Tallman: Fundamentalists need broader interpretation of God, scripture

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It is important for contemporary Christians to have a broad interpretation of God, Jesus, scripture, and theology since fundamentalism can be a dangerous force in our world, denying science, evolution, vaccines, and climate change.

In this regard, it is important to understand God is both apophatic, beyond human understanding, and cataphatic, within human understanding. The primary example is God becoming human in Jesus, so we would have some way of understanding the apophatic God.

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Christians need to hold onto both these dimensions. If you lose the apophatic dimension, you can become arrogant in your certainty about God and believe you must force your narrow understanding on others. But if you lose the cataphatic dimension, God becomes completely unknowable, and you may as well stop talking about God.

A third important dimension of God is the Holy Spirit, which is incarnate in every person as love, wisdom, joy, peace, and humility. Wherever you find those spiritual qualities, whether in Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, humanists, or atheists, the divine Spirit is present, leading them to a closer relationship with God. They don’t need conversion.

People who believe in the supremacy of scripture usually mean the supremacy of their own interpretation of scripture. So, to avoid fundamentalism, it is important to realize that scripture is interpreted in many ways.

The Bible did not fall out of the sky. It came to us through a church, and there is no historical break between present-day Catholicism and the early church. Christ gave Peter and the rest of the apostles the authority to properly interpret scripture when he said, “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18).

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Catholic bishops, the apostles’ successors, then organized early church councils that decided which books should go in the Bible and which should be excluded. The New Testament is a Catholic document.

However, Catholicism recognizes the supremacy of everyone’s conscience. You should study church teaching and Catholic interpretations of scripture before making moral decisions. However, if you cannot agree in good conscience with these sources, you are free to follow your own conscience. You are ultimately accountable to God, not to the Catholic church.

Also, many fundamentalists subscribe to a narrow fall/redemption theology which many theologians now disagree with as it ignores the first and second chapters of the Bible, where God created humans and everything as “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Instead, this theology focuses exclusively on the third chapter, the fall of humans into evil, and the redemptive work of Jesus on the cross, which conquers our fallenness.

In addition to scriptural narrowness, fall-redemption theology gives us a horrific picture of a god that is wrathful, violent, and demands blood and death, or his anger won’t be satisfied, a god who consigns people to eternal torture if they don’t believe in this narrow theology. A different interpretation is we create our own hell by our bad decisions.

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Fall-redemption theology also lets Christians off the hook. They don’t have to change their lives to be saved. All they must do is believe in Jesus’s redemptive sacrifice on the cross. This diminishes Jesus’s life and teachings, which are often ignored, and which accounts for the hypocrisy and failure of many Christians to follow Jesus genuinely.

A poster in my home office says, “Why and from what does Jesus save us? To form a more perfect world, Jesus saves us, by example, from living only for ourselves.” This requires interaction between God and humans; we cannot do it alone.

However, as scripture says, “faith without works is dead” (James 2:17-26). God gives us faith, but we must do the work. We are saved by following Jesus’ example of loving God and others. Jesus says, “Do this, and you will inherit eternal life” (Luke 10: 25-28).

Bruce Tallman is a London religious educator of adults. www.brucetallman.com

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