Into the Wardrobe

Hi all,

My question is pretty simple, though the answer might be complicated. What are the characteristics of a 'fundamentalist' Christian? In other words, what beliefs or practices make someone a fundamentalist?

And I have a related question: is someone who attends a church that people consider 'fundamentalist' automatically fundamentalist himself? (That may seem like an odd question, but lots of people who are not particularly Orthodox nonetheless attend Orthodox synagogues.)

And here's another related question: is an Evangelical Christian and a fundamentalist Christian the same thing?

I'm not looking to argue or debate about Christian fundamentalism, by the way. I'm just trying to understand what the label 'fundamentalist' means.

~Rosemary

Some time ago, I started a thread here by asking what the word 'evangelical' meant. After studying the many replies I got and doing some outside research, I came to this conclusion:

"For most purposes I'll accept and use this bare-bones definition of ‘evangelical’: a person or group to whom the gospel of Christ is of great importance in how they think and how they live. Such a person or group is likely to be very active in promoting, in one way or another, Christian beliefs and values--understood in somewhat (or even considerably) different ways by various evangelical persons and groups."

So, by this definition, evangelicals may or may not hold such fundamentalist beliefs as Biblical inerrancy and the historicity of miracles like the virgin birth of Jesus.

Hmmm. While some evangelicals do have different approaches to scripture than the inerrantist one, I don't think you'd find any who would disbelieve in the virgin birth. Almost by definition they wouldn't then be evangelicals, at least as the term is currently used to describe that group. There are broader definitions of 'evangelical', of course, but I don't think that's what JRosemary was asking about.

Leslie--

Could you tell us how you think about the Bible? For instance, do you interpret it all very literally or much of it as metaphor? Your answer would help clear up for me some uncertainties I feel about non-Fundamentalist Evangelicalism.