Aristarchus, in the third century B.C., clearly established a heliocentric picture of the solar system that was well understood and accepted by the Greeks. … Yet Ptolemy, five centuries later, turned this on its head and proposed a geocentric theory of almost Babylonian complexity. The Ptolemaic darkness, the scotoma, lasted 1,400 years, until a heliocentric theory was reestablished by Copernicus.–Oliver Sacks, The River of Consciousness, p 204
Christian
fundamentalism (which has parallels in other religions and ideologies) arose at
the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century in
America and Great Britain in reaction to liberal theology and modernism. One
might say it is parallel to Oliver Sacks’s above description of the regression
that misguided science for centuries, imagining a solar system with Earth
rather than the Sun at its center.
My post last week described a scotoma simply as a blind spot, but it can be more
than that. It can be what Orwell called a “memory hole” which sucks acquired knowledge
out of the room, an amnesia of, in the case of fundamentalism, a spiritual tradition that
experienced a diversity that recognized scripture as an element of faith but
not its sole author. Biblical literalism was at odds with earlier and
subsequent ways of interpreting scripture.
This
is my beef with fundamentalism—not that it isn’t a useful way to reclaim the
biblical story, but that it claims to be the ONLY way to read scripture,
dismissive of our own progressive Christian interpretations.
I
am glad to have been raised as a Christian fundamentalist and biblical
literalist: it gave me a knowledge of the Bible and a certainty and guidance I
needed as a child and youth. But I ultimately found it confining, not only of
me personally as a gay man and a political liberal, but of me spiritually,
bereft of much church tradition and teachings and reflections of the church
doctors and saints, theologians and mystics.
That
upbringing also resisted science and culture and other faiths, though more so
today than when I was growing up. More than ever today, fundamentalism sucks
acquired knowledge out of the room, even that of fellow Christians like myself
who remain faithful to Jesus without fear of hell or certainty of heaven, without
subscribing to all Christian doctrines, and while trying to welcome insights
from science and other cultures and religions.
I
know the pain that fundamentalists feel when challenged, or when disappointed
in those who do not similarly “believe,” as I felt that as well. Unlike some
progressive Christians, I try not to express animus toward fundamentalists or
fundamentalism, save when they try to theocratize our politics and political
institutions. I am truly a liberal in the classic sense, trying to welcome as
many viewpoints and perspectives and knowledge as possible.
And
I agree that scriptures have to be taken seriously, even authoritatively, but
not literally. A literal interpretation, I believe, actually does a disservice
to scripture. It can miss the depths and richness and complexity of the
biblical conversation about the meaning of it all.
And,
as Jesus said of the Sabbath and the fundamentalism of his day, the Bible was
made for humankind, not humankind for the Bible.
For Black History Month in the U.S., I invite you to read and/or circulate
Black Lives Matter and Black Museums Matter. For more such posts, use the search
engine on my blogsite or click on the following words to search for “black” or “Civil Rights,” and scroll down for multiple posts.
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