🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3373@ism780c.UUCP>, marty@ism780c.UUCP (Marty Smith) writes:
> 
> I realize that I don't know what fundamentalist christianity means.  Would
> someone list the beliefs that are necessary for a person to be a
> fundamentalist Christian?
> 
> 				 Marty Smith

As a non-Fundamentalist Christian, this is my perception of the set of
beliefs:

1) The Bible in the original text is 
   a) divinely inspired, and
   b) inerrent (ie, every last word is true, there was a flood
      with a person named Noah and his family the only humans to 
      survive, etc) 

2) The exclusive means of salvation is to believe in the vicarious
   sacrifice of Jesus Christ as atonement for our failures to
   love each other as we love ourselves (what is vulgarly called
   sin, a word I dislike because non-Christians especially tend to
   put a large emotional semantic overload on the word) in order 
   to reconcile us with God.

3) A complete denial of the efficacy of works, almost to the point 
   breaking belief #1 (I've known a number of Fundamentalists who
   really should go read the book of James).

The really far out Fundamentalists (like Jack T. Chick) go so far
as to assert that the King James Bible is also inerrent, and is
a faithful and accurate translation of the original texts. Chick
seems to think all the advances in our knowledge of Hebrew and
Greek as they were used when the Bible was being written are a plot
by the Catholic Church to corrupt Christian doctrine.

Flames from Jack Chick followers to /dev/null.

Chip Kluge (kck@g.cs.cmu.edu (ARPA))

Given that an institution cannot have an opinion, I find all the
disclaimers we put in our posts really stupid.

> I realize that I don't know what fundamentalist christianity means.  Would
> someone list the beliefs that are necessary for a person to be a
> fundamentalist Christian?
> 
> 				 Marty Smith


     The term "fundamentalist" originally came from a book (early 20th century,
I believe) which listed, in reaction to "modernism", 5 "fundamentals" of
the Christian faith:  1) the Virgin Birth; 2) inerrancy of the Bible;
3) substitutionary atonement; 4) the bodily resurrection of Jesus; 5) Christ's
second coming.  (That list is from memory, but I think it's correct.) 
     In addition to the theological definition, there are also emotional
connotations to "fundamentalist".  When a person describes himself as a
fundamentalist, he probably means something like "defender of the foundational,
orthodox doctrines of Christianity".  When a person calls someone else
a fundamentalist, it's most often meant as an insult, meaning something
like "closed-minded illiterate who still thinks the earth is flat".
(Note that I'm not equating these definitions, just pointing out that
the word is used in different ways!)

                                   N. L. Tinkham
                                   nlt@duke