Tethered to what?

Amy asks a good question in the comments to yesterday's post: "What's up with the 'Christians can be such jerks' posts lately?"

I posted the previous two entries quite deliberately, to make this point extremely clear:

Fundamentalism is the not the cultural model of Christianity that I want anything to do with.

At the same time, when you look at the history of fundamentalism, at one time they were the people standing for the truth of the Bible against a growing movement of people "demythologizing" the Bible -- meaning that all the miraculous stuff like the virgin birth, feeding five thousand, healings, exorcisms, and yes, even the resurrection of Jesus, were considered "unscientific" and therefore mythological.

What fundamentalism became -- an extremely conservative, legalistic, more-separate-than-thou subcultural phenomenon -- came later. At the outset, these were the people saying - loud and clear - that the Bible was actually telling the truth.

In this increasingly post-modern era, there has been a lot of talk about "post-evangelical" and "emerging" theology. Several people have even suggested that I do some writing on "post-charismatic theology" (which I am planning to do, but only after much more research from a wide variety of sources).

Some people are horrified that postmodern, emergent people (or "pomergent" as Mitch has suggested -- which is a tongue-in-cheek label that I rather enjoy) are even thinking of deconstructing theology. As Justin pointed out in several conversations and over on his blog: "If a religion/church is to evolve and adapt offering furthering interpretations of doctrine, wouldn't that just dilute their doctrine?"

Charles Kraft offers a helpful suggestion in his classic missiological work, "Christianity in Culture: A Study in Dynamic Biblical Theologizing in Cross-Cultural Perspective": that we need to approach any cross-cultural contextualization of theology using the analogy of a "tether" -- a stake that is driven into the ground, to which we are tied. We are free to roam around the perimeter of area that the tether allows, but at some point, we reach the end of our theological chain which is a "thus far and no farther" marker, preventing us from falling into what Justin warns about.

So, not unlike the original fundamentalists, we have to nail down what constitutes the tether. Fundamentalists became known as such because of their insistence on "The Fundamentals" of the Christian faith. Whatever their cultural expression may have devolved into, their original intent was to define what was truly orthodox, historically in line with the traditions and teachings of the church, and would therefore represent the "thus far and no farther" of Christian theology.

So, keeping in mind from my last two posts that I'm not advocating Fundamentalism as we see it today, the question I am advancing for discussion is:

What are the 'fundamentals' today that will constitute the tether that will keep any pomergent deconstruction from wandering into error, irrelevance, or even rank heresy?

What are the absolute essentials of our faith, which transcend both modern and postmodern thinking (since neither is actually a friend of faith)?

What is the tether that allows us to re-imagine how we communicate beliefs that we hold as timeless in our current cultural milieu?