Fundamentalism and the Psychology of Violence

       Recently I began what I hoped would become a dialogue with a fundamentalist. That is, I asked on-line for a free copy of the Quran, and in due time it arrived in the mail. After a decent delay, the people who kindly supplied it to me emailed me to ask what I thought of it. It was, of course, not so much an interested query as an attempt at conversion, but that was fair enough, and politely asked, and completely expected.
       In a similar spirit of brotherly conversation between two men of good will, I replied that I had read the Quran in its entirety, and had a couple of questions. One was how in the surah “The Story” the Old Testament figures Pharaoh and Haman were portrayed as contemporaries, since Pharaoh was an Egyptian (dating from ca. 1400 B.C., and Haman was a Persian, dating from ca. 500 B.C. (Their stories are found in the Biblical books of Exodus and Esther respectively.) The surah in question portrayed them as speaking with one another. How could this be, I asked, since they were separated one from another by hundreds of miles and about 900 years? I also asked how in the surah “Women” it was denied that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified and a look-alike killed in his place, since all reputable scholars and historians accept the Crucifixion as an historical fact.
       My Muslim friend replied at great and generous (and courteous) length. Most of his reply consisted of an argument that Jesus was not crucified, arguing from, of all things, the Letter to the Hebrews. (For those unfamiliar with this New Testament letter, the self-offering of Jesus on the Cross is its center-piece and main theme.) He didn’t spend much time on my first query about Pharaoh and Haman, but disposed of my objection by simply asserting that the Haman with whom Pharaoh spoke was his “prime minister who happened to have the same name of that person who lived in Persia; it is just the same name and not the same person”. That was the sum total of his reply.
        Here, I submit, is the voice of fundamentalism. The scenario my Muslim friend is suggesting is rather like that of a school boy writing an historical paper and asserting in it that Napoleon once had a conversation with Mao-Tse-Tung, and when being told that this was impossible, replying that “of course it was entirely different Mao-Tse-Tung”. No educated person would give this serious consideration. If it was an educated historian who suggested such a thing, there might be a further request for sources. But a school boy, without prior historical credentials, would correctly be written off as not knowing what he was talking about.
     The Quran is, I believe, similarly lacking in historical credentials: it mistakes the son bound by Abraham in Genesis 22 as Ishmael when it was Isaac; it mistakes the woman who found Moses in the bulrushes as Pharaoh’s wife, when the Exodus account says it was his daughter. And, of course, it manages to deny altogether the historicity of Jesus’ crucifixion. These elementary errors of historical fact do nothing to establish the Quran’s historical reliability. It seems clear that it was written by a brilliant story-teller who had only a passing and inaccurate knowledge of Jewish and Christian traditions. The conversation of Pharaoh with Haman clearly is one such anachronistic inaccuracy. The Quran’s author had obviously heard from Jewish sources of two villains who persecuted the Jews, Pharaoh and Haman, and assumed that one worked for the other. To try to deny this by saying “of course it was an entirely different Haman” is fundamentalism. (I thought of asking my Muslim friend how an Egyptian prime minister came to have a Persian name, but decided against it.)
       I have met many fundamentalists in my time—Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, even some Christians. All have the same characteristic. For them, outer fact is determined in advance by their dogma, and no argument is allowed to dislodge this priority. That is, their dogma or belief is the prism through which they view and judge all of the real world around them. If their dogma says “Elvis is alive and living in Oregon”, then Elvis is alive, regardless of what any exhumation in Graceland may prove. If it says, “There is a Jesuit conspiracy running and corrupting the Protestant seminaries”, then there is such a conspiracy, and no amount of argumentation or accumulation of facts will prove otherwise. (This last example is a real one, odd as that sounds.) If it says, “The sky is not blue, but green”, then the sky is green. All the world but them may see it differently, but will be written off as colour-blind, for the sky must be green. When dealing with the fundamentalist, argument is unavailing.
       This means that for the fundamentalist, at least when he is arguing his case, the opponent is not fully real. He is not a three-dimensional person, with all the credibility real persons bring with them. He is one-dimensional, and therefore not fully human. The one arguing with the fundamentalist that there is, in fact, no Jesuit conspiracy corrupting Protestant seminaries is written off as simply a dupe. He is to be discounted, given no weight. That is why the argument goes nowhere, because the fundamentalist is not really listening. It is not actually a dialogue, but a monologue. The person with whom the fundamentalist is arguing is not really a person, he is “the Other”, the unbeliever, the infidel. He is part of Babylon, of the Dar al-Harb, the “house of war”. He exists not to be listened to but to be converted.
       It is just here, I suggest, that all fundamentalism carries within it an inner psychology of violence, whether or no this latent psychology and tendency produces bodily violence. It is not that fundamentalists are necessarily violent or aggressive persons. That depends entirely on the fundamentalist, and it is not my point. My point is that all fundamentalism tends to see the neighbour not as a real person, but as a target, a threat, something to eliminate—either by conversion, refutation, or by other means—if he threatens the dogma or world-view. Most people see their neighbours as other people like themselves—real persons with likes and dislikes, persons to be agreed or disagreed with, persons who share the same transit system, whose children share the same schools. They cheer for the same national hockey team in the Olympics as we do, and grumble under the same federal taxes. They are like us. But for the fundamentalist, the neighbour is not like himself, for he defines himself over against his neighbour, and as radically unlike him.
       This is the psychology of violence. If we fail to see our neighbour (that basic Biblical category) as like ourselves, we leave ourselves open to the possibility of doing him violence. That is why in any war the enemy to be killed must be first dehumanized. The Germans in the second world war were thus not like us. The German was “the kraut”. The Japanese were “the japs”. The Vietnamese were “the gooks”. In each case we refuse to see the Germans, the Japanese, the Vietnamese as basically like ourselves, with families and loved ones, with hopes and fears, with strengths and weaknesses. All the humanity of the neighbour has been stripped away; he is simply “the enemy”. That is why the higher ups on both sides in the first world war objected to the now-famous game of football with the “enemy” between the trenches on Christmas Eve. It was difficult to ask men to kill each after they had played together and shared tokens and showed each other pictures of their girl-friends and families. The men across No Man’s Land were no longer “the enemy”. Now they all had faces and names. They were no longer the Dar al-Harb. Now they were persons.
       People of different faiths will have conflicting dogmas and beliefs. But it is important that in our conversations with those of differing faiths that we maintain a dialogue, and not let it degenerate into a monologue. It is our neighbour to whom we called to offer our witness, not “the enemy”. As Orthodox Christians, we are called to faith, not to fundamentalism.

"Take Up and Read" part 2: How to Read the Scriptures

In our previous article about the importance of reading the Scriptures, we mentioned how a child’s words, providentially overheard by Augustine of Hippo, led to his conversion as he took up and read the Scriptures. “Take up and read” (“tolle, lege”, the words actually heard by the great North African teacher) should continue to resonate in our hearts too. If our lives are to bear fruit for Christ, we also need to take up and read the Bible, and make this a part of our daily life. The question is: how do we read the Scriptures? What things should we bring to our reading? I would mention four things.

1. The first thing we bring to our reading is a heart of humility and prayer, asking God to teach us through what we read. That is, we must read the Scriptures on our knees (spiritually speaking), or not at all. The most dangerous thing in the world is the read the Bible with a proud and unteachable spirit. God will not touch or teach with the person who approaches His Word in this way. “The Lord regards the lowly, but the haughty He knows from afar” (Ps. 139:6). Rather, “this is the man to whom I look: he that is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at My Word (Is. 66:2).

To be lowly and humble involves a willingness to be corrected. We all come from a secular culture, and we have absorbed many things from it, some of them true, some of them false. Because Scripture is not only the word of men, but also the Word of God, it stands apart from all the other literature of the world, in that its teachings are always true and reliable. Thus, when we read the Scripture we can expect some of our cherished beliefs to be blessed and confirmed, and some of them to be contradicted. Humility means the willingness not only to be confirmed when we are right, but also contradicted when we are wrong. As St. Augustine is reported to have once said, “If you only believe the parts of the Gospel you like, it is not the Gospel you believe in, but yourself.”

This faith in the reliability of Scripture is not Protestant fundamentalism (as some have imagined), but historic Orthodoxy. To quote St. Augustine more fully, “I have learned to hold those books alone of the Scriptures that are now called canonical in such reverence and honour that I do most firmly believe that none of their authors has erred in anything that he has written therein. If I find anything in those writings which seems to be contrary to the truth, I presume that either the codex is inaccurate, or the translator has not followed what was said, or I have not properly understood it.” We see here the mind of all the Fathers, east and west, and their saving willingness to be corrected from the Bible. As children of the Fathers, their willingness must be ours as well.

2. As well as imitating the humility of the Fathers, we read the Scriptures as those who have listened to their sermons and been instructed by them. We read the Bible, as it were, sitting in their lap, interpreting it in ways consistent with their interpretations. This is because before the apostles ever set pen to paper and wrote the New Testament, they also taught their churches through the living word, and these words were kept in those churches as oral tradition. The Fathers represent and carry this apostolic Tradition, and so Scripture can only be interpreted in ways consistent with what the Fathers have preserved.

This does not mean that we are to become patristic fundamentalists, so that for us exegesis becomes archaeology, a mere wooden repetition of what the Fathers have said. We are allowed the same freedom that they enjoyed. But it does mean that their basic approach is paradigmatic for us, and their basic conclusions authoritative. For example, if the patristic consensus about the New Testament is that it teaches that Jesus is divine, then any other conclusion is out of bounds. We cannot follow the creative heretics of the so-called “Jesus Seminar” in their Christological conclusions about the New Testament. We have sat and still sit at the feet of the Fathers.

3. Consistent with this patristic approach, we read the Old Testament to find Christ there. That is, the Old Testament, as well as the New Testament, points towards Jesus Christ, His Cross, His Resurrection, and His Church. This is how the apostles interpreted the Old Testament, and it points the way for us also. The Kingdom of God proclaimed by the prophets does not find its fulfillment in Zionism in this age, but in the preaching of the Gospel and the salvation offered the whole world by Christ. This means that we read the Old Testament differently from the Jews. Jews believe the ultimate fulfillment of the prophecies lies with the exaltation of the Jewish race, with a reestablished Temple and a triumphant nationalism. We assert that the Old Covenant finds its fulfillment in the Body of Christ, in the Church of God in which there is neither circumcision nor uncircumcision, but a new creation (Gal. 6:15), and in a salvation which transcends literal altars, and national boundaries, and the distinction between Jew and Gentile. As St. Justin the Philosopher said in his debates with his Jewish friend Trypho, Moses and the Prophets now belong to us.

4. Finally, we read the Scriptures with all our powers, including that of the mind. Reading in humility and hoping to be taught by God does not excuse us from sweat or scholarship. Scholarship is not to be despised, but all of its useful tools must be utilized, including Bible atlases, concordances, inter-linears, word studies, commentaries, scholarly journals, lexicons. The Fathers themselves prized such scholarship (that was one of the reasons Origen got a lot of fan mail), and they bequeath this love of learning to us also. The Lord tells us to love the Lord our God not only with all our heart, soul and strength, but also with all our mind (Mk. 12:30). Part of humility is the recognition that we need all the help we can get. God will bless us and enlighten us, but not if we use supposed piety as an excuse for laziness. Study involves work.

In many icons where a bishop is portrayed, he is portrayed as holding a Gospel. It is not accidental that our leaders are portrayed as holding this Book. We are “people of the Book”, a people for whom loving Jesus also means loving the Scriptures which His providence has given to the Church. Like St. Augustine and all his other episcopal colleagues, we also are called to take up the Book and read.