My Stories 2: Recovering from fundamentalism

I was sixteen years old and the question of what I would do with my life (as we used to put it)  was becoming urgent.

Again, the story begins with the church youth group: At that time it was the custom of our church’s youth group to attend the Belgrave Heights Convention meetings at Christmas and Easter. That Christmas we had arranged a group to stay together in what was called a House Party.  I went along with the heightened sense of expectation that was part of the evangelical fervour of our group. Today we might say that I was making a Retreat. I had bought a new Bible (a modern translation—already the rot had set in!), and earnestly engaged in prayer, listening to the messages and Bible studies , and talking with the leaders and other friends. What was God calling me to do with my life?

Early in the New Year, our group held a session we used to call ‘Echoes of Belgrave Heights’. I guess this reflected the attitude that in some way the Convention meetings gave us a spiritual ‘high’ and we wanted to maintain the experience and share it with others who were not there. Four participants in the House Party were asked to offer their reflections.

I was to speak last. The others spoke appreciatively of the Bible studies and their enjoyment of the activities of the group. When I came to speak, I explained that I had gone to Belgrave Heights seeking ‘a word’ from God, but really I had to say that nothing had been made clear to me. I don’t really know what I had expected, but in that group people often spoke of receiving direct guidance from God and that’s what I had been hoping for.

Only one thing had become clear to me. Through reading Psalm 37, I had come to see that I must ‘wait patiently on the Lord’. Apart from that, I had no great insights and no other sense of guidance. I expressed my feeling that perhaps it was not there, at ‘the Heights’, that I would sense God’s leading, but here at home, in the Latrobe Valley, the place where we lived our ordinary lives.

   What I see now is my youthful self trying not to pretend. This has always been an important value to me. 

Immediately after the meeting, our new Pastor brushed past me and as he went by simply said, ‘Read Luke Nine.’ I scarcely grasped what he said, and called after him, ‘What was that?’  He repeated the simple direction to read Luke’s Gospel,  Chapter Nine. Between that afternoon meeting and our evening service, I read it twice but I simply had no idea why he had asked me to do so, and what I was supposed to gain from it.

After the service I asked him why he’d asked me to read that chapter. With a gentle sigh he said something like: ‘This is the trouble with so many of you who have been brought up in the church. You spend so much time talking about the Bible, but in fact you’ve been inoculated against it. You are blind to what it is saying to you.’

Then he proceeded to show me that Luke Nine has a story of Jesus and three disciples going up a mountain and down to a valley. On the mountain they have an amazing experience, seeing Jesus ‘transfigured’, and with him two of their greatest religious heroes, Moses and Elijah. The disciples say they want to stay there forever, to build houses and live there in the place of heightened spiritual awareness. But Jesus insists on going to the valley. There they encounter a boy the disciples had not been able to heal.  Jesus not only heals the boy, he teaches the disciples about the importance of dependence upon God, there, in the face of great suffering.

Then the Pastor carefully drew the parallels with what I had been saying in the meeting that afternoon. I too had sensed that I was being led down the mountain, and the Pastor was affirming me in that. He also suggested that the Bible offered many more insights for my quest.

 Since that day, I have learned to read the Bible in new ways—recovering from fundamentalism. I have discovered that it is not a book of ideas or wisdom which is somehow located ‘out there’ or ‘back there’. It is a dynamic, living text which reaches out to me and in so many ways draws me into its drama. It helps me to see new possibilities in the drama of my continuing life.
This sense of the gospel as a living drama into which we are drawn was the beginning of my discovery of a theology of story. What happened to me that Sunday evening was an example of how stories function in the formation and development of our faith.

There are for me three really significant elements in this process of recovery.
First was something I only came to see several years later, while studying Political Philosophy at university. Reading John PLamenatz, German Marxism and Russian Communism,  I found a discussion of Fundamentalism—at pages 81 and following. This was not biblical fundamentalism, but Marxist, ideological fundamentalism. I came to see that any ideology or philosophy can be subjected to this kind of narrow, defensive, and intolerant mindset. For that is what it is, a state of mind, often driven by unacknowledged emotions. Fundamentalism can affect, or infect, any viewpoint or set of ideas and valued, and undermine its worth. And since it is not a logical position, but rather a psychological stance, it is not something that can be argued with. That discovery was for me an invitation to move on from an oppositional stance, for or against particular ideas, to a more open and exploratory approach, willing to engage with the truth, wherever it might lead me.

The second helpful element for me was what I have come to call the essential ups and downs. The biblical story I began with sets together the ideas of the mountain and the valley. There are many significant stories in the Hebrew and Christian traditions centred on mountains. In this story the figures of Moses, who ‘met with God’ on a mountain, and Elijah, who challenged the prophets and followers of another deity on a mountain, represent these very powerful traditions. They embody the whole tradition indicated by the then customary expression ‘the Law and the Prophets’: moral and religious teachings and values which essentially defined the Jewish people and their life. Nowhere does Jesus negate or reject these traditions, though he profoundly challenges many of the applications of them. Furthermore, in this story he rejects the idea of staying on the mountain top, as if that ‘spiritual high’ is the ultimate purpose of their faith.
Jesus insists on returning to the valley and the story in Luke leads to the idea that it is there that the meaning and values of ‘the Law and the Prophets’ will need to be discovered and worked out.

These are what I mean by ‘the essential ups and downs’. Neither the valley alone, nor the mountain alone, but each is part of the journey of life and faith. They are both crucial as sources of meaning and hope. They each have their temptations, as if one can stay there or do only that. But work without rest and inspiration is as deadly and unhelpful, in the end, as ‘pie in the sky’ religious experience. Each can become a fundamentalism, and each can rescue the other from that fundamentalism.

The third element has profoundly influenced my choice of career and approach to it as a teacher and pastor. In Plato’s Republic there is a famous parable or analogy of a cave. He envisages that people live in a cave where the only light comes from the outside, casting shadows on the walls. The shadows are just that to some people, though just a few are courage enough to find what is the reality beyond, causing these images. For Plato, it is the quest of philosophy to seek the reality beyond the appearances of things. That reality is not transitory and shadowy, but eternal, unchanging and therefore not physical. To engage with such reality is the quest for wisdom and those who make this quest (like Plato) should rule the Republic.

My own take on this parable, however, has always been to ask about those who are left behind deep in the cave. Is there no possibility that wisdom might lead some at least to go to them and help them, perhaps invite them also to the quest for light, truth, and a deeper engagement with reality? 

My sense is that there is such a wisdom and this is part of the ‘Luke 9’ story, the way of Jesus that leads both up a mountain and down into the valley—not only to assist those who need healing, in a one-sided therapy, but a life-giving and enabling mission, in which all may journey together, towards insight and practical wisdom.

I am so grateful for this story and for all that it unlocked for me, over a lifetime.