Larry Hart
Abstract
This essay, which originally appeared in 2005 in The Living Church, asserts that there is a fundamentalism of both the religious right and the left, and that the Anglican (Episcopalian) principle of the via media offers the possibility of avoiding the pitfalls of both, while guiding us into a theology that is both progressive and orthodox. The version which appeared in The Living Church was, to my disappointment, edited by the editorial staff who weren’t fully convinced a liberal theologian or bible scholar could be a fundamentalist. I, therefore, found it rather gratifying when Marcus Borg embraced that idea as more than a possibility. At any rate, this is the unedited version originally submitted for publication.
Key Words
fundamentalism 1), via media 2), profession 3), confession (confessio) 4), ideological 5), factuality 6), Scripture 7), conservative 8), liberal 9), progressive 10), existential-expressive 11), explanatory-objective 12)
Moments of Clarity
The deeper significance of the Anglican principle of the via media, the middle way, has, I confess, until recently been somewhat lost on me. I saw it as a refined expression for “compromise.” And, while I knew the ability to make appropriate compromises was a sign of health, I also knew being a real person means possessing an awareness of the distinction between the soft-self where concessions and compromises can be made with ease while maintaining integrity, and the solid-self where values, convictions, and commitments may not be negotiable away or abandoned without a loss of something essential to an individual’s personhood. But while reflecting on two disappointing worship experiences I had a particularly lucid moment in which I saw that the via media is not compromise, but rather the ability to consider unfamiliar and novel ideas, and to synthesize the truth of those ideas.
This moment of clarity was actually preceded by two similar experiences, the first occurring some years before the second while attending a worship service with my mother and sister. My mother had just been widowed for the third time, and my sister was struggling with depression. The church where we worshipped that Sunday morning was more than a little conservative, and the sermon, typical of my mother’s denomination, focused on how everyone could and should understand the Bible in precisely the same way, how all Christians should be of “one mind.” Later my mother quipped, “Yes! And we know whose mind it would be too.” She was simply recognizing, having heard many such sermons, that what the preacher was really saying was that anyone who disagreed with his particular understanding of the littlest details of the Bible, or with the particular views of the partisan group to which he belonged, was destined for the flames of hell. What I thought that morning was, “There is nothing here. There is nothing here for the sick at heart, for the desperate struggler, or for anyone who sits beside a pool of tears. Nor is there anything for anyone seized by the incalculable goodness of life who wishes to celebrate on this day.” Conservative fundamentalism is about the inconsequential and therefore simply cannot address the depth of our existence.
My second experience was, as I say, more recent. While in pastoral transition my wife and I had begun attending a parish because of its convenient location for us. Most Sundays the sermon attempted to debunk whatever lectionary readings were appointed for the day. The pastor was concerned, he said, with “making people feel welcome who don’t and can’t believe all this Christian stuff.” As I understood from my conversations with him, he was himself a Christian because he enjoyed the beauty of the Episcopal liturgy and thought Christianity generally a good way to live one’s life. One Sunday as I sat listening to the sermon, still mourning my oldest sister’s recent death, it came to me that I felt the same way I had felt years before sitting with my mother and sister in that rigidly conservative church with its simplistic understanding of life and Scripture. “There is nothing here,” I thought, “nothing for the grieving, nothing for the joyful, nothing for those seeking ultimate meaning and fulfillment.” When it came to the Lord’s Prayer we might as well have recited Hemmingway’s version: “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy nada. . . ” Liberal fundamentalism is also about the inconsequential and therefore unable to speak to the depths of human experience.
A Fundamentalism of Both Kinds
A few days later I realized how much these two experiences were alike, and that there is a fundamentalism of both the religious right and the religious left, and they each share a number of similarities. For example, fundamentalism of both types is predominantly what Douglas John Hall calls professional rather than confessional in nature. Profession is the public acknowledgement of what we think. Conservative fundamentalism replaces a living faith in Christ with rigid dogma and precise intellectual propositions about Jesus that one must profess or be dammed for all time. But liberal fundamentalism is no less adamant in its claim to be the arbiter of ultimate truth. Only someone from the “enlightened” far left can see the real truth of things. Where the conservative relies on dubious and unthinking personal interpretations of Scripture in constructing a worldview, the liberal spins metaphysics out of his or her own imagination. For the latter, assumptions are correct not because of any reasonable epistemology, or commitment to Scripture, but because that is how he or she personally thinks and feels; or would like for things to be. Conversely, confessional faith bears witness to what one has experienced and known of Christ.
Profession or Confession
The Latin confessio was originally used to designate the burial place of a confessor or martyr; that is, one who had borne witness to the truth he or she had encountered even if doing so meant torture and death. As used here we profess what we think, but confess the reality we have encountered, discovered, and, in the Jungian sense, “know” as well as believe. It seems to me that confession, honestly expressing the reality I have discovered in Christ without denigrating any other faith traditions and having a willingness to listen and learn from them, is the via media between an exclusivism so dense that not even what is good can penetrate it, and an inclusivism so porous it lacks integrity. I have an appreciation for something the editors of The Christian Century, a more theologically liberal magazine, once wrote:
Tolerance of others is a virtue, but it is a complex one. . . . Embracing the virtue of tolerance should not lead us to think religions are all the same or that all religious beliefs are compatible. Tolerance should not preclude Christians from humbly and joyfully witnessing to the truth about God revealed to them in Jesus Christ. Christians are called to proclaim this distinct truth, while affirming the kind of religious tolerance that arises from their own belief – the kind voiced by the Apostle Peter when he said, “God shows no partiality, but in every nation [ethnos/ethnei] anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him” (Acts 10:34b-35).
Honestly confessing what I have discovered on my pilgrimage, saying who I am, where I stand, and where I am going while respecting the right of every other human being to do the same is the path leading safely between adversarial professions. It is also, coincidentally, according to psychotherapists the mark of a healthy minded, self-differentiated, person.
Fear On the Right & Anxiety On the Left
A second shared characteristic of all fundamentalism is that it is fear based. Edwin Friedman, the highly respected rabbi, therapist, and pioneer in family systems theory, believed all debunking, a frequent characteristic of far-left scholars and theologians, arises out of the individual’s own internal anxiety. Those biblical scholars and theologians embracing the ideology of the far-left can be somewhat obsessive in their search for evidence that will, in their estimation, disprove the “factuality” of some part of the biblical narrative––as if the Bible, like a bank statement, must be true down to the smallest decimal point or the whole thing is false. In reality there are very few instances in life where we apply such logic. But the religious right is also afraid and obsessed with factuality. It believes that the absolute fact of every detail in the Bile must be vigorously defended––that the possibility of any error or mistake, no matter how slight or insignificant, will lead to the complete collapse of the Christian faith like a house of cards or a line of dominos. Consequently, the suggestion of any discrepancy or anomaly in the biblical text is seen as a threat to the overall trustworthiness and “factuality” of Scripture and is angrily resisted. Fundamentalism, then, is essentially a reaction to events arising out of one’s own inner emotional baggage rather than a wholesome and grateful response to the beauty, goodness and truth that has been graciously revealed to humanity. Fundamentalism is, then, not about specific beliefs, but the manner in which those beliefs are held. The via media of the open mind and heart can work as an antidote to both types of fundamentalism
The Shared Problem
The problem, then, with both sorts of fundamentalism is deeper than any particular set of beliefs. The problem is that both engage in ideological thinking; and are, therefore, subject to elements of pride and self-interest. To paraphrase John Carnell, “There is always a demagogue on hand to decide who is virtuous and who is not.” When their particular beliefs are examined John Spong and Franklin Graham seem very different, but when one looks at the way in which each holds his beliefs, they appear very similar. Years ago, Rokeach discovered in his psychological research that “closed-minded” and “open-minded people” differ precisely in this regard; that is, a closed-minded person may change his or her mind, for instance change political parties, but they will hold their new beliefs with the same dogmatism, negativity, and even hostility with which they held their old beliefs. However, the “open-minded” person holds his or her beliefs with humility, with a genuine appreciation of other ways of believing, and with the understanding that while one must make committed choices in life it is always possible that one is, to one degree or another, mistaken.
Ambiguity, Unpredictability, and the Need to Control
Fundamentalism is intensely concerned with control. Usually this arises out of a fear that if not carefully managed one’s world might careen into chaos. Consequently, God must be managed, the Spirit restrained, and Christ the Lion tamed and domesticated. The right does this by reducing Christianity to a legalistic system and formulas that God is obligated to follow. In this way the fearful ambiguities of life and its unpredictability are safely managed or removed all together. The theological left, horrified by what a deep unqualified yes to God and the Christ whom God sent might mean, find relief in denial. I recall a parish forum in which the leaders could not bring themselves to acknowledge God as Creator or Jesus Christ as Lord.
The Same But Different
I have been writing about the fundamentalism of the right and left as two ideologies in Christendom; yet it is at this point that I am forced to agree with Douglas Hall:
Those who say that Jesus is not in some special sense significant for their belief have already stepped outside the Christian faith, for Christianity is what it is through the affirmation that Jesus of Nazareth, who has been called the ‘Christ’ is actually the Christ, namely he who brings the new state of things––not a statement of Christian conservatism but of one to whom many turn for their basis of interfaith dialogue.
The right approaches the interpretation of Scripture from a rigidly literal perspective that deifies Scripture itself as totally inerrant; the left, is rigidly figurative in its understanding and sees Scripture as a misguided, mistaken, and erroneous set of documents whose only truth is in an emblematic meaning. Both views are obsessed with “factuality,” both are held with the same attitudes indicative of closed-mindedness, and both are equally one-dimensional. They are, as the saying goes, reverse sides of one coin.
There is a great illustration of what I mean in Craig Evans’ book Fabricating Jesus. Evans explores the shift of the scholar Bart Ehrman from conservative to liberal fundamentalism. Ehrman became a believer as a teenager in a conservative setting. He enrolled in the fundamentalist Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, and then from there went to Wheaton College and Graduate School, eventually earning a Ph.D. at Princeton. Ehrman held rather rigid ideas about inspiration and the inerrancy of Scripture. Eventually everything unraveled for Ehrman as a result of reading Jesus’s comment in Mark 2:25-26 stating that David, when he was in need and hungry, entered the house of God when Abiathar was High Priest. However, I Samuel 21:1-10, actually says Ahimelech was the High Priest who assisted David, and that when Saul, who was pursuing David, heard about this he murdered Ahimelec. His son, Abithar, escaped and later succeeded his father as High Priest. Because Ahimelec and not his son was actually High Priest when David and his band of warriors ate the consecrated bread, we technically have a mistake––a mistake either on the part of Jesus, or Mark, or someone who passed the story along. Ehrman says that once he admitted that mistake the floodgates opened. “For if there could be one little picayune mistake in Mark 2, maybe there could be mistakes in other places as well.” This is not the day Ehrman outgrew fundamentalism, it is the day he capitulated to it, and was consumed by it. Evans comments: “The historical reliability of the Gospels does not hinge on proof that no mistakes of any kind can be detected in them. Ehrman’s struggle with faith grows out of mistaken expectations of the nature and function of Scripture.” My point is that whether as a conservative youth or a liberal adult there is a sameness to Ehrman’s thinking and approach to Scripture that has an intense concern with a highly literal factuality as at least one of its chief characteristics.
The Existential-Expressive and The Objective-Explanatory
The work of John Knox, the twentieth century theologian, indicates at least one way the via media might free us from both types of fundamentalism. Knox believed Scripture must be understood in terms of its great myths, as well as its objective reality. In a true biblical myth, he said, there are both “existential-expressive” and “objective-explanatory” elements. Although the two cannot be separated, the “existential-expressive” is the use of imaginative language to express the deepest reality of life as we feel and live it. Resorting to highly poetic language is the best we can do in trying to express the reality of certain events and experiences. The “objective-explanatory” is “the actual objective act of God” which accounts for where the expressive narrative came from. A story, then, may contain certain imaginative elements but, nevertheless, be rooted in an objective reality that can only be described “metaphorically.” The opening chapters of Genesis are clearly in the language of poetry or myth; yet Christians believe Genesis expresses the very real fact that God is the creative source of our existence and every blessing of beauty we experience. As Knox insightfully pointed out, “there is a difference between a story that imaginatively expresses the inner meaning of a known fact, and a story that invents the fact itself.” Knox is suggestive of how the via media might be useful in synthesizing the metaphorical and objective reality of biblical events and stories––integrating spiritual practice and rigorous scholarship.
Conclusion
It seems to me that the via media offers the possibility of avoiding the pitfalls of the fundamentalism of both right and left, and in moving toward a progressive orthodoxy of intellectual honesty and spiritual depth characteristic of those times when “the mind descends into the heart.”