Not feeling a need to restrict this blog to matters strictly concerned with creation and its theology, I picked up this recently on Michael Jensen's website.
The blog by Michael seems to have attracted a lot of debate, and I added my two bits worth. Below for ease of reference.
"I note that there is a cross current of arguments about fundamentalism, but no real definition. Is the word used here as journalists typically use it: with a range from 'bible believing' to simply kooky, and melding all together, or is it used with reference aperjoratively to the set of books issued in the 1930s as a statement against modern North American liberalism of the fundamentals of christian faith; a set of propositions that largely, at the time, I understand, defined orthodox evangelicalism. See here.
If it's the latter, then I guess I'm a fundamentalist, but that does not mean that I fall for faith as the atheist would accuse me (believing with no evidence, which is not biblical faith at all), or that I see answers to everything in the Bible. What it does mean is that I take the Bible as definitonal of my view of the world and its relationships. It sets up a framework by which I attempt to construct understanding: these understandings I am wont to doubt, but their basis I am probably not.
So what is the argument between Sam, John and the others?
BTW, I would agree that orthodox Christianity provides a better position from which to doubt than atheism (and I think that modern atheism is a weird type of Christian heresy anyway) because at least it provides a basis for persons that extends validity beyond the merely material and elevates doubt to the level of meaningful, rather than the random."
I known it is not possible to read too much into blog posts, but it seems to me that there is something missing from the analysis implicit in Michael's blog. That is, our 'first motion of the intellect' is belief. We can get nowhere if we do not first believe...something. All else follows, but our beliefs will determine finally how we see the world and our place in it. So, in a sense, everyone has a religious position. Everyone bases their thought life on taking something as having an independent reality. For most of us, this is sub-articulate, that is, taken, but not stated.
Thus to accuse 'fundamentalists' such as myself, but with the definition, that I take the Bible to be inerrent and the inspired communication of God to humanity, and so the statement from the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy: "2. Holy Scripture, being God's own Word, written by men prepared and superintended by His Spirit, is of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches: it is to be believed, as God's instruction, in all that it affirms, obeyed, as God's command, in all that it requires; embraced, as God's pledge, in all that it promises."
I hope Michael had this in mind, and did not fall into the trap of taking the popular definition, that 'fundamentalists' are socially or politically militant or archly conservantive, or somehow hard against human frailties. Not so in my case, but I don't want to go to politics or social questions here.
My concern is that Michael seemed to allow himself a fairly uncritical engagement with the structure of theoretical thinking that must start with a belief position, and for Christians above all, that belief position has to be found in the Bible, and nowhere else. A number of statements in the Bible, by Paul and others, bolster this view. I think particularly of Col 2:8, and 2 Cor 10:5.
