Orthodoxy and Fundamentalism

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I’m not sure what the question is, and I see don’t much relationship between the two, other than both are Christian. :confused:

If by Fundamentalism, you mean the American Fundamentalist movement, I’m familiar with it, and can go along with its historic “five fundamentals”, but so could nearly every other conservative evangelical. Beyond that, I don’t have much in common with them.

Orthodoxy has a lot of things right (I agree with their particular version of panentheism, with their view of heaven and hell, and probably with more that I don’t even know about yet), but I’m not about to convert.
 
What exactly are we comparing about them? They’re quite dissimilar, I would say.
 
Never met anyone in either camp, so let me just stereotype.

Fundamentalist: Very zealous for what they believe; anti-Catholic; Conservative in politics and in their social views; an extreme form of Baptist; live in alabama

Orthodoxy: Very similar to Catholicism; they do very little evangelizing; members are conservative; live in Greece; anti-West;
 
I’m interested in whether people see Orthodoxy as having a fundamentalist side, whether it comes from within, or has been imported from Protestant fundamentalism. I feel that I’ve been seeing this more prominently in my reading on Orthodoxy, and I find it a bit disturbing.😦
 
Bluegoat said:
I’m interested in whether people see Orthodoxy as having a fundamentalist side, whether it comes from within, or has been imported from Protestant fundamentalism. I feel that I’ve been seeing this more prominently in my reading on Orthodoxy, and I find it a bit disturbing.😦
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If you are referring to Holy Orthodoxy vs Protestant Fundamentalism, Orthodoxy has it’s roots in the Middle East and Europe for many hundreds of years, so any speculation about cross fertilization has to take into account that Protestant Fundamentalism has 19th century American roots.

If you are referring to attitudes that is a different matter.
 
Bluegoat said:
I’m interested in whether people see Orthodoxy as having a fundamentalist side, whether it comes from within, or has been imported from Protestant fundamentalism. I feel that I’ve been seeing this more prominently in my reading on Orthodoxy, and I find it a bit disturbing.😦
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I’m curious to know what you have read to lead you to this conclusion. I’ve read books by Ware, Zizioulas, Guroian, Florovsky, and others, and see very little in comparison to Protestant fundamentalism.

Sometimes I’ve come across some hardcore Orthodox attitudes on websites like orthodoxinfo.com/ - but nothing really different IMHO than the attitudes of hardcore believers of any group of Christians. Certainly nothing that has been imported from Protestant fundamentalism.

The best Orthodox blog out there is “Glory to God for All Things” by Fr. Stephen Freeman - follow his writings for awhile and I think you’ll see a huge difference between the Orthodox mindset and the fundamentalist mindset.

fatherstephen.wordpress.com/
 
Hesychios said:
If you are referring to Holy Orthodoxy vs Protestant Fundamentalism, Orthodoxy has it’s roots in the Middle East and Europe for many hundreds of years, so any speculation about cross fertilization has to take into account that Protestant Fundamentalism has 19th century American roots.

If you are referring to attitudes that is a different matter.
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Both really. And maybe neither. Not very helpful.😊

I think fundamentalism is more that a particular movement in America. We see it in lots of religions, in different times. So to some extent I am thinking about it that way.

Also, while Orthodoxy and American fundamentalism have different roots, they have existed together for some time, so I don’t see why one couldn’t influence the other. A good example of this might be the arguments I’ve seen by some Orthodox Christians about evolution. They are pretty much taken right from the big book of American Fundamentalist arguments, and the people who make them seem to have absorbed some of the same underlying ways of thinking.

But I am having trouble putting my finger on just what it is I’m trying to describe, which is why I left the OP so open and general - I was hoping someone else might have more insight into what I meant. I’ve up till recently thought of Orthodoxy as being about Christian Churches, with orthodox belief and practice of Tradition, who recognize each other as orthodox and have apostolic succession through laying on of hands. But it’s come to my attention that for a lot of people, that isn’t enough, or what constitutes Tradition is a lot broader than I thought. There’s almost a kind of feeling of manifest destiny, or to me it reminds me of fundamentalism somehow.

Anyway, I’m not sure what it is, or how it fits into Orthodoxy, but I’d like to figure it out.
 
Bluegoat said:
I’m interested in whether people see Orthodoxy as having a fundamentalist side, whether it comes from within, or has been imported from Protestant fundamentalism. I feel that I’ve been seeing this more prominently in my reading on Orthodoxy, and I find it a bit disturbing.😦
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Depends on your definition of ‘fundamentalist’. If used in the modern usage, there are ‘fundamentalist Catholics’. Obviously an oxymoron in both history, theology and intellectual capacity, but accepted by people with a simplistic understanding of the word.
Historical, classic fundamentalism views the Orthodox Church in the same way it does the Catholic Church.
In my fundamentalist days I heard a preacher refer to the Orthodox as “the eastern breast of the women of Revelation 17”. Of course, he didn’t say it in quite that way, he used common language, which displayed his inability to communicate in a spiritual and adult fashion.
You will find extremists in all groups. The Orthodox Church are brothers and sisters in Christ.
 
Hesychios said:
If you are referring to Holy Orthodoxy vs Protestant Fundamentalism, Orthodoxy has it’s roots in the Middle East and Europe for many hundreds of years, so any speculation about cross fertilization has to take into account that Protestant Fundamentalism has 19th century American roots.

If you are referring to attitudes that is a different matter.
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Another thing popped into my mind when thinking on this subject. Fundamentalism is based on the notion of Sola Scriptura. One of the issues that divides the Catholic Church from the Orthodox Church is the Papacy. As I understand it (please correct me if I am wrong, I am unfamiliar with the Orthodox), the Orthodox would not debate that issue based on the concept of Scripture alone, as they too reject that fundamentalist idea.
 
JustaServant said:
Another thing popped into my mind when thinking on this subject. Fundamentalism is based on the notion of Sola Scriptura. One of the issues that divides the Catholic Church from the Orthodox Church is the Papacy. As I understand it (please correct me if I am wrong, I am unfamiliar with the Orthodox), the Orthodox would not debate that issue based on the concept of Scripture alone, as they too reject that fundamentalist idea.
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Protestant fundamentalism insists on sola scriptura as one of its fundamentals. Catholic fundamentalism includes selected texts from the Fathers, or Popes. Islamic or Jewish fundamentalism doesn’t insist on either. Neither do atheist fundamentalists.

I think all these kinds of fundamentalism have some things in common: they are essentially reactionary; they fail to see the forest for the trees; they can’t discern between the essentials and the inessentials or understand how to apply principles; they take questionable items as self-evident and immovable. And I’m sure other things too.
 
JustaServant said:
Depends on your definition of ‘fundamentalist’. If used in the modern usage, there are ‘fundamentalist Catholics’. Obviously an oxymoron in both history, theology and intellectual capacity, but accepted by people with a simplistic understanding of the word.
Historical, classic fundamentalism views the Orthodox Church in the same way it does the Catholic Church.
In my fundamentalist days I heard a preacher refer to the Orthodox as “the eastern breast of the women of Revelation 17”. Of course, he didn’t say it in quite that way, he used common language, which displayed his inability to communicate in a spiritual and adult fashion.
You will find extremists in all groups. The Orthodox Church are brothers and sisters in Christ.
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I’m not worried about extremists and wack-jobs (secular, fundamentalist, or just nutty), who indeed do exist in any large group. What I’m rather perturbed about is when I start to see these ideas coming from people that are not extremists and wack-jobs, and regular priests. In the same way that I think it is sensible for people within Catholicism or Anglicanism to be concerned with the secularism and religious liberalism that is seen among so many average parishioners.
 
It’s good to define terms. Based on your clarified definition, there are certainly “fundamentalists” in every faith. But i think you’d be better served by using the word ‘reactionaries.’

Just as there are catholics out there ready to consign every non-catholic to hell based on an arcane interpretation of the catholic teaching that Christ established the Church as the vehicle through which all Grace flows, there are EO who see all catholics as heretics at best and all protestants as further decayed heretics. But you can’t judge a whole group by the loons that offshoot from it, so what’s the point?

I once met a self described community of “independent orthodox” christians. They had been an evangelical/charismatic community and learned enough Church history to recognize how lacking they were without the sacraments. Somehow they decided they could appoint their own priest and requisition EO divine liturgy, architecture and practices without any formal ties to a genuine EO community. Weird stuff is everywhere!
 
manualman said:
I once met a self described community of “independent orthodox” christians. They had been an evangelical/charismatic community and learned enough Church history to recognize how lacking they were without the sacraments. Somehow they decided they could appoint their own priest and requisition EO divine liturgy, architecture and practices without any formal ties to a genuine EO community. Weird stuff is everywhere!
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There was a group like this who started in the Protestant missionary outreach called Campus Crusade. This group started to establish house churches and began to look into the history of Christianity because they wanted to be just like the original Christians. So they would have one guy researching liturgical history, another researching the history of the church, another researching early Christian beliefs, etc. Slowly they began adopting Orthodox practices as their own. Eventually they formed what was called the Evangelical Orthodox Church. Continuing their research, they discovered the mainline Eastern Orthodox Church, believed it to be the one Church established by God, and most sought and were brought into the Antiochian Orthodox Church in America. You can read about in in Fr. Peter Gillquist’s book called Becoming Orthodox: A Journey to the Ancient Christian Faith. I’m pretty sure there are some still in the Evangelical Orthodox Church but most joined communion with the Antiochian Orthodox Church in America, at least from my understanding.
 
Etymologically, orthodoxy means “stright/ upright/ correct thought” i.e. correct doctrine.
fundamentalism means “adherence to the fundamentals” i.e. interpreting the Scripture as literal.

Of course, the terms are frequently used in other ways that this, but these are what the terms mean. Orthodoxy is concerned with having true/ correct doctrine, fundamentalism is concerned with how one reads the Scriptures.

That being said, depending on where one is situated doctrinally would decide whether the terms overlap or not.

As a Lutheran, I see these as two separate things. And before any LCMS or WELS folks jump on me for saying that, what I mean is that the particular style of “literalism” preached by the Fundamentalists is at odds with Lutheran doctrine, most noticeably concerning Baptism and Holy Communion.
 
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