Syncretism, the great American temptation

I'm over at Ref21 this week (again), "Reading with M'Cheyne" (see earlier posts here and here), and have decided to repost the blog entries a day later over here, since there are probably some of you who don't (or won't!) venture over to Ref21. Here's my first entry from yesterday:

“There are some Jews whom you put in charge of the province of Babylon—Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—who are disobeying Your Majesty's orders. They do not worship your god or bow down to the statue you set up.” (Dan. 3:12)

If there’s a simple gospel call to the nations that hasn’t changed in two millennia, it’s this: put away your idols and worship the true God revealed in Israel’s Messiah, Jesus. This refrain came constantly from the lips of the Apostle to the Gentiles, who enjoined people everywhere to hear the announcement of the good news, which will “turn you away from these worthless things to the living God, who made heaven, earth, sea, and all that is in them” (Acts 14:15).

Not much has changed since then. Syncretism is the great American Temptation (along with french fries, of course) among Christians as much as in the surrounding culture. But “how can God's temple come to terms with pagan idols?” asks Saint Paul. “For we are the temple of the living God!” (2 Cor. 6:16a).

It's important to note at this point that we confessionalists aren’t, historically at least, fundamentalists (I use the word in its post-Scopes Trial sense): the dangers of syncretism don’t undo the radical freedom that is ours in Christ. Christians have always been, rightly, a synchronistic bunch (that whole “being in the world” bit) while nonetheless being warned to guard against the syncretistic temptations that come along with that synchronistic life (“but not of the world”). We are in essence called to live deliberate lives in this time between the times, but we are not to do it, even if it were possible, with a separatist posture. While we need to be cautious to avoid unchristian syncretistic practices, we also need to uphold the freedom to practice wise dominion in this earth as we await our Lord’s return. This goes for eating meat offered to idols (which is nothing, if you know the one and only God created the food and you are not eating it as a symbolic gesture of worship of the idols, so the apostle in 1 Cor. 8) or practicing yoga. We can boldly, yet humbly and with gratitude toward the triune God, eat that halal gyro and then attempt to work it off with a tuladandasana or utkatasana pose.

At any rate, mixing Christianity with idolatry happens even among us confessional types. Where are those points of syncretism in our own lives? What beliefs and practices do we take for granted this very day that give accord between Christ and Belial (1 Cor. 6:15)? Pray with me and ask that the true God would root out the idolatry within our own hearts, from which will spring beliefs and practices that delight our Father in heaven.

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Where is the "Fun" in Fundamentalism?

"Grace" Christian School

I'm one of those who fall in the "[Christian] fundamentalism breeds atheism" camp. True, it may be better, at least it's more honest, to be an atheist than a functional one (i.e., a person who explicitly denies the existence of deities vs. a confessing Christian living as if God doesn't exist). But, still, my childhood experiences with fundamentalists, while standing in contrast to a few of my adult experiences with them, push me in the direction of using the moniker pejoratively. Put differently, Warfield's fundamentalism (with which I've come into contact in the past decade—the good kind) is not the kind of fundamentalism that arose during/after the modernist controversy of the early twentieth century.

I generally disdain fundamentalism, and I must confess this bias openly. It is a framework and a people with whom I feel little kinship, having experienced it firsthand in the realms of education and church in my formative years (and now only when it's unavoidable). I wasn't raised in a fundamentalist (a.k.a. "indy-fundy") home, but we lived down the street, out in the boondocks, from a private school that had a stellar reputation for teaching its kids the good stuff. Academically, this was true; spiritually, not so much. Although grace was in the name, the place hardly exhibited it. Even less so within its ecclesial life (not unlike Hawthorne's seventeenth-century Boston). After a couple of years of attending church there, my folks, thankfully, had had enough (though we stuck around the school for a year or so longer. Not surprisingly, it was the Lutherans that showed us what providing a decidedly Christian education in a healthy way looked like. I think there's some pretty interesting reasons for this, but that's another post.)

On the other hand, Meic Pearse writes in Why the Rest Hates the West: Understanding the Roots of Global Rage that "by their constant, mindlessly inaccurate resort to the 'f-word'—fundamentalism—to describe the upsurge of religious fervor in much of the non-West, Western secularists are employing a boo-word that long ago lost its original meaning and has come to signify 'more-religious-than-I-happen-to-like'—and thus to say more about the speaker than about the persons, things, or phenomena described" (p. 27). For this reason alone, I've pretty much left off using fundamentalism pejoratively, for fear of accusing myself of disdaining others because they're "more-religious-than-I-happen-to-like" and thus hold certain views and act certain ways, so I think, because of that super-religiosity. In other words, giving them such sleight of hand fails to take them seriously (and, incidentally, probably betrays a supercilious pattern in one's life). Recognizing the duty to show others dignity means treating them seriously, at least at first (i.e., giving them the benefit of the doubt).

Okay, so, John Piper called his readers some time ago to give fundamentalism the benefit of the doubt, to "feel a good breeze" from the wasteland (actually, he wrote, somewhat more nicely, "from the fevered landscape of controversy"). I don't remember how I came across this post recently, but I'm just now reading Kevin Bauder's article (warning: .pdf file). Piper pulls out the nuggets from the piece: that the best of the fundamentalism that Bauder knows comes from those who "refused to become giants," who were not trying to create or control empires; who revered the Word of God and delighted in expounding the scriptures; who fought the battles of their day, but did so without losing their gentleness and kindness.

Of course, it goes without saying that being popular has nothing to do with the desire to create one's own kingdom, however small. This is exactly the tendency I've seen and experienced during my tenure among the fundamentalists, and none of them were/are popular, being quite content to play God's unquestioned voicebox among their particular community. Bauder himself notes: "I have been watching this version of fundamentalism [the "hyper" type seen today—his word] for forty years or so. It is filled with demagogues and bullies. I want nothing to do with it" (p. 4). This goes for a good many of those raised in it, and, alas, they've chosen atheism as a higher road—and I don't blame them.

Bauder thinks there's a fundamentalism "worth saving" (p. 2–3). I demur; unless there's a wholesale realignment with the old Princetonians, to my mind, there's little hope of salvaging it. Nevertheless, I totally understand his tenacity. The idea of jumping from the fundamentalist ship and sinking into the vast evangelical sea is probably scarier than being associated with people whose demagoguery is at least easy to spot (yes, I'm biting my lip here).

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