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Document Details : Title: Met de kennis van God zelf Subtitle: De gnostiek van het protestants fundamentalisme Author(s): VAN HARSKAMP, Anton Journal: Tijdschrift voor Theologie Volume: 49 Issue: 1 Date: 2009 Pages: 44-60 DOI: 10.2143/TVT.49.1.3203459 Abstract : Today it is not unusual to see fundamentalism as both modern and anti-modern and, according to philosophers Marc De Kesel and Donald Loose as a contorted phenomenon within which people affirm religion’s modern subjectivity while, at the same time, denying it by appealing to religion’s divine foundations. This essay examines this philosophical interpretation by drawing attention to a central religious characteristic of American Protestant fundamentalism. According to culture critic Harold Bloom, church historian Philip J. Lee and others, fundamentalism can only be understood when we realise that, thanks to its roots in the Calvinistic puritan tradition, it has become a religious current with gnostic dimensions. Although Calvin certainly was no gnostic, his work contains elements that in America’s religious history have come to resemble gnosticism. These include the accent on saving knowledge of God, the individual’s inner being into which divine light shines thanks to being born again, situating sin outside this and, we must not forget, the strong depreciation of the physical, material and non-spiritual world. We can discern gnostic dimensions in the fundamentals of this religious current in the doctrines of the virgin birth, Christ’s divinity and the Bible’s infallibility. Nevertheless, fundamentalism’s attempts to deny its own gnosticism has turned this religious current into a spectre of modern, liberal, highly individualised Protestantism because it reminds Protestantism of the potential loss of the sola scriptura principle and what has been called the Protestant principle (Paul Tillich). |
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