself in Scripture in such a way that we can understand it directly? Without learned interpreters?” (Yes: even in the Catholic Church Bible fundamentalism can exist.)

This attitude did not come accidentally. It came from my reverence for God and His Word. But over the years my understanding of the way God speaks through the Bible slowly changed. My own (Catholic) theological studies were of decisive importance. So eventually I found myself at exactly the same point, held the same convictions as that student from my youth.

In the non-denominational congregation to which I have belonged for almost 30 years, there are also people who have a rather fundamentalist understanding of the Bible in the sense I held in my youth. Over the years I have had many discussions about this. And I repeatedly met people who represent a “hard” fundamentalism. But at least as often I met others who suffer from such fundamentalism. They have been hurt by the harshness that often accompanies it.

Luther and Dinosaurs

In the 1980s I was invited to a free-church congregation, at that time still as a Catholic. I gave a lecture on the different translations of the Bible. When I packed up my things afterwards, a very angry listener came up to me. He asked me how I could talk so uncritically about different translations. He stated that he was convinced that the only correct Bible was the Luther translation. (In Germany it has about the same position as the King James Version among conservative english speaking christians.) And my counterpart continued: strictly speaking, you can’t even speak of “translation”. God has dictated his word to Luther.

Well, I’m sure he wasn’t following the doctrine of his church. He must have misunderstood something. I believe that this attitude also came out of respect for God and his Word. But when I think of really vehement fundamentalism, then this encounter comes to mind again and again.

I remember a guest speaker who held a seminar in our church many years ago. He had only one big topic: he wanted to prove that the biblical story of creation is completely correct and reliable. The argument went something like this: “The Bible is the Word of God, and God cannot be wrong. So if the Bible says that the earth was created in 6 days, then this is exactly what happened. If alleged evidence appears that claims otherwise (e.g. petrified dinosaur bones), then it must be interpreted differently. Why shouldn’t God have created already petrified bones? We don’t know that. But we know that the Bible does not lie.”

These speeches were a pain to me. They were that kind of fundamentalism that hurts me, that in my opinion distorts the Bible. I left as soon as I could. And fortunately such a seminar would have no chance today in my church.

Augustine and his approach to fundamentalism

That’s what I mean by strong fundamentalism. And this is not a new phenomenon in the history of Christianity. On the contrary. Already in the first centuries there were people who advocated such a strict interpretation of Scripture.

In his 12-volume Genesis commentary “On the wording of Genesis” ¹ Augustine (354-430) writes:

Often enough it happens that even a non-Christian has acquired a very certain knowledge through reason and experience, with which he has something to say about the sky, about the course and orbit, size and distance of the stars, about certain solar and lunar eclipses, about years and times, about the natures of living beings, bushes, stones and the like. ²

For Augustine, science obviously had its own justification, regardless of the researcher’s religious convictions. The question for him now is: how do we deal with truths, which seem to contradict biblical statements? He continues:

Nothing, then, is more embarrassing, more dangerous, and more sharply to be rejected than when a Christian, with reference to the Christian Scriptures, makes assertions about these things to an unbeliever that are false and, as they say, turn heaven upside down so that the other can hardly restrain his laughter. ³

Augustine describes exactly the feelings of surrogate shame that I know so well when someone wants to convince others that science can only be true in a biblical framework.

Such an attitude not only harms the reputation of the Christians they represent, but also those who they actually want to convince:

That such an ignorant person reaps ridicule is not the worst thing, but that outsiders believe that our authors thought something like this. It is they, whose salvation we strive for, who bear the greatest damage when they despise and reject our men of God as unlearned. For if they catch one of us Christians in an error in a field that they know exactly, and notice how he wants to prove his nonsense with our books, how are they then ever to believe the resurrection of the dead, the hope for eternal life and the kingdom of heaven, since they must consider as undoubtedly wrong what these books have written about things that they themselves have experienced and could recognise?

It is unbelievable how much annoyance and sorrow is caused to reasonable brethren by such reckless zealots who are contemptuously rejected in their wrong and false views by people who are not supported by the authority of our books, and then begin to defend what they have manifestly said wrongly in their reckless audacity. And then they also dare to prove themselves by citing our holy books or by putting forward from memory all sorts of things that they think are useful to them as confirmation, and yet understand neither what they say nor the things they claim (1 Tim 1:7). ⁴

More questions, less claims

These clear statements by Augustine really surprised me. Although he believed and taught the Bible as the inspired Word of God, he had a breadth of thought that I wish we could see in many discussions today. Augustine did not need to insist on his understanding of the truth. C. Rebecca Rine characterizes his style in the Genesis Commentary as follows:

For Augustine […], the commentary took on more investigative overtones. As translator Edmund Hill observes, in Augustine’s final commentary on Genesis […], the bishop of Hippo “instructs his readers by letting them share in his own search for the meaning” rather than drawing clear-cut conclusions about the meaning of each and every verse. Augustine himself caricatures his comments as “a heap of questions,” finding in Genesis “a vast array of true meanings . . . extracted from a few words.” ⁵.

There are three things about the attitude of Augustine that impress me very much:

• He does not fight insights from experience and science even when they seem to contradict the Word of Scripture.
• He, as the bishop, as the scholar, the recognized theologian - he nevertheless approaches a text in a questioning way.
• And he also considers “a wide range” of meanings that other Christians have worked out from the same words to be true.

I wish this breadth of thought for myself and for our dealings with other Christians and non-Christians. This requires humility. It can give us the courage, like Augustine, to deal with the word of Scripture: again and again struggling to interpret it. Not starting from the conviction that we already know the truth. Then we would be fundamentalists in the “good” sense: People whose foundation is the Word of God.

If we read and represent Scripture like Augustine, then we don’t need to be afraid of being labelled as fundamentalists in the sense of narrow-minded or backward.

And that would make it easier for us (yes: me too) to out ourselves as followers of Jesus.

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