Some quotes on the internet regarding fundamentalism:
Mark T
a.. Fundamentalism is a force for evil in society.
b.. The fundamentalist believes that he is right. Period.
c.. Talking to a fundamentalist is like talking to a wall.
d.. Fundamentalists think their religion is based on fact rather than
faith.
e.. It is a distorted viewpoint that sees everyone else as wrong.
f.. Fundamentalists are militant, simplistic and rigid. They demand that
their faith not be questioned even by themselves.
g.. The implication is that if you're one of God's chosen, the other
fellow isn't, and that you're therefore somehow better.
Eric Fisher
NHC Home TeacherServe Divining America 20th Century Essay:
Religious Liberalism and the Modern Crisis of Faith
Grant Wacker
Duke University Divinity School
©National Humanities Center
.... the new approach to the Bible presupposed that the Scripture
could, indeed must be understood as any other ancient text, without
recourse to the supernatural explanations. Arguably the elimination of
the supernatural from the working vocabulary of biblical scholars,
emerged as the hallmark of religious liberalism and, not incidentally,
provoked fierce confrontations with religious conservatives in the
twentieth century.
Religious liberalism itself took a variety of forms.
On the far left, so to speak, stood religious naturalism. Proponents of
the latter, such as the prominent educator John Dewey, discarded all of
the supernatural elements of the Christian tradition yet urged
thoughtful citizens to nurture the ideals that the biblical heritage had
engendered such as democracy, progress, and fair play.
In the center of the spectrum stood religious modernism. These figures
unabashedly erected the canons of contemporary science and culture (or
at least the "best" of contemporary culture) as normative for Christian
theology. By their reckoning Christian teachings could be retained when,
but only when, they could be validated by recent secular thought. The
divinity schools at the University of Chicago and Harvard, and many
social science departments in prominent universities, proved centers of
modernist thinking.
Finally, an outlook commonly known as evangelical liberalism occupied
the right side of the spectrum. Advocates of this position dominated
Protestant mainline seminaries and likely shaped the thinking of a
majority of Protestant clergy through the mid twentieth century.
Evangelical liberals assumed that Christianity began in direct religious
experience of God. Experience produced doctrine, not the reverse. The
Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, longtime pastor of New York's Riverside
Church, and probably the most famous of liberal preachers, was wont to
say that Christian experience bore the same relation to theology as the
enjoyment of a flower did to the science of botany.
Given these premises, liberals reinterpreted God as an immanent presence
within history, Jesus as an ethical guide, and the Bible as a historical
record of humankind's encounter with God's love.
Many but not all religious liberals (of all types) applied these
principles to the amelioration of social wrongs. Such efforts went by
various names, including Christian Socialism, Social Christianity and,
most often, Social Gospel. The best known proponents included Ohio
pastor Washington Gladden, Rochester Seminary professor Walter
Rauschenbusch, temperance advocate Francis Willard, and perhaps
settlement house worker Jane Addams. These individuals insisted that the
historic focus upon individual salvation reflected a highly selective,
if not downright immoral, reading of the Bible. In their view the larger
meaning of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures called for structural
(which usually meant legislative and judicial) intervention in society
in order to rebalance staggering disparities of wealth, inhumane working
conditions, and the exploitation of children in factories and mines.
Though Social Gospelers remained largely oblivious to unjust treatment
of minorities and women, they helped to establish many of the principles
of justice that churches (and synagogues) have come to take for granted
in the 1990s.
Guiding Student Discussion
My experience with college undergraduates suggests that students tend to
disregard any religious form that they cannot see on the local street
corner. They can relate to the notion of a Baptist Church or a Roman
Catholic ritual, but they have a hard time appreciating something as
evanescent as an outlook that pervaded a great part of twentieth-century
life, religious or not. I have discovered no magic solutions, but I have
found that students respond well to autobiographies of thoughtful men
and women who struggled to come to terms with the challenges of
modernity. For Protestants try Edmund Gosse's haunting autobiography,
Father and Son (1907); for Catholics, Dorothy Day's The Long Loneliness
(1952); for Jews, the autobiographical novel Anzia Yezierska's Bread
Givers (1925). All highlight conflict between the old and the new
without dwelling upon the technicalities of religious thought.
Historians Debate
Unlike many topics of American religious history, students of religious
liberalism have not waged pitched battles of interpretation. They have,
however, presented markedly different perspectives on what the animal
"really was" according to their interests. The most influential study of
religious liberalism as an intellectual movement remains William R.
Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (1976). Susan
Curtis, A Consuming Faith: the Social Gospel and Modern American Culture
(1991) offers a quite different approach, focusing upon the way that
religious liberals both reflected and exploited broad cultural trends
like the quest for efficiency, expertness, corporate organization, team
spirit, and therapeutic self-help.
Grant Wacker holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and is currently
Professor of the History of Religion in America at the Duke University
Divinity School. He is the author of Augustus H. Strong and the Dilemma
of Historical Consciousness (1985) and is coeditor, with Edith Blumhofer
and Russell P. Spittler, of Pentecostal Currents in American
Protestantism (1999). He is working on two books: a monograph to be
titled Heaven Below: Pentecostals and American Culture, 1900-1925, and a
survey textbook of American religious history with Harry S. Stout and
Randall Balmer.
TeacherServe Home Page
National Humanities Center Home Page
Revised: October 2000
www.nhc.rtp.nc.us
sensi
Mark T <ma...@home.in.oz> wrote in message
news:4127e0fb$1...@dnews.tpgi.com.au...
Yeah, I kind of have a problem with this mental thing of being chosen over
others.
I even went through that *spell* myself.