Magically Fundamental

Jon Meachem in the NY Times breaks it down:

Then, significantly, MacCulloch adds, “I live with the puzzle of wondering how something so apparently crazy can be so captivating to millions of other members of my species.” That puzzle confronts anyone who approaches Christianity with a measure of detachment. The faith, MacCulloch notes, is “a perpetual argument about meaning and ­reality.”

This is not a widely popular view, for it transforms the “Jesus loves me! This I know / For the Bible tells me so” ethos of Sunday schools and vacation Bible camps into something more complicated and challenging: what was magical is now mysterious. Magic means there is a spell, a formula, to work wonders. Mystery means there is no spell, no formula — only shadow and impenetrability and hope that one day, to borrow a phrase T. S. Eliot borrowed from Julian of Norwich, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

via Book Review – Christianity – The First Three Thousand Years – By Diarmaid MacCulloch – Review – NYTimes.com.

And that’s why fundamentalism, which tries to put God in a box, is problematic from the get go for me.

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.