Fundamentalist?

Catholic New Times, June 6, 2004 by Douglas McNamara

The way that the term "fundamentalist" is being used in the CNT review of Gibson's Passion is such that anyone who actually believes that Christ is the definitive self-interpretation of the Father, who believes that he is the Second Person of the Trinity and that he rose again physically from the dead, and who believes that Scripture is inspired of God and is His word about us, not merely our word about Him, is a fundamentalist. Hence, Henri DeLubac, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Karl Rahner, etc are all fundamentalists.

We've always lived in a world of comprehensive change; this is not new. The change from a Ptolemaic universe to a Newtonian universe was comprehensive, the change from a Newtonian universe to an Einsteinian universe was comprehensive. These changes did not necessitate a radically new way of interpreting scripture. Theological knowledge and scientific knowledge are discontinuous spheres, and a change in the one does not affect a change in the other. But the CNT review assumes that they do, that a new cosmology requires that scripture be re-interpreted as if it is intimately intertwined with the old cosmology.

Douglas McNamara

Vaughan, Ont.