Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
12/4 Flashback: Forked tongues

12/4 Flashback: Forked tongues

Last updated on: December 4, 2022 at 8:33 am by Fred Clark

12/4 Flashback: Forked tongues 2022-12-04T08:33:13-05:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

From December 4, 2012, “The all-or-nothing lie of fundamentalist Christianity (part 2)”

(Part 1 of this post is here.)

I attended a private, fundamentalist Christian school. I also belonged to a fundamentalist local church.

Our church was an independent, fundamentalist, Baptist church. It had once been a Northern Baptist church, then split off to join the Conservative Baptists, then split off again to join the still-more-conservative General Association of Regular Baptists before eventually splitting off from the GARB to go it alone.

But our independent, fundamentalist and Baptist church should not be confused with an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church, which is a very specific, and quite different, brand of fundamentalism.

Denominations represented by the students at Timothy Christian School — my fundamentalist alma mater.

There are many such different brands of fundamentalism. You’ve got your Calvinist fundies and your Arminian fundies, your premillennial dispensationalist fundies and your postmillennial dominionist fundies, your raucous holy rollers and your somber frozen chosen.

What all these groups have in common is that they all believe they have unambiguous access to absolute truth through the literal reading of the inerrant, infallible Bible.

I’ve strung together a bunch of adjectives there, but each is important for understanding the all-or-nothing, package-deal aspect of fundamentalist Christianity. The belief that the Bible is the “inerrant” and “infallible” word of God means that every word of it is true, without error, and thus it stands as the ultimate arbiter of absolute truth. The belief that this absolute truth should be read literally entails that it is accessible to us, which means it cannot leave room for ambiguity and honest disagreement between two well-intentioned, Spirit-guided readers.

So while the absolute truth of the Bible must obviously be defended against worldly enemies such as liberals, modernists and secular humanists, it’s even more important that this absolute truth be defended against other fundamentalists who disagree on any point of doctrine, however seemingly minor. We worldly types are a favorite bogeyman for fundies, but “the world” — a category just as comprehensive as it sounds — cannot pose an existential threat to the core of fundamentalist identity. Other fundamentalists can.

“The world” is wrong, but our errors reinforce fundie identity and fundie epistemology. We are wrong because we reject the absolute truth of the literal reading of the inerrant, etc., Bible. Those other fundamentalists, however, claim to accept the same epistemology, and that threatens to undermine the whole conceit, because if it is indeed true that the Bible provides us unambiguous access to God’s absolute truth, then all fundamentalists ought to believe exactly the same things.*

This is why if you go to a pre-Tribulation premillennial dispensationalist Bible prophecy seminar, you won’t hear speakers wasting their breath condemning historical or liberationist readings of the book of Revelation. They focus instead on the graver, existential danger posed by alternative fundamentalist readings, attacking the post-tribbers and mid-tribbers who distort God’s absolute truth even though they ought to know better.

That’s related, I think, to what Freud called the “narcissism of small differences,” but it makes a lot of sense from the fundies’ point of view. The belief that an inerrant Bible provides us access to absolute truth cannot be reconciled with the existence of competing fundamentalists who disagree on even the most esoteric points. Those groups can be attacked or avoided, but not accepted and accommodated. There’s no room for “let’s all agree to disagree.”

That helps to explain why there is such a multiplicity of fundamentalist denominations. And also why they tend to be so small.

That smallness poses a big challenge for anyone trying to run a fundamentalist school. A functional school needs an adequate number of students and staff. Huge fundie mega-churches, like the sordid Hyles-Anderson creep-show in Indiana, are big enough to run their own schools, staffed and attended only by uniform members of their own churches. But most fundamentalist churches are nowhere near big enough to do that. For most fundie churches, having a fundie school for your kids means having to collaborate and co-operate with other churches — including with other churches that may not agree with yours on every detail of doctrine.

The website for my alma mater, Timothy Christian School, says that its students come from 150 different churches in 70 different towns. And as that pie-graph up above shows, those churches represent quite a diversity of religious traditions and perspectives.

When I was a student at TCS, I had many classmates and teachers who were members of Pentecostal and Assemblies of God churches. Those churches were just as fundamentalist as my own, and our churches were fully in agreement on many points of fundie doctrine — young-earth creationism, Rapture prophecy, inerrantism, literalism, KJV-onlyism, etc. (This was the late 1970s and early ’80s, so anti-abortionism hadn’t yet arisen to eclipse all of those as the pre-eminent identifier.)

But those Pentecostal and AofG churches also taught the charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit, including a big emphasis on speaking in tongues, which they taught was the sign of the baptism in the Spirit and a necessary mark for any true Christian.

At my independent, fundamentalist Baptist church, speaking in tongues was forbidden. It was seen as, at best, a heresy, and at worst as evidence of demonic possession. Anything even slightly charismatic-seeming was frowned on at my church. I remember once someone raised their hands above their head during worship. Once.

One life-long member of our church graduated from Bible College and then went off to the Urbana missions conference where he went forward and committed his life to full-time Christian service as a missionary. Our church was very big on missionaries, providing financial support for dozens of them through our local mission committee. From a very young age, we were taught that full-time Christian service as a missionary was the highest calling for any Christian.

But it turns out that this guy from our church had signed up with a fundamentalist mission agency that our mission committee had come to regard with suspicion. The head of the agency, apparently, had been asked in an interview about speaking in tongues. He condemned the practice and said he had never done it himself, but he also said that he supposed, maybe, it might not be too grievous a sin if someone were to do it privately as part of their own personal prayer and devotions. This was regarded as an unacceptably lenient stance toward speaking in tongues, and so our mission committee denied the request for support from our own home-grown missionary to-be.

The point here is that the form of fundamentalism taught by our church was utterly incompatible with the form of fundamentalism taught by some of my classmates’ and teachers’ churches. Our church taught that they were not legitimate Christians, and their church taught that we were not legitimate Christians. Both sides took this disagreement very seriously, with the denial/acceptance of speaking in tongues regarded as a theological disaster equivalent to embracing evolutionary science or textual criticism. Each side regarded the other as violating the all-or-nothing package-deal of fundamentalist Christianity.

And yet there we all were at Timothy Christian School. We were studying together, praying together and taking turns sharing our personal testimonies in chapel together. We were agreeing to disagree, respecting one another despite our differences. We’d have shuddered to hear the word, but our practice was downright ecumenical.

We couldn’t both be right. We might both be wrong. We might both be partly right and partly wrong. And those weren’t supposed to be possibilities for people with direct access to the infallible word of God.

Our very presence there together forced us to acknowledge our difference of opinion. And that, in turn, forced us to acknowledge that such diversity of opinion seemed inevitable even among those of us committed to a literal reading of the inerrant, infallible Bible.

In other words it forced us to accept, at least implicitly, that unambiguous direct access to absolute truth might not be quite as accessible as we liked to pretend. And just like that, there goes the whole fundie epistemological construct and all the all-or-nothing, package-deal claims that go with it.

I could not have articulated any of that at the time, when I was still a student there at Timothy. But looking back, much later, I came to see this as a saving grace. It spared me from the intense crisis of faith I might otherwise have experienced when many of the ingredients of the package-deal I had been taught were destroyed in their collision with reality. The truths I had learned had been chained together with a ludicrous bundle of lies — young-earth creationism, PMD “prophecy,” etc. — but the chains did not hold because I had already come to see that the chains were not real.

Our teachers at Timothy Christian told us that our faith was an all-or-nothing package deal, but the diversity of traditions and theologies there at the school — as narrow as such diversity may have been — showed us otherwise. That provided us an advantage over the home-schoolers and other fundie kids who were schooled in more denominationally homogenous settings. Those kids were being set up for a crisis of faith.

We were too, but we were also — accidentally and inadvertently — being prepared to deal with it.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* This isn’t to say that fundamentalists think that reading the Bible requires no interpretation at all. They acknowledge, at least nominally, that some parts of their doctrine are based on less-than surface-level readings of passages they admit can be confusing. So even a literal, common-sense approach to reading the Bible, they concede, may require what they like to call “rightly dividing the word of truth.”

But just as fundamentalists insist that the Holy Spirit guided every word of the Bible’s composition to guarantee its inerrancy, and — as many, if not all, fundies believe — that the Holy Spirit watched over every word of the Bible’s translation, to ensure the inerrancy of our English King James Version, so too they believe that the Holy Spirit will guide the faithful reader to ensure that reader is rightly dividing the word of truth. Inerrancy is not simply a claim about the nature of the Bible, but also a claim about our access to it — our ability to read the inerrant Bible inerrantly.

This framework ups the ante on any disagreement over the meaning of the Bible. If Bob and Jack disagree, then one of them must not be obeying the guidance of the Holy Spirit. And since Bob knows in his heart that he is a well-intentioned, real, true Christian who is genuinely seeking the Spirit’s guidance, that must mean that Jack is not. And Jack is assuming the same thing about Bob. It tends to get ugly from there.

Uncategorized

Previous Post

December 3, 2022

12/3 Flashback: Ever ever on

Next Post

December 5, 2022 12/5 Flashback: Born that way

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category class warfare evangelicals Iraq Left Behind Mammon music Uncategorized

Select a Month November 2026 October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Which prophet challenged the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Elisha Jonah Isaiah Elijah