It sounded like a slur. It felt like a slur. "Fundamentalist!" I was serving on our diocesan human sexuality commission and the term came up frequently, usually in some derogatory manner. Although I was never actually called one, I found myself oddly in sympathy with those being maligned, even though it brought up images of racist, sexist bigots who were not only homophobic but mean and violent as well as ignorant and stupid.

I decided to do a little research on the topic. What I found was surprising. Fundamentalism originally was a movement to counter the liberalism of the late 19th- and early 20th-century protestant churches. German higher criticism was de rigueur (sound familiar?) and Darwinian evolution was the explanation for every issue that faced society. There was a group, including Anglicans, who said that there was a need to retain some basics of the faith, i.e., "fundamentals" that are unassailable. Over several years five fundamentals were established and the first four, as an orthodox Christian, I embrace unequivocally:

As I reflected on my own training more than 25 years ago, I remembered how strong was the message: "Don't take the written word at face value. Demythologize the text. Look for the interjection of the primi- tive church. Always check the credibility of the text with external sources. Never underestimate the human agenda." Quickly we learned the specifics: Moses did not write the Pentateuch, David didn't write the psalms, Solomon didn't write Proverbs and Paul didn't write many of the letters attributed to him. I was taught a hermeneutic of suspicion.

We Anglicans have never been in the sola scriptura camp of many in the protestant traditions. We do have Hooker's three-legged stool of scripture, tradition and reason, and the Chicago Lambeth Quadrilateral statement of "The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, as 'containing all things necessary to salvation,' and as being the rule and ultimate standard of faith?"

What does it mean to have the Old and New Testaments be the "rule and ultimate standard of faith." If I had been taught to be suspicious of the text, how could it be both rule and ultimate standard? This was a poser.

Finally, it hit me that what was said in the liturgy on Sunday morning also needed to be believed in everyday application. If one said, "The Word of the Lord" after the reading of the lesson, why wouldn't it be the "Word of the Lord" in everyday life? It struck me as being either cavalier or schizophrenic to affirm God's word in the liturgy but not from the pulpit or in my teaching or even in my private life. I made a simple and significant transition. I started affirming that when the Bible speaks, God speaks. It became clear that I was to be interpreted by the text, rather than the other way around. God was calling me to submit to the text. I began to realize that scripture is meant to be taken literally much more than it is allegorically. There was and is tension. Various authors, literary genres, historical uncertainty, and unclear translations make misinterpretation always possible with all the correlating risks of bad science from Genesis 1 and 2, or the gospels being taken as literal biographies of Jesus and so on. I simply affirmed that when the scriptures speak, God speaks. In reflection, it made the oaths I swore at my ordinations both to the diaconate and to the priesthood much more profound: "I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God."

As I reflected further, I moved from the old emphasis of the Bible being a library (biblios=library) and started viewing it as a cohesive whole. Soon I found the delight of scripture interpreting scripture. Article XX of the Articles of Religion states, "It is not lawful for the church to ... so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another." Somehow in the great plurality of authors there is this common theme of God speaking to those who would read and hear. The author of 2 Timothy put it this way: "All Scripture is God breathed ..." (2 Tim. 3:16). If I have trouble with cohesion, the problem is with me, not with the text.

So in conclusion, I have decided that external sources do not get to trump the text, no matter how unsettling it may be. When the Bible speaks, God does speak and there is power and authority and trustworthiness that I had not seen in my prior training. So in the future, when I hear the word "fundamentalist" I will think of it less as being a slur and more of what I believe from and in my heart. o

The Rev. Bryce McProud is the rector of St. Matthew's Church, Eugene, Ore., and chaplain of the University of Oregon.