Thursday, April 06, 2006
Bishop John Shelby Spong on Fundamentalists vs. Evangelicals
This is a letter from Bishop John Shelby Spong's weekly e-letter. In it, he addresses a question from a reader on the similarities and differences between Fundamentalist Christiantiy and Evangelical Christianity.
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Pat Clark from Anniston, Alabama writes:
"I'm not sure of the difference between Fundamentalists and Evangelicals. Are they the same or different in political activism and social concerns? I think of Albert Mohler as a fundamentalist because he is so narrow, while Tony Campolo and Jim Wallis call themselves evangelicals and there is a world of difference between them and Mohler. Campolo and Wallis seem to concentrate on living by the teaching of Jesus, rather than on theology."
Dear Pat,
It would be better if you would ask a fundamentalist and an evangelical to draw this distinction. You are correct between Albert Mohler who heads the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville and Jim Wallis, the editor of Sojourners Magazine, there is a great gulf. Yet they would overlap in places.
Neither evangelicals nor fundamentalists have yet discovered the critical biblical scholarship that has graced the western world for at least the last 200 years. When I last was on a television program with Albert Mohler, it was painfully obvious that he was not in touch with any of the contemporary biblical scholarship of the past century. Both camps seem to me to operate with pre-modern images of the universe as well as God. Evangelicals and fundamentalists like to call themselves conservative Christians, as if there is something called conservative or liberal scholarship. There isn't. There is just competent and incompetent scholarship. To call ignorance 'conservative' is a clever ploy, since conservatism is a legitimate political perspective, but that word does not translate well into religious categories. My sense is that the difference between those who call themselves "conservative" Christians and those they call "liberal" Christians is more about being open or closed to ongoing truth than it is about anything else. J. B. Phillips once wrote a book entitled, "Your God is Too Small." That is the peril into which I fear both evangelicals and fundamentalists fall. Deep down I find that almost every person seeks security in some form of literalism or unchanging certainty, both in religion and politics. I find little difference between those politicians who talk about 'strict construction of the constitution' and those preachers who talk about the Bible as 'the inerrant word of God.' Perhaps it is fair to say that evangelicals draw the line at what must be viewed literally a tiny bit more loosely than do fundamentalists. The difference, however, is very, very small. For example some people are literal about Adam and Eve; some about the Virgin Birth; and some about the physical Resurrection. I do not believe that any prepositional statement about God can be literally true. I think people should take the Bible seriously but never literally. Literalism is finally and always idolatry. Someday, all Christians will recognize that.
-- John Shelby Spong
