ExFundie

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.

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