"Fundementals" of Christianity

FROM FUNDEMENTALS TO MEDITATIONS IN FAITHFULNESS.
The movement known as fundementalism arose in the 1950’s as a response to and expression of modernity. Seeking to define faith in contrast to liberalisim the movement laid down 5 points by which they felt ‘historical faith’ should be dfined and defended. They failed to take into account 1) that other traditions at other times in our history have held other persoectives – blood attonement does not show up until the 13th century and that early Christiantiy viewed incarnation, and not death on a cross, as our means of salvation. I wonder what happens if we make these into meditations on faithfulness instead of definitions of ‘true’ faith.
* Inerrancy of the Scriptures
To have an ineerant scripture is to have one that must be worshiped as the end all/be all of faith and knowledge. To engage in such an idoloatry is to refuse to see the project that the bible itself engages in – a collection – or community – of texts. Each text may make specific claims but these claims can be augmented or refuted by other claims in the text. Mark presents a ‘son of man’ or human, Davidic Jesus while John presents an ‘Son of God’ or Divine jesus. These texts are mutually exclusive and mutually revealing. Instead of answers they give us questions to ponder and journeys to go on.
* The virgin birth and the deity of Jesus (Isaiah 7:14)
In discussing the Virgin Birth it is important to note that the narrative itself only appears in two of the Gospel narratives. My point here is to not debate Virgin Birth but to instead insist that such a doctrine is not a prerequisite for faith and faithfulness. The power of the narrative is instead something much different – it is the assertion that the Holy One of God enters humanity in those people most often to be over looked, forgotten and trampled upon. The life of God in the world bursts into human expierence in a fragile form, subject to the ravages of weather.
Jesus as God incarnate is itself a post-biblical idea. Johns Gospel comes the closests to saying it but more closely implies that Jesus and God are of one agenda, one mind and one goal. Paul has a high Christology but also does not go as far as to name Jesus as god. Jesus is most God like in John and most human in Mark. For the Christian then Jesus becomes the parable of God. Jesus becomes the method and mode by which we contemplate God With Us, the life of God touching and intertwined with the human condition.
* The doctrine of substitutionary atonement by God's grace and through human faith (Hebrews 9)
It has been a disturbment to people for ages as to why God needs a bloody sacrafice to appease his wrath. The thinking goes that humanity is to ‘sinful’ that Gods relationship to us is not one of love but of wrath and anger. When ‘God so loved the world’ it was in order to provide a person – a perfect person at that – to receive his wrath and rage. Here we can hear the critiques that say that this sort of thinking justifies abuses of the worst kind.
Liberation theology says the suffering Christ is not the recipitant of Gods rage but is instead the sighn of Gods solidarty with the suffering of the world. Those who suffer under poverty, in justice and human cruelity can turn to Jesus to see a god who does not suffer in their place but suffers with them.

Another idea, which works with the Liberation theology model, is that it is not God who needs a bloody sacrifice, but us. The Holy One of God comes into the world and we respond with violence and injustice. Jesus on the cross becomes the scapegoat – the one whom we direct our rage and intolerance unjustly. In the shock of this we recognize what we did – we created a system of injustivce that killed with out mercy. Salvation here is not Jesus dying FOR our sin but BECAUSE of it. In resserection Jesus steps forward and reveals the broken body – the victim of our crime – and stresses to us the idea that violence does not save us. Jesus challenges the idea of sacred violence as salvic.

* The bodily resurrection of Jesus (Matthew 28)
* The authenticity of Christ's miracles (or, alternatively, his pre-millennial second coming)[4]
I spent my undergrad days –at Jerry Falweels Liberty u – debating the validity of the miracles. I spent my liberal years debating how they didn’t happen. In my ‘emerging’ days I hope to hold onto that last position and then move to a new place that asks ‘what do these miracles mean – what do they say about Jesus and the God he points to? To get engaged indebates about miracles misses the point that the original storytellers where trying to tell: God has erupted into our midst and in this person we meet God-with-us.