FUNDAMENTALISM

Fundamentalism is that movement that arose in the United States during and immediately after the First World War in order to reaffirm the fundamentals of orthodox Protestant faith and to defend it against the challenges of liberal theology, German higher criticism, Darwinism, and other isms regarded as opposed to American Christianity. A series of twelve volumes of articles called The Fundamentals was published between 1910 and 1915 as a witness to the central doctrines and experiences of Protestant Christianity, and as a defense against numerous movements, cults, and citicisms of orthodoxy. This series of articles contained positive biblical exposition of the "fundamentals" of the Christian faith -- the inspiration and authority of the Scriptures, the deity, virgin birth, supernatural miracles, atoning death, physical resurrection from the dead, and the second personal return of Jesus Christ, the reality of sin, salvation by faith through spiritual regeneration, the power of prayer, and the duty of evangelism. With these expositions, there was also polemics against positions that opposed and rejected these "fundamenttals" -- Romanism, Darwinsim, "higher criticism," and such cults as Christian Science, Mormonism, Spiritualism, and Jehovah Witnesses.

These articles are usually associated with the founding of fundamentalism as a restatement of orthodox Protestant Christianity against of the liberal theology and modernism of the time. Three million individual copies of these articles were distributed free to English-speaking ministers, missionaries, and workers around the world. They were financed anomymously by "two Christian layman," Lyman and Milton Steward, wealthy California oil capitalists who donated the income from interest on some of their securities investments. These articles originated out of and was editorially controlled by persons in the Bible schools, revival, and independent church movements associated with the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA) and Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. The writers of the articles were a broad group from the English-speaking North America and the United Kingdom and from many denominations. They were Presbyterians, Anglicans, Baptists, Independents, and others. The doctrines they defined and defended covered the whole range of traditional Christian teachings. They presented their criticism fairly, with careful arguments, and in appreciation of much that their opponents said. As a group these authors represent the last of Victorian orthodoxy; all but nine of the thirty-seven most prominent were deceased by 1925, and of those, only six stood with fundamentalists in the church battles of that decade. The eighty-three articles covered these main themes:
(1) a statement and apologetic defense of the main Christian doctrines (for example, God, revelation, the incarnation, the atonement, the resurrection of Christ, the Holy Spirit, inspiration of the Scriptures);
(2) a defense of the Bible against the German higher criticism;
(3) a criticism of movements considered non-Christian (for example, Romanism, Eddyism, Mormonism, rationalism, Darwinism, socialism);
(4) an emphasis on evangelism and missions;
(5) a sample of personal testimonies by people telling how Christ worked in their lives.
Their aim was to help equip Protestant workers in ministeries to understand the new situation in Christianity, when alternatives to and departures from orthodoxy were numerous and successful. Many articles were devoted to the defense of Scriptures against German higher criticism. Dyson Hague, lecture at Wycliffe College, Toronto, Canada, had read the Germans carefully and appreciated their attempts to understand the authorship, literary forms, and the sources of the biblical texts. Hague pointed out that in their scholarship they depended upon the a priori assumption of naturalism and that there were valid alternatives in the treatments of higher criticism questions. Professor James Orr from Glasgow carefully distinguished between Darwinism and the evolutionary theory that may describe how God created the living creatures including humans. This was not accepted by other orthodox Christians who held that Darwinism and evolution were the same and that God did not create animals or man by evolution.

The publishing of these articles focus the attention of many Christians on these issues: what are the fundamentals of the faith? How are these fundamentals of the faith to be defended against their enemies? Almost immediately the list of fundamentals became less comprehensive and the list of enemies became narrower. Defenders of the fundamentals of the faith began to organize outside the churches and in the denominations. The General Assembly of the northern Presbyterian Church in 1910 affirmed five essential doctrines regarded as under attack in the church:
(1) the inspiration and inerrancy of Scriptures,
(2) the virgin birth of Christ,
(3) the penal substitutionary theory of the atonemnt,
(4) Christ's literal bodily resurrection from the dead, and
(5) the historicity of miracles.
These were reaffirmed in 1916 and 1923, by which time they had come to be regarded as the fundamental doctrines of Christianity itself. On a parallel track, and in the tradition of Bible conferences since 1878, premillenarian Baptists and independents founded the World's Christian Fundamentals Association in 1919, with William B. Riley as the prime mover. These premillennialists tended to replace the miracles of the fifth fundamental with the literal personal return of Christ in His Second Advent, or even with the premillenarian doctrine. Another version put the deity of Christ in place of the virgin birth.

The term of "fundamentalist" was perhaps first used in 1920 by Curtis Lee Lewis in the Baptist Watchman-Examnier, but it seemed to pop up everywhere in the early 1920's as an obvious way to identify someone who believed and actively defended the fundamentals of the faith. The Baptist John Roach Straton called his newspaper The Fundamentalist in the 1920s. The Presbyterian scholar J. Gresham Machen disliked the word, and only reluctantly accepted it to describe himself, because, he said, it sounded like a new religion and not historic Christianity that the church had always believed. Through the 1920s the fundamentalists waged warfare in battles in the large northern church denominations as nothing less than a struggle for true Christianity against a new none-Christian religion that had crept into the churches themselves. In his book Christianity and Liberalism (1923) Machen called the new naturalistic religion "liberalism," but it later became the fashion to call it "modernism."

Even though people like Harry Emmerson Fosdick professed to be a Christian, fundamentalists felt that he could not be regarded as such because he denied the traditional formulations of Christian doctrines and had created modern, naturalistic formulation statements of those doctrines. The issue was as much a struggle over a view of the identity of Christianity as it was over a method of doing theology and a view of history. Fundamentalists believed that the way to formulate doctrine in an early period were true and modern attempts to reformulate them were bound to be false. In other words, the fundamentals were unchanging.

Church struggles occurred in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Protestant Episcopal Church, and even the southern Presbyterian Church, but the grand battles were fought in the northern Presbyterian Church and the northern Baptist denominations. Machen was the undisputed leader among the Presbyterians, joined with Clarence E. Mcarthney. The Baptists created the National Federation of the Fundamentalists of the Northern Baptists (1921), the Fundamentalist Fellowship (1921), the Baptist Bible Union (1923) to lead the fight. The battle focused upon the seminaries, the mission boards, and the ordination of clergy. But in many ways the real strongholds of the fundamentalists were the Southern Baptists and the countless new independent churches spread across the south and midwest, as well as in the east and west.

In education, fundamentalists opposed the teaching of Darwinian evolution in public schools, leading up to the Scopes Trial (1925) in Dayton, Tennessee. William Jennings Bryan, a Presbyterian layman and three times candidate for the American presidency, was the acknowledged leader of the antievolution battle.

By 1926 or so, those who were militant for the fundamentals had failed to expel the modernists from any denomination. Moreover, they lost the battle against evolutionism. Orthodox Protestants, who still numerically dominated all denominations, now began to struggle among themselves. During the depression of the 1930s the term "fundamentalist" gradually shifted meaning as it came to be apply to only one party among those who believed the traditional fundamentals of the faith. Meanwhile, neo-orthodoxy associated with Karl Barth and Emil Brunner critique of liberalism found adherents in America.

In several cases in the north, fundamentalists created new denominations in order to carry on the true faith in purity apart from the larger bodies they regarded as apostate. They formed the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches (1932), the Presbyterian Church of America (1936), renamed the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the Bible Presbyterian Church (1938), the Conservative Baptist Association of America (1947), the Independent Fundamental Churches of America (1930), and many others. In the south, the fundamentalists dominated the huge Southern Baptist Convention, the southern Presbyterian Church, and the expanding independent Bible church and Baptist church movements, including the American Baptist Association. Across the United States, fundamentalists founded new revival ministries, mission agencies, seminares, Bible schools, Bible conferences, and newspapers.

During the 1930s the distinctive theological point that the fundamentalists made was that they represented true Christianity based on a literal interpretation of the Bible, and that de facto this truth ought to be expressed organzationally separate from any association with liberals and modernists. They came to connect a separatist practice with the maintenance of the fundamentals of the faith. They also identified themselves with what they believed was pure in personal morality and American culture. Thus the term "fundamentalist" came to refer largely to orthodox Protestants outside the large northern denominations, whether in the newly established denominations, in the southern churches, or in the many independent churches across the land.

In the early 1940s, the fundamentalists began to divide themselves into camps. There was those who voluntarily continued to use the term to refer to themselves and to equate it with Bible-believing Christianity. There were others who came to regard the term as undesirable, having connotations of devisive, intolerant, anti-intellectual, unconcerned with social problems, even foolish. This second group wished to regain fellowship with the orthodox Protestants who still constituted the vast majority of the clergy and people in the large northern denominations -- Presbyterian, Bapist, Methodist, Episcopalian. They began during the 1940s to call themselves "evangelicals" and to equate that term with true Christianity. And beginning in 1948 a few called themselves neoevangelical.

This split among largely northern fundamentalists began to be expressed organizationally on the one hand by the American Council of Christian Churches (ACCC, 1941), which was ecclestically separatist in principle, and the other hand by the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE, 1942), which sought to embrace orthodox Protestants as individuals in all denominations. The term "fundamentalist" was carried into the 1950s by the ACCC as well as by a vast number of southern churches and independent churches not included in either body. It was proudly used by such schools as Bob Jones University, Moody Bible Institute, and Dallas Theological Seminary, and by hundreds of evangelists and radio preachers. The International Council of Christian Churches (ICCC, 1948) sought to give the term worldwide currency in opposition to the World Council of Churches.

Thus the term "fundamentalist" came to take on the special meaning in contrast with evangelical or neoevangelical, rather than merely in contrast with liberalism, modernism, or neo-orthodoxy. Fundamentalists and evangelicals in the 1950s and 1960s shared much; both adhered to the traditional doctrines of Scripture and Christ; both promoted evangelism, revivals, missions, and a personal morality against smoking, drinking, theater, movies, and card-paying; both idenitified Amercan values with Christian values; both believed in creating organizational networks than separate themselves from the rest of society. But fundamentalists believed they differed from evangelicals and neoevangelicals by being more faithful to Bible-believing Christianity, more militant against church apostasy, communism, and personal evils, less ready to cater to social and intellectual respectability. These fundamentalists tended to oppose evangelist Billy Graham, not read Christianity Today, and not support Wheaton College or Fuller Theological Seminary. Instead they favored their own evangelists, radio preachers, newspapers, and schools. Fundamentalists tended to differ greatly among themselves and found it difficult to achieve widespread fundamentalist cooperation.

Meanwhile most people in North America and Great Britain who were neither fundamentalist nor evangelical tended to regard both as fundamentalist, noting their underlying similarties.

By the late 1970s and in early 1980s fundamentalism entered a new phase. Supporting the campaign of Ronald Reagen for the American presidency, they became nationally prominent as offering an answer for what many regarded as a surpreme social, economic, moral, and religious crises in America. They identified a new and more pervasive enemy, secular humanism, which they believed was responsible for eroding churches, schools, universities, the government, and above all the families. They fought all enemies which they considered to be the offspring from secular humanism -- evolutionism, political and theological liberalism, loose personal morality, sexual perversion, socialism, communism, and any lessing of the absolute authority of Bible. They called America to return to the fundamentals of faith and the fundamental moral values of America.

Leading this new phase was a new generation of television and print fundamentalists, notably Jerry Falwell, Tim La Haye, Hal Lindsey, and Pat Robertson. Their base was Baptist and southern, but they reached into all denominations. They benefited from three decades of post-World War II fundamentalist and evangelical expansion through evangelism, publishing, church extension, and radio and television ministry. They tended to blur the distinction between the fundamentalists and evangelicals. Statistically, they could claim that perhaps one fourth of the American population was fundamentalist-evangelical. But not all fundamentalists accepted these new leaders, considering themselves to be neofundamentalists.