Fundamentalism is not about fundamentals. It’s about drawing lines. Where the line gets drawn is dictated by cultural developments. Fundamentalists often claim that they represent what has been the historic stance of the church, but this is not true. Fundamentalism is as much a product of the culture as is whatever fundamentalism opposes. 

In this respect the original fundamentalism controversy is instructive. From 1910-1915, Lyman Stewart, one of the founders of Union Oil (and the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, now Biola), together with his brother, Milton, published a twelve-volume series of essays called The Fundamentals, a total of 90 essays in all. In a short forward, the editors signaled the brothers Stewarts’ intent: “Two intelligent, consecrated Christian laymen bear the expense, because they believe that the time has come when a new statement of the fundamentals of Christianity should be made.”

The focus of the essays was on developments in biblical studies, what was then called “higher criticism,” and science, the Darwinian theory of evolution. These developments, the essays contended, threaten Christianity at its core. The essays were long, erudite, and often correct in particulars. The authors never tired in pointing out what they regarded as deficiencies in the then current ideas about the development of the Old Testament (the idea, for example, that the Pentateuch was assembled out of four primary sources, known as J, E, P, and D) and in Darwinian science. They got many things right, but on the core issues, they were wrong.

Take source criticism, the idea that the first five books of the Bible were assembled from earlier sources. Much has changed in the one hundred and more years since the publication of The Fundamentals. Scholars continue to debate how and when and by whom the Pentateuch was assembled, but the essential point remains: the text of the Bible has a history. It is the product of writers and editors, working over a period of time. 

Or evolution—the idea proposed by Charles Darwin. In the century since the publication of The Fundamentals, the evidence for the evolution of life has only gotten stronger. With the ability to read the DNA code, it has become possible to specify the exact relationships among species. Bonobos, chimpanzees, and humans share as much as 99% of their genetic material, and of the material not shared with bonobos, humans share some of it with chimpanzees, and of the material not shared with chimpanzees, humans share some of it with bonobos. Clearly, there is in all of this a rather complicated set of species relationships going back several million years. The point is that genomic science has made it possible to study the history of the development of life on earth in ways not previously possible.

None of this could have been anticipated by the writers of The Fundamentals, of course, but in opposing those who were studying the history of the text of the Bible and the development of life on earth, they made a fundamental error. They supposed that they already knew the truth about these things and that it couldn’t be different from what they already knew. They already knew that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible (with the exception of the account of his death in Deuteronomy 34, of course) because, so they thought, Jesus said so. And they thought that humans couldn’t have evolved from other animals because that’s not how Genesis tells the story (or, in the case of Genesis, stories). Because they could not think differently for reasons they regarded as principial, they were at the mercy of any new evidence to come along. If you take an absolute stance on such questions, time is likely to prove you wrong.

In a different way, this is likely to be true for those who have decided to stake their ecclesiastical lives on doctrines that have about them more than a whiff of today’s politics. At first, the ideas that have animated groups like the Abide Project in the Christian Reformed Church seem an odd grouping: such things as complementarianism (“separate but equal” for the sexes), penal substitutionary atonement, and opposition to same-sex marriage. What does complementarianism and opposition to same-sex marriage have to do with penal substitutionary atonement? The answer is that they coalesce around opposition to what the purveyors of these ideas regard as the excessive permissiveness of contemporary culture. They present a hard disciplinarian God who imposes everlasting torture on humans because they are human, the demand that women stay within their ordained roles, at least in the church, and the idea that homosexual relationships are always a form of deviancy. 

These ideas are of a certain era. They are reactionary, an attempt to draw a line, to say, we will go this far and no farther. What they lack is the capacity to take account of what is emerging in contemporary culture that may be of God, to evaluate with all the resources available to us what’s good and what’s not. Already in 2008, Collin Hansen chronicled this movement in his Young, Restless, Reformed book, subtitled A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists. Take note of what he writes on a single page (44) of the YRR movement:

[Quoting a young YRR advocate, Laura Watkins] “If you don’t go into Reformed theology with the idea that you deserve to go to hell, then it’s not going to make sense because you will wonder how God could be so unfair,” she answered, “But then you realize it’s unfair that we’re being led to heaven in the first place. We start out as enemies of God; so if he chooses not to save us, that’s perfectly just.”

[And then in the next paragraph] The Calvinist resurgence is a complementarian movement. That is, these Calvinists understand from Scripture that men should lead churches and households. I wondered how Carmela [Cirafesi] and Laura navigated a theology that [preacher and author John] Piper admitted appealed to masculine instincts. [Seminar professor Roger] Olson told me he had never known a female student who switched her beliefs to Calvinism.

[And later on the same page] Still, I wondered how Calvinism relates to complementarian theology. There is nothing about unconditional election or irresistible grace that dictates what you think about gender roles. Or so I thought. [Again quoting Laura Watkins] “This is a different trait in me, but I see how they connect in my head. I believe God is sovereign and has ordered things in a particular way,” Laura explained. “Just as he’s chosen those who are going to know him before the foundations of the earth, I don’t want to be rebelling against the way God ordered men and women to relate to one another. He’s a good God, so it will be in my best interest to be submissive in a biblical way.”

You can see how all of this hangs together. The basic idea is that God lays down the law, and we had better submit. God, like kings of old, has no reason to explain why it’s so arranged. Why God, for example, saves some but not others. Or why God gives certain roles to men and others to women. Or why straights can be married but not gays. And so on. It’s “just so” theology, with the “so” of the “just so” being the Ozzie and Harriet culture of the 50’s in the US. In this way of thinking, God seems to have had a definite preference for a certain cultural era and certain people.  God’s selection, for example, seems not entirely random; there seems to have been a definite preference on the part of God until quite recently for Europeans. And it seems God really liked the white middle-class of 70 years ago when men were men and women were women and LBGTQ+ people were never heard from.

One can decide on the basis of a certain theology and on a tendentious reading of scripture that this is the way things should be. That it is God’s way. That the church should draw the line here and stand firm. But there is much that suggests that this theology is far too narrow and this evaluation of what’s happening in contemporary culture misses what is essential.

Both before and since, the theological conversation around the meaning of the cross presents alternatives to penal substitutionary atonement that to my eye, at least, are far more compelling. These are not unorthodox or unbiblical alternatives. In fact, they have as good as or better credentials than the notion of penal substitutionary atonement does. Penal substitutionary atonement was late to the theological game, appearing full blown first with Anselm of Canterbury in the very late 11th century. The cross is the great mystery of the New Testament, and the scriptures present it in ways that never lock down the cross to a single explanation. To make penal substitutionary atonement the sine qua non of Christian thought, as did the CRC Synod 2022, is to cut off that church from the best of Christian thought over 2,000 years.

To take another of the pillars of the movement that has lately dominated the CRC, the complementarian idea for the roles of women and men seems by now to be confined to some evangelical churches. Outside of these churches, we find women running corporations, engaging in science, playing a brand of basketball that lately has drawn huge numbers of viewers, and running for president of the United States. And in churches, where they are permitted to participate, women have proven capable pastors and preachers. The complementarian notion that families are a hierarchy with the husband at the top is today largely a joke. Why does a family need a single head? Complementarianism is an idea that seems like one of those things preached in (some) churches that are roundly and rightly ignored outside of the church. A perverse sort of feel-good doctrine.

And we have over the past 50 years learned much in our culture about sexuality, not that the conservative church seems to have noticed. It could have been otherwise. In 1973, when the first CRC report on homosexuality appeared, it took a daring approach. It distinguished between sexual orientation—whom one is attracted to—and sexual practice. Having made this distinction, the report goes on to say that attraction to one’s own sex is not sinful. Further, they say that “The choice for the Christian is between marriage and celibacy.” With that in mind, they seriously entertain whether same-sex marriage would be a possible alternative for homosexuals, only to reject it—all that in 1973, long before same-sex marriage existed as an option. At this point, in 1973, the CRC was at the leading edge among conservative churches in thinking about homosexuality. Not so today.

The church has gotten itself stuck, and if is stuck on these things, what it will miss is the opportunity to grow spiritually and theologically. We need to be thinking about what it means to be Reformed. We who belong to Reformed churches have a legacy to protect and foster. But legacies are never protected or fostered by trying to nail them down to a certain era or to certain formulations. The 20th century gnomonic TULIP (Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace, Perseverance of the saints) , is a poor way of understanding what Calvin was all about. Or what the Reformed movement should be about. Part of the Reformed legacy has always been a commitment to keep on thinking about the Bible, about God, and about human life. Always reforming. When we stop thinking, we stop being Reformed.

I have now turned a series on blog posts on “What the Bible Say about Sex” from the three I originally planned into five. And not said much about the Bible in the last of these. I think it’s enough for now. In my next posts, I hope to go back to my first love, the Bible (well, after Adria), and to present in a way more systematic than I have done before my view of how to read the Bible with joy and spiritual profit.

Until then,

Clay