Keeping Our Balance

Wisdom is the principal thing, God tells us in Proverbs 4:7. Principal means number one. Numero uno. The most important quality a person can develop. (Yes, more so even than faith, hope, and love - all of those are guided by wisdom and without wisdom will swifty go astray.)

But what does Godly wisdom look like? A high IQ? Lots of post-grad degrees?

"But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace." (James 3:17-18) There's God's answer: real wisdom is first pure, then peaceable.

Fundamentalists have latched onto the first of those characteristics of godly wisdom. That's why I'm a fundamentalist - purity of doctrine and life is essential. That comes first. Any peace we have must be a peace in purity. Any unity must be a unity of agreement with truth, not an agreement to ignore truth.

Time and again the Scriptures tell us to separate from both wrong doctrine and wrong behavior. The refusal of the church at large to obey our Lord's commands about separating from those who preach a false gospel or live like the unsaved is one of the great blemishes upon the cause of Christ in our age.

Wait, the Bible says we should refuse to associate with people who live in blatant sin but call themselves Christians? "But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such a one no not to eat." (I Corinthians 5:11)

But what about working together with unsaved people for good causes? "Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you, and will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty." (II Corinthians 6:14-18)

But what about people who call themselves Christians, but believe that salvation works differently than what the Bible says - surely we can associate with them, even if we don't agree with them, so long as there is some benefit to it? "As we said before, so say I now again, if any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed." (Galatians 1:9) "Now I beseech you, brethren, mark them which cause divisions and offenses contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned; and avoid them." (Romans 16:17)

The wisdom that is from above is first pure - there can be no peace between the true gospel of Jesus Christ and any false gospel. There can be no peace between the righteousness of Christ and the filthiness of sin. The followers of righteousness in Christ ought not to fellowship with the followers of a different gospel or of unrighteousness, no matter whether the people call themselves Christians or not.

Different people draw the line in different places, but a line must be drawn, and that line must not be drawn short of salvation by faith in Jesus Christ - otherwise, we disobey God, arrogantly thinking our wisdom is superior to His.

But there is a second characteristic of true wisdom.

In this characteristic, many who call themselves Fundamentalists have failed miserably. Once purity is assured, peaceableness should be the next concern. Even in our purity, we ought to seek peace. The point of all that separation is not to inflict harm on those we separate from, nor is it to assert that we are better than they in ourselves - it is to restore the erring brother to right living and to bring the person who has misplaced faith to genuine salvation in Jesus Christ.

While many Fundamentalists point at the blatant disobedience of many evangelicals (particularly the so-called "New Evangelicals") to the commands for separation and purity, I fear that we have often just as blatantly disobeyed plain commands of Scripture. "And the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient, in meekness instructing those that oppose themsleves; if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth." (II Timothy 2:24-25)

We have ignored for ourselves the warning that only by pride comes contention. We have excused our lack of gentleness with proclamations of purity. We have attacked our brothers instead of lifting them up. We have assaulted the people most in need of help. We have become the brawlers and strikers that pastors are forbidden to be. We insult, though Jesus condemned it. We act in anger, though we were told to put all anger and wrath away from ourselves. And in doing these things, we neglect godly wisdom. We have refused to seek peace, instead choosing to disobey our Lord and embrace conflict.

Many Fundamentalists find smaller and smaller things to argue, fight, and separate over. We went from separating over the fundamentals of the faith to separating over any major doctrine to separating over any doctrine clearly taught in Scripture to now separating over human interpretations and applications of doctrines taught in Scripture. In our prideful pursuit of purity, we have lost our balance. (Yes, I suspect that much of this is rooted in pride, because only by pride comes contention, and only through pride does it seem likely that men who know so much of Scripture would so plainly disobey the commands to be gentle and seek peace.) Too many no longer care about being peaceable.

Many Fundamentalists are bold speakers of truth. We need that. But we need to remember to speak the truth in love.

We cannot compromise our purity of doctrine or life - to do so would be to disobey our Lord. But we need to remember in our pursuit of purity to also seek peace and to be gentle. It can be a difficult balance to keep. But the wisdom that is from above has precisely that balance.

Why I Don't Believe in Religion

I don't believe in religion. Yes, I'm a Fundamentalist. But, no, I still don't think much of religion, for the most part. I know of only one place in the whole Bible where the term "religion" is used positively, and it has nothing to do with how a person gets to God or has a home in heaven or receives eternal life.

Why would I be generally opposed to religion? Because religion, at its core, gets the most important thing wrong. Religion is man's efforts to please God. It's usually all wrapped up in what you do and how you do it. Often it brings in rituals and rites, observances and sacrifice. It's usually rooted in morality, and it often has some fine things to say about the duty of man. But when you come right down to it, religion is man trying to make himself good enough to please God. Or it is man trying to find the right levers to pull to make God happy enough to accept him. It is man trying to work his way to God.

That's backwards. Man can't ever, on his own, be good enough to please God. Romans 1-3 systematically proves that no one, not even the most religious, is good enough to please God through his works. And the clincher is that truly, none of us seek after God. Lots of people call themselves seekers - but they are usually trying to find their own way to God, to blaze a path of their own devising.

Religion has it all wrong. Man can't work his way to God. God came to man.

Religion has it backwards. Men don't seek until they find God. God isn't lost, needing us to find Him. WE are lost, needing Him to find us. Jesus Christ came to this world to seek and to save that which was lost.

I don't really have a religion. I have a relationship with God, based on the work of Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for me. I'm not some poor searcher standing at the door of heaven, frantically pulling at levers on a cosmic board, hoping to find the combination that makes God happy and convinces Him to let me in. I've already been brought into the household of the King. It wasn't because of anything I did or any good that I am. It was all because of what He did. He sought me and He saved me. All I did was believe in Him to receive that gift of salvation.

So don't call me religious, please. I'm trying to please God, sure, but it's not so that He'll let me in. Instead, call me a child of God, trying to please Him because I am in.

"Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us."

What Is a Christian Fundamentalist?

In order to address what I mean when I call myself a Fundamentalist, I'm going to have to take a little time off from my busy schedule of practicing my anti-Obama chants, working on my AK-47 marksmanship, and developing bombs. That makes me mad enough to blow something up.

Oh, wait. I don't mess much with political stuff (especially in my role as a pastor), I don't own an assault rifle, and I've never built a bomb. (Well, that egg-drop project back in high school might have come close... but nobody got hurt, aside from the smell. The fire wasn't really all THAT big.)

Despite the impressions you may have gotten from media outlets (which can rarely be troubled to make careful distinctions - it's hard to clarify who really is what in a 600-word article or 2-minute television news report), Christian Fundamentalists have virtually nothing in common with the Islamic Fundamentalists or Hindu Fundamentalists who have done such violence recently.

The reason the media can apply the term "fundamentalist" to all of us is that we all take what we believe seriously, and we're deeply attached to core tenets of our faith. But our faiths are radically different, and that's what gets missed in the popular image. I don't know of a single self-professed or accepted-by-the-community Christian Fundamentalist who has committed any act of violence in the name of his faith. We don't kill people for God, and we don't blow things up for God. We're willing to die for our faith - but we would never kill for it. That would be a foolish denial of the very fundamentals we stand for.

So if I'm not defined by radical politics or violence, what makes me a Fundamentalist?

A Christian Fundamentalist is one who holds to and is willing to stand up for the basic truths of Christianity. The list of fundamentals differs from person to person, but they pretty much all boil down to the essential truths for salvation, and those all revolve around Jesus Christ: who He is, what He did, and what we must do in response. This is no surprise - it's a Biblical idea, even though the name is recent. The Apostle Paul repeatedly told people to know doctrine and to be willing to separate from (not work with or fellowship with) people who denied core truths or who lived in blatant sin. The Apostle John nailed it down really clearly in I John 4:1-3. The person who accepts the truth about Jesus Christ, whatever else they may be wrong about, has a relationship with God. The person who hasn't believed the truth about Jesus Christ, whatever else they may be right about, has no relationship with God. When a person teaches the truth about Jesus Christ, whatever else they may get wrong, they are helping the cause of Christ in that at least. When a person teaches error about who Jesus is and what He did, whatever else they may get right, they are hurting the cause of Christ.

The difference between a Fundamentalist and other Evangelicals is not in what they believe about the gospel - both believe that salvation is by grace, through faith in Jesus Christ, as the Scriptures make so plain. We all agree the Jesus Christ is God the Son who came to earth as a man, died for our sins, and rose from the dead. The difference between Fundamentalists and the rest of the Evangelicals is the Fundamentalist's willingness to obey the commands to evaluate and separate from those who don't believe the gospel.

Am I a Fundamentalist because I hate people? No! I'm a Fundamentalist because I love God and want to do what He says. (This is the test of love, after all: "If ye love me, keep my commandments.") I'm a Fundamentalist because I believe the gospel of Jesus Christ to be the most important truth this world has ever seen - so important that I can't pretend I'm the same as someone who rejects it. I want to share it with anyone who will listen - but I don't want to work with someone who won't, at least not joining together in so-called ministry.

That's what makes me a Fundamentalist - believing the fundamental truths of Christianity and being willing to take a stand for them. The movement by the name of Fundamentalism has gotten tangled up in a lot of other things, some of which I agree with and some of which I don't. (It's made up of people, even people like me, which guarantees it won't be perfect.) At its heart, though, Fundamentalism is about the gospel of Jesus Christ and obeying Him.

Now I think I'll go and make another ... sandwich, a sandwich! What, you thought I was going to make something explosively dangerous, just because I'm a Fundamentalist? Well, okay, that description might suit any sandwich I make.

That Growing, Dying Dinosaur

"So, Sonny, back in my day, there were these guys called Fundamentalists."

"Really, Grandpa? They were like what, professional fun-thinkers, game-makers or something?"

"Heh. Not if you believed Mencken."

"Who?"

"Never mind... he's deader than they are now. Though a lot of those Fundamentalists had a lot more fun than folk realized. Sneaky fun-havers, a lot like the Puritans."

"Who?"

"Never mind - the Puritans wouldn't have liked the Fundamentalists, either. Mostly, the fundies just said and thought stuff people didn't like. Got 'em in all kinds of trouble."

"Wait... I heard about those in school. They're the ones who were always blowing themselves and other stuff up until they just died out, aren't they?"

"Well, that's pretty much what you'd expect to happen to people who blow themselves up, isn't it? But nah, you're thinking of the Muslim kind. I'm talking about the Christian ones. Mostly they just blew up at people until they blew themselves out and all dried up because nobody wanted to be one."


Will grandads and grandsons be having this conversation in twenty or thirty years? Probably, if this article by Michael Spencer in the Christian Science Monitor is correct, and grandads who tell their sons about the good old days and all the bad things that happened in them haven't all gone out of style or into nursing homes before then.

The consensus among those who even have a clue what Fundamentalism is (more on that in another post) seems to be that Fundamentalism is a dinosaur. The meteor that smashes the movement into oblivion like an out-of-date species has already crashed someplace up north. The dinosaur is breathing in all that dust, and its lungs are getting black on the inside like a five-pack-a-day smoker (not that most Fundamentalists would ever condone smoking, even among dinosaurs, unless, of course, it's a way to make dinosaur jerky). The dinosaur is about to keel over and die any day now, if not from lung cancer, then from the cold because of all the dust it didn't breath in and get stuck to the inside of its lungs.

Now, Mr. Spencer is a smart guy. He's probably running a couple of post-graduate degrees hotter than your average Fundamentalist, too. He says some very sharp things in his article, some very insightful things that I agree with completely. He's also humble enough to admit that he's definitely wrong in some of his predictions. And I think I know what one of them is, because in his routine filling-in of Fundamentalism's death certificate, he missed one obvious, glaring thing about the dinosaur: it's still growing.

The dinosaur of Fundamentalism really is pretty old-fashioned in a lot of ways. In some of them, it goes beyond old-fashioned into timeless and eternal, I think. In others, many of its members have ideas and practices that make Amish buggies look positively space-age. But Fundamentalism is not wheezing its last breaths and wasting away because its throat is clogged with second-hand asteroid smoke.

Like it or hate it, understand it or have no idea what it really is, Fundamentalism is alive and growing. A recent survey of independent Baptist churches (the most common culprits in the harboring of Fundamentalists) done by Global Baptist Church Planters (there's a book coming out with Paul Chappell, based on the study) found that among respondents, the average church has grown by 20% since 2005. It reported that the average independent Baptist church was seeing people saved, baptized, and becoming faithful members. Maybe this dinosaur is so resilient it made one of those desperate space missions starring Bruce Willis to blow up the asteroid, then immediately junked the technology because, of course, all technology not at least one generation out of date is probably evil unless it's really useful.

I am not honestly convinced the study was enormously scientific, from what I've seen of the data. It tries to be aware of and compensate for obvious deficiencies, and they made it on the largest scale they possibly could. However accurate the actual numbers are, the general trend confirms what I've seen. Fundamentalists are out there, sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ, which the Bible calls, "The power of God unto salvation." Thus, even as mainstream evangelicalism staggers toward the brink of destruction, its lungs clogging further with every step, this group that has always been out-of-step with the rest of the group now finds itself marching in a completely different direction.

Many Fundamental independent Baptists have somehow managed to hang onto a portion of the Bible that is strangely disappearing even faster than the dinosaurs did - the bits that tell them to tell other people about Jesus Christ and to be bold and active in doing it. (This is the "aggressively evangelistic" trait Mr. Spencer referred to.) And it kind of makes sense - the people getting their message out there are the people who most likely to propagate themselves, wouldn't you think? And the people actually doing what God told them to do with His power are the ones most likely to fully realize it, aren't they?

Maybe this dinosaur is better equipped for the post-meteor (whatever that mysterious meteor of destruction might be) world than most of so-called Christianity. Maybe it's even good enough at the core of what it does that it can even deflect or evade that big rock completely (even without Bruce Willis' help), though tough times are surely coming. It may not be good with technology, and it may not be as socially conscious as some other dinosaurs - but neither social consciousness nor techonology are the power of God unto salvation.

This dinosaur ain't dead, and it ain't dying. Whether it scares you or excites you, it's growing.