ExFundie

For anyone checking up on me, I have moved this blog elsewhere, to ExFundie at Wordpress. My general cultural blog is at Confessions of a Cultural Idiot, also at WordPress. Meanwhile, my book-related blog is at Bookishgal on my "Shiny Ideas" professional editing and writing site, and my editing/writing blog (which I've only just started) is at Shiny Ideas.

...to see if this blog still works in the "New Blogger," till I switch all my blogs to WordPress.

CHANGING GEARS A BIT

I'm not leaving all the previous posts behind; in fact, I'm expanding and developing them into a book. So for the time being, I won't be posting any more of the chapters, while I work on the book.

However, I do hope to post more, soon, about various developments in the realm of religion and philosophy. So this blog will hopefully continue.

[Note: the very first essay begins here]

So, you've got a family of fundamentalists living next door to you. How are they going to behave toward you, if you're not a fundamentalist yourself?

There are several possibilities. The strictest of them will have nothing to do with you, period. This is because, of course, you are under a completely different allegiance: you are allied with the enemies of God no matter how nice you may seem, and there can be no fraternizing with the enemy.

A second reason for not fraternizing, though, comes from two beliefs, about themselves and you: firstly, they believe that they are inherently sinful and weak; secondly, they believe that as an enemy of God, you are given solely to sin. The spirit behind even your "good" actions is self-centred rather than God-centred, so even your "good" actions are sinful. So if they allow themselves to enjoy your company, they could easily be led back into sin under your influence. They want to avoid temptation, especially in the guise of goodness and friendship. Therefore, they will avoid you except for the most cursory, necessary interactions in the community.

For these people, this can apply even to neighbours who are supposedly Christians, but of a different sectarian persuasion. If you are Roman Catholic, for example, many fundamentalists will consider you just shy of a servant of the anti-Christ, and will avoid you almost as fervently as if you were a Satanist (and some would say you are!).

If you are of another religion altogether, say Sikh or Hindu or, heaven forfend, Islam, you are even worse. Catholics at least use the Bible, so there is some chance of God breaking through and converting them. But these others are, for the Christian fundamentalist, unabashed and brazen idolators. Their evil nature is much more out in the open. So a strict fundamentalist will have as little to do with these neighbours as humanly possible.

There are other fundamentalists, though, who will in fact be quite friendly, and fraternize to some degree with their atheist, or idolatrous, or otherwise ungodly neighbours. But do not be deceived, no matter how friendly they are: their primary motivation is NOT simple friendliness. Always and only, their purpose in befriending you will be TO TRY TO SHOW YOU THE TRUTH AND CONVERT YOU TO FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIANITY. Only after you are converted will they be able to relax, and enjoy you as a person, and enjoy your friendship for its own sake.

They believe that Jesus gave them a divine mission before he departed the world and ascended to heaven: "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature" (Mark 16:15). It is their job to bring everyone they meet into a saving relationship with Jesus and God. If you were to die "in your sins," and go to hell, because they just hung out with you and didn't try to convert you, it would be a horrible tragedy and a lifelong accusation on their conscience. So their first business with you – always and only – is your conversion.

Sometimes it appears as though these neighbours are being friendly without trying to convert you. But they regard conversion as a process, often progressing gradually. They work to gain your trust, and gradually introduce ideas that work toward the real reason they have befriended you. At all times, they are watching and calculating: "How can this barbecue or that hockey practice lay more groundwork? How can I work this conversation around to point in God's direction? How often can I casually refer to God doing something in my life, to try to make them curious enough to bring up the subject themselves? When will they be ripe for another attempt?" And so on. Every friendly act and conversation IS A TACTIC. Even if they come to regard you genuinely as a friend, they are always plotting first and foremost how to convert you

If they end up having to sacrifice your friendship in the name of their God – they will. You are, at very best, in second place. But even being that high is rare, because they owe far more allegiance to their church, their religious friends, their political organizations, and so on. You will NEVER be considered on a par with them, as friends, till you have converted to fundamentalist Christianity.

This will have an effect on all sorts of family issues. Your children might be allowed to befriend their children – up to a point. But they will segregate their kids from yours at the first sign that your children might be putting non-fundamentalist ideas into their kids' heads. However, they will not hesitate to try to put fundamentalist ideas into your kids' heads. A mother making cookies while all your kids hang out in the kitchen may take that chance to talk about God while you're not there. The father driving the kids to practice might pray with the kids while travelling in the van, as a "witness" and influence on your children.

Because it is their responsibility to try to convert everybody they meet, they believe that you are harming your child if you do not introduce them to Jesus and his redemptive work. Therefore, they will always try surreptitiously to educate your child in their beliefs. They will do this EVEN IF YOU EXPLICITLY ASK THEM NOT TO. They will obey what they think God wants, even if it contradicts what you want, as a parent.

In fact, this is a good moment to comment on the fact that fundamentalists in North America yell very loudly about parental rights, but don't really believe in those rights for any parents but themselves. They yell that the government has no right to interfere with their parenting; they are the parents, and The State does not own their children. The State has no right to declare whether they can or can't strike their kids in punishment, for example. The State also has no right to tell them what they can or can't teach their children. In fact, they are the ones who should be dictating to The State what it can or can't teach. They believe this so strongly that if they disagree with what The State teaches their children, they tend more and more these days to pull their kids out of public school altogether, to engage in home schooling.

But it's odd, about parental rights, because fundamentalists in essence believe that only they have these rights. They will NOT recognize your right, as a parent, to tell them, "Do not talk to my children about religion." Whatever principles you try to teach your children, that they disagree with, they will subtly try to undermine in as many ways as possible. What they believe your child "should" be taught, they will try to teach, no matter what your wishes are.

In other words – not only do fundamentalists believe they have parenting rights over their own children that supersede any rights by The State or others – they believe THEY HAVE PARENTING RIGHTS OVER YOUR CHILDREN, if they disagree with what you are teaching your kids.

All you need to do to test their commitment to "parental rights" is ask them to join you in fighting for your right to teach your child evolution, or to be an atheist, or to support left-wing politics. They only believe in "parental rights" if the parents believe in the "right" things – meaning fundamentalist Christianity in its current manifestation of right-wing politics.

Family structure will play a big role in their beliefs as well. In theory at least, they believe that the wife is always subjected to her husband. Even if she works outside the home, in theory her husband is boss, and makes the decisions for the family. They may not come right out and tell you that your equal-partner relationship is wrong in the eyes of God, but they will support political groups that try to undermine male-female equality, and will subtly disapprove if you have a relationship where the female partner takes the lead as often as, or more often than, the male partner.

If your partnership consists of two men or two women living in a marital relationship, you will be lucky if the fundamentalist neighbours speak to you at all. Certainly they will discourage their children from having anything to do with yours. They may in fact actively try to force you out of the neighbourhood or out of community involvement. Most of the time the best you can hope for is to be ignored.

Though if they do try to befriend you – beware. More than any other type of non-fundamentalist neighbour, you have the most to worry about from these "friends," no matter how much they might genuinely like you. Since their primary goal is to try to convert you to fundamentalist Christianity, this means as a corollary that they are not just trying to convert you, but TRYING TO BREAK UP YOUR PARTNERSHIP AND FAMILY. Because of course, their talk about "family values" only extends to their type of family. Any other type is ungodly, and therefore evil, and gay relationships are the most evil of all. They can convert a standard male-female family to fundamentalist Christianity without breaking up the family (though they will immediately try to "mentor" the new converts into the man-ruling-the-woman type of hierarchy). But they will never tolerate a gay relationship without wanting to destroy it.

We could go on and on with specific examples of how a set of fundamentalist neighbours would relate to non-fundamentalists, but I think you get the picture. Some fundamentalists do not behave this way, because while they agree in principle with the things taught at their church, they either lack the courage to try to push these beliefs on their neighbours, or they retain some sense that their neighbours have a right to hold different beliefs without interference. However, the stronger and more fervent their fundamentalist faith, the more likely they are to behave this way. Converting their neighbours to fundamentalist Christianity will be their number one priority, overriding freedom of conscience, parenting rights, and different family values.

And naturally, they extend these attitudes beyond the local neighbourhood, into society in general. So let us move outward too, to view them in action in the wider world.

Back to: Interjection: Acting Out

Alright. We've laid out the world view of Christian fundamentalists, and seen how logically everything flows from their initial premises. We can see, from this, how they don't find anything contradictory in their belief system, because given their initial premises, it holds together very well and provides explanations for almost everything they see around them. And provides hope, and an ultimate solution to all the world's long-standing woes.

But now that we understand their philosophical foundations, we need to examine just how fundamentalist principles are acted out in the world. Someone might respond, "Look all around you! We already know how they act in the world. Isn't it obvious??"

In one sense, it is. But I still maintain that their actions in the world do not stem primarily from "sheer orneriness" or "sheer hatred." It is very handy for us to attribute their actions to things like that; it makes our work so much easier, and makes it easier for us to judge them and, in fact, to dismiss them. (And doesn't that sound exactly like what they do to non-fundamentalists, by lumping us all together, dismissively, with a few handy, all-encompassing terms like "sinners" or "traitors"??)

But the truth is far more complex than that. From my own experience as a fundamentalist for 31 years, I know that most of them are trying to do their best, to sort out the complexities of society. They are operating from a belief system they genuinely believe to be true, and they truly believe that if this belief system is spread in the world, it will heal the world and ultimately make it better. Their world view seems so "obvious" as the solution to everything, because it FITS what they see. Beginning with the premises they start with, they do find answers. And therefore, as a corollary, if the answer as they see it is so "obvious," then anyone who opposes that answer must be doing it deliberately, with very bad intentions indeed for the world.

Therefore it is absolutely necessary to understand the logic behind how they act. Even if we could forbid all their actions, they would still adhere to that internal logic, and would find some other way to act it out. But if we can begin to chip away at those underlying principles themselves, demonstrating that the truths about the world are vastly different from what they've been taught, I am convinced that that's the only way we have a hope of changing the actions that flow from their underlying beliefs.

So, let us begin the next stage of our inquiry. How are these people going to act in the world, starting with the premises they do?

Let's start with the fundamentalist as your next door neighbour, and move outward from there.

Back to: Rise Up and Feel the Power

Next: Love Thy Neighbour

So. After all the historical buildup, the deed was finally done. The Redeemer promised to Adam and Eve in the garden had finally arrived, and made the sacrifice for all the sin that had resulted from their wrong choices at the beginning of time. "It is finished," Jesus said. Finally.

Now what?

Well, the sacrifice was finished when Jesus died, but in fact the atonement wasn’t, quite. There was one more thing that needed to happen, to seal it tight, finish it off, show that it was complete and accepted by God. That thing was the Resurrection of Jesus.

This doctrine again puts fundamentalist Christians squarely in the middle of orthodox doctrine for Christianity through the ages, so their beliefs about the resurrection don’t particularly stand out. But it's important to understand these beliefs anyway, so we have the complete picture of how fundamentalists view the world. Having this full picture helps us understand how they behave in the world as a result.

For Christian fundamentalists the resurrection was literal and physical, rather than symbolic or spiritual. It was not a case of a body that had been tortured and lapsed into a faint or a coma, and mistaken for dead, being "revived" in the coolness of the tomb and stolen by the disciples. Fundamentalists have no problem at all with a real, physical coming back to life after genuine death. Remember, they believe that God is the creator of nature and its laws, and that he can intervene to counteract those laws when he has a good reason.

One thing that follows the belief that Jesus was genuinely dead and was resurrected bodily is the belief that wherever Heaven is, Jesus is there literally in the flesh. Whatever the spiritual dimensions of Heaven, it is also, now, somehow a literally physical place as well, where physically resurrected bodies can exist. And because Jesus’ work on earth was done to represent all humanity, then any humans who follow him and are resurrected at the end of time will also be resurrected in physical bodies, and will exist for all eternity in a physical state, albeit a pure, exalted, and transformed one.

There is an even more thrilling repercussion, for fundamentalists. They believe that Jesus' divine/human fusion was permanent. So Jesus not only exists in heaven as God, but also as human. Which means that through Jesus' work, humanity itself has been lifted up from degradation, into the godhead itself, and will remain a part of divinity for eternity. Jesus lifted humanity higher than it ever would have been if the Fall into sin had never happened. (Which, of course, raises all sorts of other interesting implications, which we can't explore right now. But I'm sure you can think of them already.)

Of course, it's only Jesus' humanity that is actually divine; all other humans will forever be subordinate to him (except in Mormonism, but they have a very different theology of the nature of divinity to begin with, which we won't go into here). But even though fundamentalists never for an instant equate themselves with the divinity of Jesus' human side, it's still nice to be associated with it. It would certainly justify their belief that all other forms of life are vastly inferior to humanity, whenever a fundamentalist might consider such comparisons.

This idea, of humanity being lifted directly into the godhead, is of course abhorrent to Muslim fundamentalists; and although I haven't studied Jewish views on the subject, I imagine it would be equally abhorrent to them, at least in the sense that Christian fundamentalists mean it. Hindu fundamentalists would have no problem with the idea of humanity united with divinity, but their view of the Ultimate Divine is that it is pretty much impersonal, and human spirits are sort of "absorbed" into it. In fact, they were part of it all along, and their individuality has been an illusion. So that what we would call "salvation" consists of these human spirits recognizing this fact, and their individuality melting back into the blissful, impersonal Divine. This, obviously, is vastly different from the Christian fundamentalist view.

But let's backtrack to the resurrection itself, and God’s reasons for raising Jesus from the dead. What were these reasons? And how did the resurrection, indicating that the salvation work was complete, actually accomplish the salvation of humankind?

Why the resurrection in the first place? Well, if Jesus had died and stayed dead under that burden of sins, it would have indicated that he had to suffer eternal death just like every other human. There would be no guarantee that the payment had been enough to free all other humans from the same fate. The resurrection was thought to indicate that the payment for sin was so absolutely complete that eternal death could not hold Jesus. His resurrection was a victory over both sin in general, and physical and spiritual death as well – not just for himself, but for all humankind. It literally undid the entire curse placed on physical and spiritual nature back when the first humans sinned.

When Christians consider the work accomplished by Jesus’ death and resurrection, there is often a sense of legal transaction: all sinful offenses, and the redemption and transformation of sinful humans, have somehow been "bought and paid for." God loved all humankind and wanted them to be saved, but rigid justice had to be served as well, so this was the ingenious way that he was true to both love and justice.

In North American fundamentalism, there are several interpretations of this legal transaction. One of these is the fairly simple view that Jesus suffered the equivalent of an eternity in hell for every single human being who has ever existed, who exists now, or who will ever exist. So the penalty due to each of them has been literally paid in full.

But this leads some Christians, called Universalists, to draw the logical conclusion that if the price has been fully paid, then all of humankind are now saved, whether they know about this gift – or accept it – or not. Missionary work done by these people in the past has consisted of telling people the good news, that God has done something about the sin in the world, and maybe they should mend their ways and try to live up to this great gift even if they don't actually convert to Christianity.

Which of course is abhorrent to most fundamentalists (and most orthodox Christians through history, in fact), who don't like the idea that anyone could possibly get into heaven who hasn't consciously (and abjectly) converted to their way of interpreting the Bible and Jesus' spiritual accomplishments. Nor do they like the idea that some Vishnu-worshipper across the world, or some mass murderer like Josef Stalin, are automatically "in" without any repenting or change of heart.

So the fundamentalists tend to adhere to varying versions of Calvinist beliefs, which teach that nobody gets into heaven without consciously repenting and converting to their version of Christianity. Everyone else goes to hell, even if the price has been paid for them, and despite the fact that this is not just. (Although in fact, pure Calvinism gets around this by teaching that whoever doesn't choose to convert and follow Jesus, well, Jesus didn't actually die for them anyway, because God foresaw what their decision would be and didn't waste his saving action on them. So if you're not a Christian, and you end up going to hell -- well, don’t worry: he didn’t die for you anyway. So your eternal death will be all yours, and was always going to happen. Feel better now?)

The Calvinist doctrines in their pure form (symbolized with the acronym TULIP) are fascinating – and horrifying. I debated going into more detail here, about each point in the acronym, but thought people might get bogged down with so much theology. But TULIP is still fairly important to get an understanding of the full extent of possible fundamentalist belief on the subject of salvation, and how people are saved. For those wanting a peek at the horrors of TULIP, check out these websites:

- This charming little page does a concise job of summing up TULIP, happily agreeing with all the logical and abominable conclusions of its five points.

- Whereas this one is a refutation of TULIP by a fundamentalist. So obviously, there are disagreements even among fundamentalists about the atonement and all its implications.

The final thing that is accomplished by Jesus' death and resurrection is the actual remaking of the individual who receives this gift and converts, deciding to follow God from now on. This is referred to as being "born again," and many Christians mean this as literally as possible without meaning an actual rebirth from the womb. For them, this is a spiritual re-birth which is very literal: the person's spirit is changed from their natural one that was already dead to God, into a reborn and alive spirit whose natural home is now heaven.

When a person repents and asks God to apply the blood of Jesus to their soul, the Holy Spirit (third person of the Christian trinity) is said to enter the person's soul and regenerate and energize it. So officially, he or she is reborn, and now considered holy and pure in God's eyes – as always, not because of their own merit, but because God now sees them through the filter of Jesus' blood, which was itself pure and holy. And in fact, their soul's destination is now heaven rather than eternal death.

The problem is that these born again people are still living in natural, untransformed bodies, which still have their natural tendency to sin and nothing but sin. So the rest of these Christians' lives are a learning process of allowing God's spirit to "live through" them, overcoming all these sinful tendencies. Any good or holy thing they do is only God doing it through them as they submit to him. Any bad or evil thing they do, on the other hand, results from their listening to their own natural tendencies to sin, which will be there until they are transformed at death. In other words, when they do good, God gets the credit, but when they do bad, it's all their fault.

This is why it's so easy for Christian fundamentalists, based in Calvinism, always to "blame the sinner" or even "blame the victim." Their belief system itself is never questioned. If anyone ever has difficulty accepting certain doctrines, or has difficulty putting certain lifestyle commands into practise, it is never the fault of a belief system that demands too much of human beings, or that has flaws in its reasoning or explanations. It is always the believer's fault, for "not having enough faith" or "not having prayed hard enough" or "not being submissive enough to God."

This also makes it easy to dismiss criticisms of their results, and makes it unlikely that fundamentalists will learn any lessons from other faiths or other ways of doing things. The moment a believer questions whether Christian fundamentalism has got this or that point quite right, or thinks that some other faith or belief system might have a point here and there, that person is immediately assured that they are "trusting human reasoning" and should instead re-submit to God. All questions of the system are interpreted as an edging back into reliance on human "natural reasoning" (which, remember, is flawed to begin with). Only by "allowing God to live and understand these things through them" will people be in the right relationship to God. And then things will work properly. And if things don't work properly – again, it's the believers' fault, no matter how devout and obedient they have tried to be.

So, what would constitute sufficient evidence, for fundamentalists, that their belief system is erroneous? NOTHING. All such evidence is automatically excluded, or blamed on the "sinfulness" of its bearer.

This is also why Christian fundamentalists are so dependent on the Bible. They can't listen to their own conscience or sense of justice to know what is good, because it, too, is tainted by their natural sinfulness. Nor can they trust their own intellects to understand the world. So the Bible, God's message to them, is the only source of knowledge about good or evil, and the only interpreter of knowledge in general. They are quite literally lost in a bewildering and frightening world, without it. Therefore it must be divinely inspired and error-free, because otherwise, they believe, they SIMPLY. CAN. NOT. KNOW. ANY. TRUTH. Period. And every bit of truth they discover about the world, about science, about human beings and nature, must be filtered through the prism of the Bible to make sure they "get it right."

One of the favourite phrases in Christian fundamentalism is "Let God be true, and every man a liar." If any evidence in the natural world contradicts the Bible's claims – it's the natural world that's got it wrong. Or at least, its ungodly interpreters.

So the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the application of his saving work to their souls and minds, begins the process of re-orienting their view of the world to match the "real" view – the one that appears to them to be propounded in the Bible. Fundamentalists spend their lives aligning their thinking to match this world view more and more closely.

So perhaps it's finally time to look at how Christian fundamentalist beliefs actually work themselves into the world. We've learned most of their foundational beliefs, and many of these beliefs explain why they behave as they do. But we need to examine some specifics, so we can see just how tightly their world view holds together as they put it into practise in the world. After that...perhaps we may be able to start finding the chinks in the wall, the jutting bricks that don't quite fit, so they can be pulled out and the edifice can be brought down.

Back to: Jesus Christ Was Not A Good Man

Next: Interjection: Acting Out

[Note: I should mention that the fundamentalists' beliefs about Jesus fit pretty much into the camp of general historic Christian orthodoxy. So when I talk about their believing this or that about Jesus, I'm not trying to say that these particular beliefs are different from what mainstream Christianity has always believed about Jesus. The reason I go into some detail about these beliefs is that when they are fitted into the rest of the fundamentalists' world view, they produce much different results from what we see in non-fundamentalist Christianity. So it isn't the beliefs about Jesus where the two sets of Christians differ very much; it's how those beliefs fit into the wider philosophy, and what is produced in the Christians' behavior as a result.]

Before we discuss Jesus, we should remind ourselves of the most important beliefs that Christian fundamentalists hold about God, the world, who Man [sic] is, and how humanity got into its current predicament. These beliefs don’t just form the backdrop to their views about Jesus; they actually determine these views, dictating that Jesus must be viewed in certain ways and not in others.

First, beliefs about God. He is the one and only God who exists (Christianity believes itself to be a monotheistic world view, with all other gods being counterfeits of the Real Thing). The pronoun “he” is the proper pronoun to use of God. He is love. He is holy. He cannot sacrifice either of these attributes in favor of the other (though in fundamentalism, he tends to lean more to the “holy,” judgemental side). He is also, despite the monotheistic claim, a Trinity; in the story of Jesus this doctrine really comes into its own.

Next, Man and the world (and fundamentalists take “Man” as the proper word to represent the entire race; women are by definition subordinate to men in this world view). Both Man and the world were created perfect, but when Man disobeyed God’s command and made himself the ruler of his own life, he and the physical world immediately began to run down and die. Man’s reasoning power became prone to error, and his spirit is born in a state of separation from God that, if he dies unredeemed, becomes permanent upon his physical death. He is born sinful, and will do nothing but sin, and therefore is born already condemned. He can do nothing to redeem himself.

So God promised a Redeemer, and spent a few thousand years manipulating history, nations, and people, to engineer the conditions required to produce the one who was promised.

Because God, being infinite, was infinitely wronged by Man’s sin, the payment to wipe the slate clean would have to be awfully big. It would, in fact, involve infinite sacrifice, blood, and death before the demands of infinite holiness and justice could be satisfied. The extensive laws God gave to the Israelites, his chosen people, were meant to illustrate the magnitude and completeness of the payment that would be required to redeem humankind.

With all of that as a backdrop, we come to it at last: the moment at which the whole wretched mess can start to be cleaned up. Jesus is born.

But already, that simple statement is not so simple. For fundamentalists, the Redeemer cannot be just a regular guy born in Bethlehem to a humble Jewish couple.

First off, if he is an ordinary human, he will be born sinful and already under condemnation himself, and therefore disqualified to redeem anyone. So he must be sinless.

Enter the Virgin Birth. For Jesus to be a sinless human, it seems that he cannot have a human father. Various reasons for this belief have been advanced throughout theological history. Some believe that Mary had to be a virgin because sex is basically sinful (or at least questionable and icky), and Jesus’ nature would have been tainted if he had been produced sexually. Others believe that the sinful nature (and everything else that’s really significant about human beings) comes down from the father rather than the mother, so Jesus bypassed the sinful nature by not having a human father.

The virgin birth is a doctrinal detail that is absolutely non-negotiable. The fact that such a thing appears virtually impossible in the natural world is no obstacle to belief. Remember that fundamentalists believe they are dealing with the Creator of the entire universe, who is the author of Nature rather than a servant of Nature, and who can certainly intervene at selected moments for his larger purposes. A supernatural intervention is not just unsurprising at such a crucial moment – it is almost imperative, to make sure everything turns out right.

So Jesus was born, literally without the hand (or anything else) of any human man being involved. And he was sinless.

We should add a note here, about Mary his mother. Christian fundamentalists do not venerate her, except as a normal woman who was obedient to God despite the social stigma she might suffer from the circumstances of this birth. They neither believe her to have been sinless, nor do they believe she was a perpetual virgin [references to Jesus’ brothers and sisters seem to prove she was not]. Fundamentalists view the Roman Catholic veneration of Mary as idolatry, and shrink in horror from the very thought that a sinful human woman could be thought of as the Queen of Heaven, or as an intercessor between people and God. Fundamentalists believe Jesus died as much for Mary’s sins as for anyone else’s. The Catholic veneration of Mary is one of several reasons that fundamentalists believe the Roman Catholic church is not a “real” Christian church. They consider it as counterfeit as any other religious belief that sets up a man-made substitute for God’s “true” plan of salvation. To venerate Mary, in their view, is no different from venerating the Hindu Lakshmi, the Babylonian Ishtar, or any other false goddess.

But back to Jesus. If he was merely human, he would still not be sufficient, even as a single sinless Man, to atone for humanity’s offense against the infinite holiness of God. In fact, the only one “big enough” to atone for infinite offense would be God himself.

Well, guess what! Luckily, Jesus isn’t just a man – he is also God. And here we encounter the divine Trinity in earnest.

Fundamentalists believe that God couldn’t just say, “Oh well, boys will be boys” and let the offense go; the demands of justice had to be met, and the atonement had to be made. And it had to be made by Man, since Man was the offender, yet no man was sufficient to the task. So because God loved Man, he himself would make the atonement, in sufficient measure – by becoming a Man and making the atonement in both his divine capacity and his human capacity.

So as well as being fully human (indeed, a complete representative of the entire human race in the same way Adam was at the beginning), Jesus is fully God.

And what a colossal stroke of luck – the structure of the Trinity (Divine Father, Divine Son, Divine Spirit) was exactly what was needed to fulfill the logistical requirements for making the atonement. The Spirit created Mary’s pregnancy, the Son descended to become human and make the atonement, and the Father was the one to whom the sacrifice was made, the one who judged it sufficient.

You could almost think the whole thing was pre-planned. And of course – according to fundamentalists, it was. God created the world, and created Man, knowing full well that Man would fall, and that atonement would be needed. Fundamentalists are careful to say (though the logic is hard to maintain; in fact, I believe it impossible to maintain) that humans had free will despite God’s foreknowledge, and were not inevitably doomed to sin. But God knew it all before it happened, and had already planned the solution. Which is why Jesus can be described in the scriptures as “the lamb of God, slain before the foundation of the world.”

So the Trinity plays a big part in Jesus’ birth and ministry, and the fundamentalists will not part with this doctrine. In practical terms, the exact same results could theoretically have been achieved with three separate divine beings instead of one, all united in purpose and love and holiness. But the fundamentalists are determined that there is only one God, and are fiercely in love with the idea of God sacrificing himself to himself to atone for sin. So the Trinity is here to stay.

The first big reason why they want to maintain the Three-in-One idea is that they insist that they are the heirs of the Jews of the Old Testament, for whom there truly was only one God. Fundamentalists regard the ancient Jewish writings as the foundational documents for their own beliefs, so they cannot allow themselves to split the godhead into three separate beings, despite the fact that fundamentalist theology has God functioning essentially that way. (We won’t discuss, here, the evidences for polytheism even in the ancient Jewish writings of the Old Testament.) So the Trinity is the only way they can resolve the contradiction. But also, they feel that if you make the three beings into separate individuals, you can possibly divide the running of the world into separate spheres. So that, theoretically, any one of those beings could be focussed on something that the others were not. But the fundamentalists want God to be in absolute control of, and conscious of, everything there is, all at once, totally and completely and simultaneously. Splitting into three separate gods is seen as somehow making the three into lesser beings, which cannot encompass the fundamentalist idea of how God functions.

The nature of Jesus himself is subject to similar debate, trying to understand how his divine nature and human nature interact and somehow function as one. He is described as both fully human, and fully God, and this can be a dilemma when one tries to understand how he could have been a realistic representative of all human beings during his life.

Fundamentalists say that the reason his thirty-plus years of human life were valuable to us is that he showed us how to live sinlessly and in full obedience to God. He is therefore an example for all other humans to follow as they re-orient themselves from a life of sinful self-centeredness into a God-oriented life. Another reason for his human lifespan is that he is supposed to have faced temptations and trials and weakness the same way the rest of us do, and therefore knows our difficulties, and empathizes with us and our hardships. And his perfectly sinless human life also became a life that qualified to be offered as a sacrifice to God, for the sins of the world.

Fundamentalists stress that it was in Jesus’ human capacity that he lived this perfect, sinless life. But objections have been made to this scenario, from the very beginning of church history. For one thing, Jesus can hardly be viewed as a typical human (and therefore someone we can expect to emulate) when he seems to have been born with a few distinct advantages we don’t have. He was born without the sinful nature the rest of us are saddled with, meaning he had no automatic tendency to sin. So could he, in fact, really empathize with those of us who, as fundamentalists delight to remind us, will always and only choose to sin because of our intrinsic nature? The very reason Jesus qualifies at all to be the Redeemer is that he is sinless. No sinful nature dragging him down inevitably. He starts out with a leg up on the rest of us from the very beginning.

And what about that little matter of his being God? Fundamentalists deny that Jesus’ God-nature helped him make his human choices, and insist that he faced all of them only as a human. Yet his God-nature manifests all over the place, almost every time he acts, in the biblical writings. The most charitable interpretation one can make is that he switches back and forth a lot.

Fundamentalists do have discussions about how Jesus’ basic natures function, but not in the sense of questioning whether the God-man doctrine is correct in the first place. Rather, they make a few assumptions – that Jesus was both God and Man, that he was perfectly human except that he lived sinlessly, that he was as fully God as he was fully human, that his two natures are still one rather than making him two separate beings – and any discussion the fundamentalists have after that are just questions of mechanics and logistics and results, rather than questioning the basic doctrines themselves.

So. We have the Redeemer as they see him: Jesus the Christ. The title “the Christ,” meaning the “anointed one,” refers to the long-standing Jewish practise of anointing someone with oil when they enter a leadership role. The anointing symbolizes the authority of the Spirit of God, descending onto the person to enable him to fulfill his role. In Jesus’ case, his anointing with the Spirit was literal, rather than symbolic, when the Spirit descended to him in person at his baptism and God’s voice announced that this was his Son. And so Jesus received the title: the Christ.

At the end of his sinless life, and a few short years of teaching and ministry to the needy, came at last the sacrifice that fundamentalists believe was prophesied to Adam and Eve thousands of years earlier, just after they had eaten the forbidden fruit and fallen into sin.

And here another question arises. Why could Jesus not simply have just died, rather than first be rejected so violently by the Jewish and Roman authorities, then tortured, then executed? One of the reasons offered by fundamentalists is that mere bloodshed wasn’t sufficient to atone for the offenses of Man – there had to be extreme suffering involved as well. (There were no hints, though, that the millions of sacrificed animals in the Old Testament were tortured before being sacrificed, even though they were supposed to prefigure Jesus’ sacrifice.) The more blood and gore the better, as far as fundamentalists are concerned. The extreme suffering supports one of their favorite doctrines: that the sin of the human race is really, really bad, so evil and bad that it’s almost unforgivable. So to atone for it, there has to be some really, really bad and nasty punishment. (This is undoubtedly one reason why fundamentalists generally adored Mel Gibson’s gory movie about the crucifixion, despite his being one of those “not-real-Christian” Roman Catholics.)

But fundamentalists would offer another reason why the torture and suffering happened. This would be that sinful people simply DO reject the purity of God and his teachings. Humans are so sinful and wicked that even if God himself came down, in love and mercy, to try to reconcile with them, they would always in their pride reject him furiously. The torture and the crucifixion simply prove, to fundamentalists, that humanity really is in a state of evil, and really is in need of redemption.

But there’s no denying that the torture, bloodshed, and violent death were pre-planned by God. For some reason, Jesus couldn’t just have his throat slit in the temple, like all the foreshadowing sacrificial animals, and let his own blood be sufficient for the atonement. There had to be suffering too.

One can see, rather graphically, why fundamentalists major so much on the holiness and judgement of God rather than the love and mercy. When they do speak of love and mercy, it is in the context of saying, “See what he horribly suffered because he loved you, because it was necessary to save you?? If you can reject that magnitude of love, then you deserve all the horrible suffering of hell!” So even love is intricately connected with death and judgement, always. There is no mercy except what is bought and paid for, violently. This goes a long way to explain many fundamentalist attitudes toward non-believers.

But to summarize, before we go on. Why is Jesus not just a “good man”? Because he had to be not just “good” but completely sinless, to qualify to stand in for sinful humanity. And he couldn’t just be a man, because to make the sacrifice sufficient, he had to be as big as God, the one who was offended by sin. In fact, he had to be God. He lived life as a human being, facing all the temptations and trials we face (though with his godhood manifesting at frequent intervals), and then had to suffer rejection, torture, and a violent death, to appease God and make the sacrifice effective.

Next we need to examine just what this sacrifice actually accomplished -- and why, even though it was supposedly sufficient for everybody, not everybody will be "saved" by it.

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