Barefoot in the wilderness
in search of understanding

A Challenge to Fundamentalists by Keith Ward

Sven has written a review of What The Bible Really Teaches: A Challenge to Fundamentalists by Keith Ward. This sounds like an excellent book, both for those who think that fundamentalism has the “correct” understanding of the Bible and hence of the Christian faith, and for those who try to talk to fundamentalists. In this book, Ward is taking on fundamentalism and showing how its “biblical” beliefs are actually nothing of the sort but instead arise from a very selective picking and choosing of verses and interpretations.

I have tried to set out what the Bible teaches on a number of issues that fundamentalists get wrong…On all of these subjects the Bible actually teaches the opposite of what fundamentalists say…They impose an authoritarian interpretation of the Bible that is as dogmatic as any medieval Catholic theology, and usually less informed. They make their faith even more exclusive than that of those Catholics who claimed that there is no salvation outside of the church. And they make intellectual assent to ‘sound’ doctrines a more important test of Christian faith than life by the Spirit…The greatest tragedy of fundamentalism is that it gets the Bible wrong. (Quotation from the book.)

pax et bonum