One can be fundamental in faith, without taking on the heavy scowl of fundamentalism. It is vital to a life of faith that one is fundamental. But you don't have to put dogma above people - and therein lies the difference.

Jesus taught that the two greatest of all God's moral mandates are that we love God with all that we have and are and that we love our neighbour as ourselves. As a friend of mine, Steve Chalke, likes to say, 'intimacy with God always leads to involvement with the community.'

Anyone who has made even a cursory reading of the life of Christ, will know that Jesus had more problems dealing with the hyper-religious Pharisees and Sadducees than he did with the common people, or even with die-hard social outcasts.

The Pharisees saw themselves as the divinely appointed protectors of the Mosaic Law. Ostensibly to do their people a favour, to stop Israelis accidentally breaking the law of Moses - which was hard to do, given the fact that the law was so clear and detailed - the Pharisees invented a heavy code of extra laws.

This is where they ran up against a wall of contention in the teaching and example of the carpenter-come-preacher from Nazareth.

Jesus refused to worship a creed or dogma. He whole-heartedly embraced the law of Moses - without the Pharisaic appendices - yet he always claimed that the law was given for the benefit of people, rather than for their harm.

Jesus' thinking on the law is summed up in his classic line, 'The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.' Divine law was given for humanity's enrichment, not for its enslavement.

The apostle Paul taught that the law was necessary until Christ appeared, partly because it held back the worst impulses of humanity - or, at least of Israel - until the true Saviour could do his full and final work.

Adherence to religious law, said Paul - a former leading Pharisee himself - could never save anyone's soul. Only faith in God's sacrifical gift of his Son could accomplish that.

This later became the foundation stone for the Christian Reformation, which reshaped history.

True people of faith, at least as Jesus taught it, are those who allow an inner change of heart, born out of a relationship with God, to empower them to serve humanity. True faith is never destructive; it releases, it does not seek to enslave.

One can be fundamental in faith, without taking on the heavy scowl of fundamentalism.