Years ago I taught Crime and Punishment to high school seniors and the main character Raskolnikov describes the moment before he murdered the pawnbroker: “I saw clear as daylight how strange it is that not a single person living in this mad world has had the daring to go straight for it all and send it flying to the devil! I…I wanted to have the daring…and I killed her.”
Scholars who study fundamentalism describe the process that moves a person wrestling with internal conflict to a sense of clarity that can sometimes be lethal. When everything that was confusing – even contradictory – is suddenly clear, there is a rush of energy and certainty that often literally flings a person into action.
The moment the conflict is resolved there is an explosive force of purest logic for the one who has struggled. It all makes sense, and the course is clear. No more holding back. I suspect that deadly clarity is what the older brother experienced last week in Boston. A flash of insight, daring and certainty without much thought about the consequences for others or himself. The inconsistencies of life had been settled for him.
We sometimes equate Old Testament figures with violent fundamentalism and figures that eliminate moral conflict in similar ways. There are instances of that, but there are examples of just the opposite. There are those few who are called to live not only with uncertainty but with agonizing questions about God and His purposes that are never reconciled. The answer is not in the back of the book.
I’m thinking of Samuel when the people asked for a king. God told him it was an evil choice, and Samuel knew it to be wrong as well. Yet God did not say, “Talk them out of it.” Instead his response was more like, “You and I know this is wrong – it is worse than merely wrong – it is evil. However, in spite of our anger we are going to anoint what we know to be wrong. Not just choose the best of a bad lot but to anoint a chosen king. We are going to put ourselves at risk in their choice.”
How could God contradict himself that way? If it was wrong then he should either punish them for it or tell them they were on their own now. He cannot anoint a king and ask Samuel to be complicit in it.
I read that Dietrich Bonhoeffer struggled in the same way: “Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God – the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God.”
For some the only way to make sense of life is forcibly to remove the conflict and often take others with them. Others easily choose to ignore it. For a few, God has called them to risk everything they believe to be true and fling themselves out like Samuel or Abraham in absolute faith no matter how irrational or contradictory it seems.
There are conflicts and inconsistencies – even paradoxes – in life that we cannot resolve. In fact, there is some danger to ourselves and others when we force the world to “make sense” or to come to a purely logical conclusion. That is the distorting nature of fundamentalism. It offers us cheap relief from obedience to a God who is not always who he seems to be.