A Brief History of Fundamentalism pt 1

Introduction

Starting out this year I struggled with knowing which description of our beliefs to start with. Am I a fundamentalist first, a baptist first of an independent? I came to the conclusion that I am a fundamentalist first because it encompasses the essentials of the faith. As we talked about last week, there are some doctrines fighting for and standing for. When you love something you fight for it, and it is this Spirit that pervades Fundamentalism. We will eventually talk about how to determine what hills to die on, how to fight for those beliefs in a Christlike way and what this means for our church today.

Behind the main spirit of fundamentalism is an adherence to passages like:

1 Timothy 1:3 “As I besought thee to abide still at Ephesus, when I went into Macedonia, that thou mightest charge some that they teach no other doctrine,”

2 Peter 2:1 “But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction.”

Jude 3 “Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.”

Tonight I am going to begin a history of Fundamentalism prior to digging into the doctrines and characteristics of fundamentalism. I admit I am not the best person to give a history of Fundamentalism because I was not a witness to most of the movements development. However, I can read what others have written and have gone back to some of the original source documents in my study of Fundamentalism.

I believe that in order to understand what Fundamentalism is, we need to understand the cultural background in which it arose. The most important cultural factor that led to the Fundamentalist movement was the rise of liberalism within all the major denominations. Literally every single major denomination had heresy trials at this time because of its influence. Liberalism arose out of the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the Romanticism of the following centuries. Liberalism is in essence Christianities accommodation to modernism. The church is trying to hold on to its semblance of Christianity while still holding on to the cultural thinking. Liberalism taught us to say “It’s OK, lets not take the bible too seriously.”

The Rise of Liberalism

I. European Liberalism- The influences of Liberalism began in Germany and were actually part of the battle that SH Spurgeon fought in the Down Grade Controversy in England. The denial of the infallibility of Scripture.The denial of the necessity and substitutionary nature of Christ’s atonement.The denial of the existence and eternality of hell.The affirmation of universalism.[3] With drew from the Baptist Union in 1887.

In the 1700’s-early 1800 Friedrich Schleiermacher called the Father of Liberalism claimed that the essence of Christianity was ethics and religious feelings. God could only be experienced through feeling and not reason. While he is called the father of liberalism, Schleiermacher was much more conservative in his theology than later liberals would be. His view was a reaction against rationalism and to him religion was based on feelings of dependence on God. It was experientially based. You can see the connection to what would later be called Neo-Orhodoxy.

After him rose a man name Albrecht Ritcschl 1822-1889- who disagreed with the emphasis on feelings and taught the belief should be based on history. History and scripture he claimed should be viewed without a belief in the miraculous. This brought higher criticism into the mix. Higher Criticism which in and off itself is merely the study of the historical background behind the writtings of scripture came to be used to deny the historical accuracy of the events of scripture and call into question the authors who wrote the scriptures.

Another famous proponent of critical theory applied to the bible was a man by the name of Julius Wellhausen. Wellhausen was the one who proposed that the Five books of Moses were actually written by four different authors coming from four different religious communities. This theory was called the JEDP theory.

At this time you also had a huge emphasis on social activism and every denomination was involved in social activism. You had emphasis against slavery, child labor, the right to vote, the temperance movement and other social issues. With this emphasis some denominations began to meet these needs while skipping over the gospel. This went along well with the message of liberalism because of its emphasis on Christ-like behavior but not true Christianity. This new emphasis came to be known as the social gospel. A key figure in this movement was a German Baptist pastor by the name of Walter Rauschenbusch. To the social gospel, salvation was about deliverance from poverty. So the Kingdom of God is here on earth as we bring in Utopia. Much of his work was done in Hell’s Kitchen in NYC.

Around this time you also had the publishing of Darwin’s Origin of Species. This affected Christianity in two ways: 1. it called into question the truth claims of scripture 2. it reversed the relationship of science and Christianity. Prior to this science supported Christianity and our faith took priority. Now, science became the new authority by which we would determine what was true. The Scopes trial was an example of the conflict that arose in America over this issue. William Jennings Bryan was a Presbyterian Fundamentalist who opposed evolution. While Jennings won the case, Fundamentalist took a black eye in the process.

II. Arrival in America

The liberalism came to America in two ways: 1) Through religious books 2) seminary degrees from Germany

Henry Ward Beecher 1813-1887 Relative of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Was so popular that when he was accused of having sex with a woman in the church, the jury voting whether to remove him could not agree and he remained pastor. Beecher’s theology taught that Christianity progressed with the modern age. One need not worry about the literal accuracy of biblical doctrines.

1891 Charles A Briggs, at Union Theological Seminary attacked the positions of the Princeton theological Seminaries position on the inerrancy. Liberalism viewed the bible as just another book and Christianity as one among many religions. Maybe event he best among them, but still just one.

1922 Harry Emerson Fosdick NYC- favorite of the Rockafellers who funded his radio program preached a sermon called “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Fosdick took each of the main points of Fundamentalism and then re-explained all those beliefs in light of modernism. He claimed that if we let the Fundamentalists win, then the modernists won’t listen to us any more.

J Gresham Machen- One of the early Fundamentalists wrote his book Christianity and Liberalism primarily as a rebuttal to this sermon.

An Examination of the teachings of liberalism in comparison with those of Christianity will show that at every point the two movements are in direct opposition.

Another Fundamentalist of the time, Francis Schaeffer, said:

Liberalism was spiritual adultery towards the divine Bridegroom.

The Beliefs of Liberalism

adapted from Contending for the Faith by Fred Moritz

God is pure benevolence without any standards. Sin does not separate us from His love. God is so loving that he would never judge sin, but accepts all mankind unconditionally.

There is a divine spark within all men. Men are good at heart and need nothing more than encouragement to allow their natural goodness to come out

Jesus Christ is man’s Savior only in the sense that He is man’s perfect teacher and example. He was not divine in any sense.

Christianity is merely one and possibly the best among many religions.

The bible is not a divine record of revelations, but a human testament of religion.

The Fundamentalist pushback

Fundamentalism arose as a response to the rise of liberalism in all the denominations and in its inception, it was a interdenominational movement. It included preachers from the Presbyterian church, the Baptist churches, the Methodist churches and the Episcopal churches. Probably the first manifestation of the Fundamentalist movement was the Niagara Bible Conference in 1878. The confession of faith in that early conference originally included 14 fundamentals. I know we often here about the five fundamentals, but it started with a list of 14.

The verbal, plenary inspiration of the scriptures in the original manuscripts.

The trinity

The creation of man, fall into sin and total depravity

The universal transmission of spiritual death from Adam

The necessity of the new birth

Redemption by the blood of Christ

Salvation by faith alone in Christ alone

The assurance of salvation

The centrality of Jesus in the scriptures

The constitution of the true Church by genuine believers

The personality of the Holy Spirit

The believer’s call to a holy life

The immediate passing of the should of believers to be with Christ at death

The premillennial Second Coming of Christ

During this time, Fundamentalist bible colleges were started including Moody Bible Institute to oppose the apostacy of the time. By 1930, there were 55 fundamentalist bible colleges around the nation.

As you can see much of this list can be lumped together and in 1910 the General assembly of the Northern Presbyterian Church came up with the Five Fundamentals generally used by all Fundamentalists today:

The inerrancy of scripture

The virgin-birth of Christ

The Substitutionary atonement

The bodily Resurrection of Christ

The authenticity of miracles

In 1920, Curtis Lee Laws the conservative editor of the Baptist paper The Watchman-Examiner officially coined the term as he called for believers to “do battle royal for the Fundamentals.”

With the publication of the Schofield Reference Bible and the Fundamentals, Fundamentalism began to make some headway. The Fundamentals were a 12 volume paperback containing defences of the fundamental doctrines by a variety of conservative writers. The fundamentals were edited by men like AC Dixon and RA Torrey.

The fundamentalists waged war by requiring adherence to these doctrines in their missionaries and their preachers in their denominations. This was especially true with the work on foreign fields where the gospel was so needed. The liberals made a big push for tolerance and inclusiveness.

For the first generation of Fundamentalism, the fight was fought within the denominations hoping to preserve them from the inside. Often, fundamentalists have been accused of being divisive and hyper-separatist; and while some have, this was not the case in the early fundamentalists. As I read the history of the Fundamentalists in the Northern Baptist Convention from which our version of Fundamentalism has its ties, there was a strong desire to stay in as long as they could and fix things. If you consider that the battles began around 1880 and they didn’t leave the NBC until the 1940’s; that nearly 60 years of trying to change things from the inside before they ever separated. Here is just a little bit of the battle from our history that went on:

in 1911, the NBC modified its voting bloc to include the full time staff of the denomination who were not pastors. This may seem like a great idea, the more people to vote the better; however, this was a political move. You see most of the staff of the NBC were liberal men. This vote increased their power over the direction of the denomination. Pastors had to pay their own way to the convention and often couldn’t afford it while the staff had their way paid. This vote shifted the balance of power more in their favor.

Because of fundamentalist concerns over the liberalism in bible colleges and seminaries, J. F Vichert called for an examination of the orthodoxy of the schools. The problem was Vichert, dean of Colgate Theological Seminary, himself a liberal called for modernists to examine the modernist schools; so nothing was accomplished.

In 1919, the World Christian Fundamentals Association was founded by men like WB Riley, James Gray, JC Massee and Bob Jones Sr. This was a global interdenominational group to support the fundamentals. Their goals were to influence the denominations by education, publications, Bible conferences and missions organization.

1920, the next year Harry Emerson Fosdick was invited to be the speaker at the NBC convention. Clearly, this would cause a stir among the Fundamentalists. At this time, Fosdick was moving to remove baptism as a requirement for church membership. It would be two years later when he would preach his famous sermon, but his learnings were already clear.

In 1921, they finally sent out a questionnaire to all the seminary professors to examine their orthodoxy and these are some of the results:

Virgin birth- 72 Yes, 7 No 1 uncertain

Preexistence of Christ 58 Yes, 24 No and 3 uncertain

vicarious atonement- 68 yes, 12 no, 4 uncertain

Return of Christ 35 yes, 42 no 5 uncertain

bodily resurrection of believers 32 yes, 35 no, 9 uncertain

The results reveal that there was still a lot of true believers in the denomination, but there was still significant apostacy among the college professors. You must remember why this is important: these are the men training other men to be pastors.

6. The move to leave the denomination went in stages. In 1944, a new Fundamentalist mission agency was started because of the influx of liberalism and the social gospel in the NBC’s mission agency. They had already begun starting their own colleges, but in 1950, Denver Seminary was started. In 1946, the conservative Baptist Fellowship within the NBC began to look into options to leave the NBC. There was the potential to join with the GARBC, which was an earlier organization to leave the NBC under Oliver W. Van Osdel, pastor of Wealthy Street Baptist Church of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The CBF did not go this direction. Eventually, the CBF went the route of the New Evangelicals who we will discuss later and the fundamentalists left to form the Fundamental Baptist Fellowship of which we are a part. The FBF was organized not as an association of churches but of individual; thus pastors are members not churches. The reason behind this is so that we avoid a denominational structure usurping the authority of the local church.

Conclusion

To many of us this history is lost because we did not grow up or take part in these fights, but I hope this first part of the history has helped you to gain an appreciation for those early Fundamentalists who stood for the clear, literal teachings of the bible. My game plan over the next few weeks will look something like this:

Sermon 1 History of Fundamentalism pt 1

Sermon 2 The inerrancy of scripture

Sermon 3 The Virgin birth of Christ

Sermon 4 The substitutionary atonement

Sermon 5 The bodily resurrection of Christ

Sermon 6 The authenticity of miracles

Sermon 7 The doctrine of Separation- who truly causes the division Rom 16:17-18

Sermon 8 The Principles of Separation

Sermon 9 How to determine what we separate over

Sermon 10 Militancy

Sermon 11 History of Fundamentalism pt 2

Sermon 11 The Doctrine of Holiness

Sermon 12 What is Worldliness?

Sermon 13 The Sins of Fundamentalism

Sermon 14 Where Do We Go from Here?