Moving away from a fundamentalist, hyper-literalist, certainty driven, black and white, Christian mindset
Wednesday, August 31st, 2011There is no question that I used to be a very: black and white, fundamentalist, hyper-literalist, certainty driven, type Christian.
In view of this, I found some of the quotations featured on the BioLogos website very insightful and true, especially given my own experiences:
Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne: “In our contemporary society, people want black and white answers. They want absolute certainty about things. Fundamentalisms, whether the fundamentalism of atheism or fundamentalism of creationism, does offer you the prospect—I think it is a false prospect—of certainty on those terms.”
Dr. Peter Enns: “And you don’t handle ambiguity very well; you need crystal clarity on things. That invites a hyper-literalist mentality that I think has been sort of a partner of Protestant Christianity, particularly in the west in America.
Rabbi Steve Cohen: “The impulse to try to reduce the Scripture to a single meaning comes out of a discomfort with complexity.”
Dr. Kerry Fulcher: “Boiling complexity down to something we can hold on to—we by default, I think, do this unconsciously. We can’t just have everything being chaotic and complex. We have to generalize and bring things down, and I think sometimes that what we fail to recognize is that we have done that…we have generalized from the complex to get something that we can then hold on to, and then we think that that is an absolute —‘it is that way; it has to be that way’—not recognizing that we have generalized to bring it down to that way.”
Dr. Peter Enns: “We want this sense of coherence where our lives make some sense and we are all after that in different kinds of ways, and we use our faith sometimes to make those things happen.”
Dr. Kerry Fulcher: “It leads to the assumptions that everyone thinks this way, and there are these simple answers to things, and we have always thought this way, and any thought that might move away or question some of those things, you know, we can tag it as liberal or tag it as atheistic. It kind of sets up a culture of warfare, if you will.”
Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne: “That sort of fundamentalism is a very brittle position—the slightest crack and the whole thing shatters.”
Dr. Ard Louis: “Really what happens is that people have fear. They are afraid that if they let go of this really tight way of looking at things, then the only alternative is going to be irrationality and lack of control, but that is not true. I think that actually you can let go of this really tight hold, and step forward into richer things, and think about things, and the alternative isn’t just quicksand where you disappear.”
Dr. Chris Tilling: “The Christian gospel does want to give us a sense of confidence in the truth, and that is a very legitimate yearning and desire. But, the earliest Christian writers have always linked that with the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which is ultimately a faith statement—it is a truth bound to belief, believing that Jesus rose from the dead—rather than from a scientific description of a certain reality that we can objectify. Then, that becomes not a matter of faith and commitment in truth, but of certainty.”
Rabbi Steve Cohen: “Certainty is where we end up when we lose faith because we are too scared of what we think we know being wrong, and to me, that is the ultimate, that is death. The people here get sick of me saying this, but you haven’t heard me say it so I will say it again, but I say over and over again that I will always prefer a good question to a good answer because a good answer stops the conversation, but a good question gets us talking— that, to me, is a stance of faith.”
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