Making sure that fundamentalists don't monopolize the Gospel
jonnyrashid.substack.com
Some of my posts are based on messages I offer at the Circle of Hope, Broad & Dauphin PMs, you can hear the original message here. Subscribe to the podcast here. I was talking to a friend the other day about “hills we are willing to die on.” We thought it wouldn’t be very flexible of us to have too many of those. In other words, if every single conviction we have is a deal breaker, we wondered how many people we could relate to. Christians seem to have a tendency to essentialize their faith based on personal experiences and prejudices. The pejorative term for this is fundamentalism. And for many of us our memory of fundamentalists revolves around issues like abortion and gay marriage and since many of us don’t make those the issues that are deal breakers for us, we might think we are immune from fundamentalism or essentializing our faiths. But are we in danger of a neo-fundamentalism if we over-emphasize our convictions? A new thought police? The danger in doing so is not being able to change when we need to. Our faith breaks before it bends. Some of us have written off the Scriptures altogether because they are drenched with fundamentalist indoctrination. Passages of the Bible that might even have a historic interpretation that differs from the contemporary fundamentalist one might be dismissed easily because we can’t seem to read them with a new lens. For many believers, the result is just a frustrating experience with the Bible that leads us to no longer reading it. We can’t seem to apply a new meaning to one that was so heavily propagated to us either by our families or by our media even. Even people who didn’t grow up in a conservative Christian home sometimes have such massive indoctrination from the outside world that they can’t seem to think of something new. The old is so well-cemented in our brains that we can’t break out of it.
Making sure that fundamentalists don't monopolize the Gospel
Making sure that fundamentalists don't…
Making sure that fundamentalists don't monopolize the Gospel
Some of my posts are based on messages I offer at the Circle of Hope, Broad & Dauphin PMs, you can hear the original message here. Subscribe to the podcast here. I was talking to a friend the other day about “hills we are willing to die on.” We thought it wouldn’t be very flexible of us to have too many of those. In other words, if every single conviction we have is a deal breaker, we wondered how many people we could relate to. Christians seem to have a tendency to essentialize their faith based on personal experiences and prejudices. The pejorative term for this is fundamentalism. And for many of us our memory of fundamentalists revolves around issues like abortion and gay marriage and since many of us don’t make those the issues that are deal breakers for us, we might think we are immune from fundamentalism or essentializing our faiths. But are we in danger of a neo-fundamentalism if we over-emphasize our convictions? A new thought police? The danger in doing so is not being able to change when we need to. Our faith breaks before it bends. Some of us have written off the Scriptures altogether because they are drenched with fundamentalist indoctrination. Passages of the Bible that might even have a historic interpretation that differs from the contemporary fundamentalist one might be dismissed easily because we can’t seem to read them with a new lens. For many believers, the result is just a frustrating experience with the Bible that leads us to no longer reading it. We can’t seem to apply a new meaning to one that was so heavily propagated to us either by our families or by our media even. Even people who didn’t grow up in a conservative Christian home sometimes have such massive indoctrination from the outside world that they can’t seem to think of something new. The old is so well-cemented in our brains that we can’t break out of it.