From sacred acts of worship to fundamentalism. Where did we go wrong?
In an issue of The Christian Century magazine a number of years ago, Quaker author Parker J. Palmer warns about putting too much trust, or at least the wrong kind of trust, in church doctrines and customs. “All of our propositions and practices,” he reminds us, “are earthen vessels. All of them are made by human beings of common clay to hold whatever we think we’ve found in our soul-deep quest for the sacred or in its quest for us.”
“If our containers prove too crimped and cramped to hold the treasure well, if they domesticate the sacred and keep us from having a live encounter with it - or if they prove so twisted and deformed that they defile rather than honor the treasure they were intended to hold - then our containers must be smashed and discarded so we can create a larger and more life-giving vessel in which to hold the treasure.”
Iconoclasm can be a good thing
“Doing that is called iconoclasm,” Palmer explains. Then he says something that I wish all Christians would take to heart: That iconoclasm sometimes needs to be done and that it is a good thing when it is done at those times. “Failing to do that,” he continues, “is called idolatry, which is always a bad thing. So even in the church, we need to commit conceptual suicide again and again - if we are serious about the vastness of the treasure in comparison to our flawed and finite words.”
“When people of any religion insist that the treasure cannot be carried except in their earthen vessels,” Parker Palmer observes, “they get into serious trouble - with themselves, with others, with the world and, I suspect, with God… Why do we do it? Because we are afraid. And what we are afraid of more than anything else, I think, is what might happen to us - what demands might be made on our lives - if we set the sacred loose, free it from domestication, and release it back into the wild.”
An illusion that dies hard
“Of course, we can never imprison the sacred, “ Palmer reminds us. “But the illusion that we can dies hard.” The challenge, he finds, is to hold onto the paradox of needing the vessels but needing to stay detached from them. “The vessels deserve our respect,” he assures us, “because they enable us to preserve the treasure over time and pass it back and forth among us. But if we become attached to the vessel in ways that obscure the treasure, we must discard the vessel and create one that reveals more than it conceals.”
“If we fail or refuse to do that, we are failing to respect the treasure, which is not our possession to have and to hold; it is the love and the power that has and holds us. To forget that fact or defy it is the ultimate disrespect, and it leads not to life but to death, for individuals, for religious communities, and for the world.”
Vessels that need replacing
Many of today’s Christians and adherents of other major world religions seem to be failing to respect the treasure by promoting fundamentalist interpretations of their religions. These interpretations are preserving some vessels that urgently need to be replaced with others, in order to reveal the religions’ treasures more clearly and to stop doing harm.
Christian fundamentalism is recent
The term fundamentalism, as it is currently used, derives not from early Christianity but rather from a series of twelve booklets published between 1909 and 1915. By the courtesy of two oil millionaires in the U.S., three million of these booklets were distributed free to every minister and Sunday School superintendent in America. They were intended to counter the spread of liberal religious thought in the churches of America, which the booklets’ authors and publishers said were undermining what they claimed were eternal Christian truths - “the fundamentals.”
The booklets reaffirmed what their writers considered the fundamental and unchangeable doctrines of Christianity; the infallibility of the Bible, the deity of Christ, the Virgin Birth, miracles, and bodily resurrection of Jesus, and the substitutionary atonement theory that says the sinless Jesus was killed as a substitute for sinful humans, saving them from going to the hell they deserve. But actually, the booklets expounded a rather narrow form of Protestantism, which was far from constituting the beliefs common to all Christians.
A church divided into three groups
Kirsopp Lake, an internationally known New Testament scholar in the early 20th Century, wrote that the denominational divisions of the church had become obsolete. He saw the real divisions cutting across denominations, dividing them into three groups:
Fundamentalists, who Lake saw as strong in conviction but spiritually arrogant and intellectually ignorant.
Experimentalists or Radicals, who were willing to shed all of the inherited and supposedly unchangeable dogmas in order to explore fresh expressions of Christian faith that they thought would be more relevant to the new cultural and intellectual climate.
Institutionalists, or Liberals, who constituted the main body of the church and opted for a middle way, clinging to a watered-down version of the traditional dogmas.
A church shrinking from Left to Right
Then Kirsopp Lake made a striking prophecy. “The fundamentalists will eventually triumph,” he predicted. “They will drive the Experimentalists out of the churches and then absorb the Institutionalists, who, under pressure, will become more orthodox… The church will shrink from left to right.”
This prediction generally describes the state of the mainline churches today. It is the liberal wing of the mainline churches which finds itself in the minority. This is because many of the liberals have been disengaging themselves from the institutional church since it showed so little sign of changing, leaving the conservatives in the majority.