Proud Fundamentalist
Lots of people claim to be fundamentalists. Far more are labeled “fundamentalist” by media outlets or Christian leaders who wish to distance themselves from more traditional—or just more feisty—brethren. Those who want to use “fundamentalist” in a historic sense can only avoid confusion by using the term with qualifiers and explanations—in other words, by including context.
So when I say, “I am a proud fundamentalist,” I mean “fundamentalist” in the historic sense. Two statements from one of SharperIron’s “About” pages sum up the concept:
In a religious sense, the term “fundamentalist” was first used in 1922 in reference to a group of Baptists who were seeking to establish doctrinal limits in the Northern Baptist Convention. Their goal was to uphold the Bible and rid the convention of the philosophy of Modernism, which denied the infallibility of Scripture, rejected miracles, and gutted the Christian faith of defining principles such as the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ. In short, the fundamentalists thought the Northern Baptist Convention ought to at least be genuinely Christian.
…
At SharperIron we’re still clinging to the term in its historic sense. Here, a fundamentalist is someone who believes in the foundational principles of the Christian faith and also believes in separation from apostasy. Opinions vary as to the degree of separation, the process and the methods. But we are committed to the principle.
Proud?
The term “proud” needs clarifying as well. If your initial reaction to “proud fundamentalist” is something akin to “Last time I checked, pride was sin,” your response is a healthy one. But our view of pride needs some nuance. In English, we use the term “pride” in a positive sense as well as a negative sense. Negatively, we use the word for various forms of thinking of ourselves “more highly than [we] ought to think” (Rom. 12:3). In this sense, pride is the opposite of humility.
But we also use “pride” to refer to a kind of moral confidence and eagerness to identify, as in “I’m proud to be a part of this team,” or “I’m proud of what I did,” or “the proud parents of beautiful baby girl.” In this sense, pride is the opposite of shame. Paul’s “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ” might well be paraphrased as, “I am proud of the gospel of Christ.”
With that as context, I am proud to be a fundamentalist.
Another clarification
At the risk of giving the statement the “death of a thousand qualifications,” one more is needful. It isn’t really a qualification, though. It’s a bit of heightened precision by way of careful reasoning.
In most of everyday life we understand how groups work. We understand that if two entities are in the same group, each is not necessarily in all the same groups as the other. In a bowl of apples, all are in the group “apples,” but only some are in the group “green apples” or “rotten apples.” The red and ripe apple is not less of an apple for failing to be green or rotten. Greeness and rottenness are not components of appleness.
My dog, Sweetheart, is in a group called dogs. To her chagrin (don’t ask how I know) she shares that group with the strays that wander the neighborhood. But Sweetheart behaves differently from the strays. She doesn’t produce patches of dead grass in people’s front yards or raid the garbage cans in strangers’ garages or breed at random. (Whether she would do all of these if she could is beside the point!) It would be silly to reason, “Sweetheart is a dog; strays are dogs; therefore Sweetheart is a stray.” It would be even more absurd to surmise, “Sweetheart is a dog; strays are dogs; being a dog means being a stray.”
It’s absurd because strayness is a distinct quality from dogness. She is no less of a dog for staying home, raiding only her own trash cans and never breeding at all. Would anyone suggest she is only 75% dog?
But when we talk about the group “fundamentalists,” many seem to slip into a group logic fog of some sort—a strange world in which apples should become oranges because so many apples are rotten, and dogs should become cats because so many dogs are strays. Some enter an even weirder world where appleness is the same thing as rottenness and dogness is the same thing as strayness.
In the world I live in, even if every dog but Sweetheart became a stray, she should hold her head high and be proud to be a dog.
With that as context, I’ll say it again: I am a proud fundamentalist.
Some loose ends
The accusation occasionally surfaces on the Web (and perhaps in the real world) that SharperIron is always critical of fundamentalism and never publishes anything completely positive about it.
To these—and any inclined to believe them—please note that this essay is 100% positive about fundamentalism (as are this one and this one). I could post links to literally hundreds of others that are 0% critical of fundamentalism.
On the whole, I hope SharperIron is down on rotten apples and strays. On the whole, we are certainly not critical of apples and dogs. The truth of this is not hard to see. If the reasoning involved was rocket science, you wouldn’t be hearing it from me! But this isn’t even junior chemistry.
I am a proud fundamentalist.
Aaron Blumer Bio
Aaron Blumer, SharperIron’s second publisher, is a Michigan native and graduate of Bob Jones University (Greenville, SC) and Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Plymouth, MN). He and his family live in a small town in western Wisconsin, not far from where he pastored Grace Baptist Church for thirteen years. He is employed in customer service for UnitedHealth Group and teaches high school rhetoric (and sometimes logic and government) at Baldwin Christian School.
- 7 views
I mentioned this years ago when I did the Type A, B, C thing. I’ve never been able to understand how it’s healthy to have the kind of pride or loyalty in a specific group or subgroup of men/ministries to the exclusion of other groups who are equally solid and or faithful. I suppose one could say “proud” in the sense of gratitude. I’m good with gratitude….especially with those that have sowed the Word and the work of Christ into our lives, souls and families. Amen on that! As I tried to communicate imperfectly five years ago, I would just be a bit more careful with the word, “pride” or even “loyal.” I don’t see anywhere in the Scriptures that indicate it’s right to give a sense of blind or automatic loyalty to a specific group of Christ’s body over/against another part of Christ’ body (unless you want to say one should have a higher degree of loyalty to one’s pastor or church vis-a-vis the church universal….which I suppose one might be able to argue simply on pragmatic grounds, such as the placement of gifts in a local, etc….). Loyalty in that sense seems to be reserved for King Jesus and those walking with Him (in or out of said group).
Without throwing under the bus our self-descript labels of fund, evang, dispens, reformed, etc…..which no doubt can serve a reasonable purpose - Why can’t we be grateful for obedience in all parts of the body? Why can’t we be loyal to Jesus and His followers wherever and whomever they are? Also….My heritage is Type A fundamentalism. I’m taking that and charting a Type B fundamentalist kind of a course (for reasons I’ve talked on and on and on and on…..and I’m trying to simply move on these days). I’m good with being grateful for the good of my heritage as long as we can be honest where we’ve failed as a group, groups, movement, movements. Often “loyalty” means we praise the good parts and ignore or downplay failure. While I can appreciate a portion of that (love covers a multitude of sins), it aides in my being uncomfortable with the term “loyal.”
Just a short thought from the shadows of the cacti here in the desert sands!
As always……you know…….”Straight Ahead!”
jt
Dr. Joel Tetreau serves as Senior Pastor, Southeast Valley Bible Church (sevbc.org); Regional Coordinator for IBL West (iblministry.com), Board Member & friend for several different ministries;
[Rob Fall] I find it puzzling that men in the FBF and especially the GARBC are not included in the list above. The FBF and the GARBC are the seminal organizations at least for Fundamental Baptists. The late B. Myron Cedarholm was the CBA’s executive secretary. The FBF became a stand alone organization in the 60’s after disagreements with the direction of the CBA.Hi Rob,
You are correct. The GARBC was one of the first groups to withdraw from the NBC. Later the Conservative Baptists withdrew. The CBs are certainly considered conservative evangelicals today. My relatives served as missionaries with them and they were later shunned and labeled by a relative at NIU. Now that his own kids are “conservative evangelicals” his tune is apparently changing (Ware invited to teach, Hollind invited to speak). Before this, however, we were labeled new evangelicals. Our only sin was a desire to fellowship with other believers across party lines. Apparently, our sin was that we were right before they were right.
I would imagine that even the GARBC is considered a conservative evangelical denomination.
The FBF became a stand alone organization in the 60’s after disagreements with the direction of the CBA.This is neither the time or place to go into the details. Suffice to say, men like Cedarholm, Weeks, and Hollowood had what they viewed as good and sufficient reasons for their actions.
Hoping to shed more light than heat..
[RPittman] Hey Aaron! I just gotta ask. Is that your beagle in the picture or is it stock photo? Beautiful dog! Now, that’s my kind of dog!No, my dog is actually a black lab mix. She just didn’t look proud enough in any my existing photos and I didn’t have time to shoot a new one.
Had a tri color collie years ago … it would have been really easy to get photos of her looking “proud.” She had a regal bearing. But the lab… she either looks playful, affectionate or sleepy. That’s pretty much her repertoire.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
That period is especially interesting to me from a history of fundamentalism standpoint for many reasons. You better understand the phenomenon of the fund. movement if you understand the milieu it grew out of.
Both another reason it’s interesting is that can help us understand our present times better. A thorough study of that era could probably help answer the question of what today’s “not quite fundamentalists but noticeably more conservative than average” types are and where they came from. It can also help us understand what the fund. movement is becoming as it dissolves back into whatever it’s dissolving into.
All that to say that I’m not sure it matters now whether the “CEs” are descendent from fundamentalism or if they are descendent from what fundamentalism descended from. These groups are all thoroughly cross-pollinated by now and had the same great grandaddies to begin with.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B_5A…] Being Gay (or, Why I Don’t Call Myself a Fundamentalist)
I haven’t written about the term “fundamentalist” or offered any reasons to identify with it. Rather, I’ve written about the phenomenon and why I am proud to identify with that.
It doesn’t matter what word you use for it as long as those you are talking to know what you mean. For quite a few years now I have only used the term under two conditions:
1. Those reading/hearing understand the meaning I intend
2. I have an opportunity to define the term as context before/while using it
If those conditions are met, it doesn’t matter at all what the actual word is. It’s like one of those algebra problems that starts out with X=12. You could use any number of letters and work the problem out just as well…. fundamentalism=12, A=12, (x-y)/j=12. All the same.
Terms are handles for concepts and they work fine as long as there is mutual understanding.
It’s a bit like sailing… if I hadn’t just pulled the word at random from a glossary of nautical terms, I’d have no idea what a “leech” is, and would probably confuse it with a blood sucking parasite. But on a sail boat with a well trained crew, I could use the term and be confident that they all know it’s “the trailing edge of a sail. In the case of a symmetric spinnaker, the side opposite the spinnaker pole.”
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
[Todd Mitchell] What a breath of fresh air, Aaron! Sailing is infinitely more interesting to me than figuring out who is a Fundamentalist and who’s not.Hmm…. I’m pretty sure you don’t mean that it doesn’t matter who holds to the fundamentals of the faith and believes in separation from apostasy. Though I guess in general it only matters when you have an opportunity to relate in some way to that person.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
It’s a bit like a recent discussion we had here (and several before it) about what “hypercalvinism,” “calvinism” and “other” mean. I suggested that since everybody was stuck in a loop getting bothered about what others were labeling them, we just chuck the terms and use the definitions.
I am a proud believer in the fundamentals of the faith who also believes in separation from apostasy.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
In any case, I’m not claiming a full blown theory of language here.
Just observing how it works when we try to write or speak to eachother.
(Critics say that no two people ever share the identical understanding of a term. I’m not interested in speculating about that. We aim to be as well understood as possible…. but something less than 100% correspondence is just about always close enough.)
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Discussion