Abstract
Diana Eck, as part of her Harvard Religious Pluralism Project, seeks to understand “How a ‘Christian country’ has become the world's most religiously diverse nation,” in A New Religious America (HarperSanFrancisco, 2002).
Karen Armstrong, meanwhile, in The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (2000), reports that American Protestants were the first to use the term “fundamentalism,” a term they identified with the effort to go back to the “fundamentals” of Christian tradition to reemphasize the exclusive beliefs of the Christian tradition, “which they identified with a literal interpretation of Scripture and the acceptance of certain core doctrines” (x). American believers seem caught in a tectonic encounter between holding fast and moving forward.
Fundamentalist religion is, in Armstrong's study, a modern phenomenon and remains highly variable:
Each “fundamentalism” is a law unto itself and has its own dynamic. The term also gives the impression that fundamentalists are inherently conservative and wedded to the past, whereas their ideas are essentially modern and highly innovative. The American Protestants may have intended to go back to the “fundamentals,” but they did so in a peculiarly modern way [x].
What links fundamentalisms is that they are “embattled forms of spirituality, which have emerged as a response to a perceived crisis … a conflict with enemies whose secularist policies and beliefs seem inimical to religion itself.” An alternative to fundamentalist religion in modern religious consciousness is adaptive interpretation, creative response as social dynamic within a religious tradition. An interesting example of such creativity is found in Omid Safi's edited work, Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism (Oneworld Publications, 2003). Safi's introduction states the challenge:
In talking about social justice, gender issues, and pluralism, we are mindful to avoid the trap in which “Islam” becomes a façade for some contemporary political ideology. … Being a progressive Muslim means not simply thinking more about the Qur'an and the life of the Prophet, but also thinking about the life we share on this planet with all human beings and all living creatures. Seen in this light, our relationship to the rest of humanity changes the way we think about God, and vice versa [3].
Allowing present realities to inform canonical texts has long been the practice within biblical tradition. It is even evident within the books of the Bible. To speak of the Bible as a lived tradition seems clear in the reiteration of stories from the past to interpret the present, as well as reading back into the past what is in the present.
The present issue of BTB reflects on how this living tradition works.