Fundamentalism is great as long as you realize it’s just the fundamentals. You don’t go out in the middle of a basketball game and start doing dribbling drills.  When you are in the game, that’s when that wise as serpents part kicks in.  You need to apply the fundamentals to every area of life, to every situation.  Far too many fundamentalists, Baptist, Bible Church people, beat up everyone else for daring to apply fundamentals to anything. This becomes a comparison of doctrinal statements, rather than a fruit bearing tree.  Going beyond the fundamentals is seen as adding to the Gospel, or becoming a liberal.  The problem is that this breeds militant ignorance.  It also takes for granted a lot of non-biblical, fads which it has absorbed from the time it was formed. In this respect it is a lot like the Book of Mormon.  The book claims that Native Americans are from the lost tribe of Israel, because that was the thinking at the time.  They put it down as timeless truth, but it is not.  DNA research by the  Mormons themselves is proving this not to be the case.  So now they just look stupid.  Fundamentalists clinging to fads from a bygone decade look very similar, and this ignorance does not glorify God, it just makes people think the church is stupid.  Far too many fundamentalists are clinging to modernism, which was never Biblical, and now not  even in style.

Billy Sunday preaches on March 15, 1915, in a temporary tabernacle erected on the site of the Central Library of the Free Library of Philadelphia. Illustration by George Bellows. Metropolitan Magazine, May 1915. Image courtesy of Boston Public Library/Creative Commons

There seems to be a whole body of recent tradition on this matter related to the David and Goliath myth.  It goes something like this: “The 12 disciples were the dumbest people on the planet at the time.  Of course Paul went to all the best schools, but he doesn’t use any of this in his work, because he said earthly wisdom was bad.  The fact that they were able to found the church and write the New Testament proves it was basically all the Holy Spirit treating them like robots.  Oh wait we are free will so it can’t be robots, well I don’t want to use high sounding reason so I will just believe this on faith.”  In this interview Dr. Tim Edwards, makes a great point that this is more like the myth of Muhammed.  Because Muham was illiterate it proves he was possessed by a demon who started the most evil destructive force on the planet ever.  Oh wait sorry, they say it proves the whole Mohammedan faith is true.  But this is not how the church works, or how the canon was formed.

The reality is much different.  According to Luke 5 Peter James and John were in business together and owned at least two boats.  According to Mark 1, James and John had servants.  If Jesus was looking for the lowest, he should have picked these servants.  Sure Jesus was gracious and loving to former prostitutes, but he didn’t make them Apostles or have them write books of the NT.  Jesus doesn’t criticize the Pharisees for book learning, or for going to school, he criticizes them for not knowing the scriptures well enough. In Luke 2 we see Jesus in the Temple studying and learning from the teachers.  Paul says that one of the benefits of being a Jew was the preservation of the Scriptures.  The written word.  That word is full of all sorts of complex poetry, wisdom, law, history, and other types of literature which was written and preserved and studied by literate men.  This was all a good thing.  That tradition continued in the New Testament,  the Holy Spirit didn’t just make everything automatic.  While the Gospel message is simple, and can be applied to any heart, applying the Gospel to every area of life is complicated.  It requires much study, and much appreciation for the study of those going before us, as they worked these things out and passed them down to us.  As they translated those scriptures for the common people, and some of them like William Tyndale were killed for doing so.  We can’t take all this for granted, our Bible didn’t just appear in our hands in English on the other side of the world.  It is the worked of 2000 years of hard work, blood, sweat and tears.  You might as well join in the mobs tearing down statues as to believe all this just happened, seriously.

I think the problem with getting this story wrong is that it gives license to the random average person to reinvent the church.  While it is possible to rely too much on human knowledge or on one’s personal intelligence, it is also possible to rely too much on one’s ignorance.  Going to the right schools doesn’t make you right, but not going to them doesn’t make you right either.  The intelligent people may be wrong about this or that, but that doesn’t make your Biblical conspiracy theory true.  It doesn’t make your idyllic 50’s Christianity true.  It doesn’t make your childhood Christianity true.  But it does guarantee that you will make the same errors as they did in the 50’s or in your home. Which is a lot like religious BO.  And if all you have is a doctrinal statement, it doesn’t mean much for the hurting world around you.  You are just a stinking pile of words.  This is why we need to study everything especially history and literature.  We can’t just say “ all I need is my Bible.”