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Only 60 years later, it is difficult to imagine the pitiable state of evangelical scholarship as it looked at the end of World War II. "Fundamentalist" was the more typical title to designate the whole movement we now call "evangelical," and to be a "fundamentalist" meant, with very few exceptions, that one stood outside mainstream academia. Ever since the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925, fundamentalism had been identified with anti-intellectualism. In the 1940s most of the small number of accomplished fundamentalist scholars were found in a few separatist seminaries and Bible schools.

Harold John Ockenga and his associates hoped to reverse this trend and bring Bible-based scholarship back into the mainstream. Their hopes for intellectual renewal were part of a larger strategy, built first on national revival. Beginning with aggressive evangelism, they hoped to restore evangelical influences throughout American culture.

One early organizational step was to found the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942. The name of the new organization signaled the beginning of a return to the 19th-century term "evangelical" to designate their movement. For Ockenga the change in terminology meant a repudiation of what he regarded as the mistaken separatist tendencies among fundamentalists. In their zeal to counter theological modernists, many militants had withdrawn from mainstream institutions to form their own "pure" schools and churches. Some were making such separatism a virtual test of genuine commitment.

A classic instance had occurred at Princeton Theological Seminary while Ockenga was studying there. In 1929 conservatives left Princeton to form Westminster Theological Seminary. Even though Ockenga had joined that conservative exodus to continue studying with the great New Testament scholar, J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937), he later parted ways with his mentor when in 1936 Machen left the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. to found what became the tiny Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Ockenga now saw such separatism as hiding one's light under a bushel.

Working from his strategic base in Park Street Church in Boston, Ockenga helped lay the basis for an evangelical renaissance in scholarship. From 1944 to 1947 he sponsored a number of "scholar's conferences." Ockenga could identify fewer than two dozen scholars from around the country to invite, and still fewer came. Nevertheless, these small gatherings helped inspire a larger vision. They also encouraged a number of young scholars in the Boston area, most notably Carl F. H. Henry at Boston University and Edward J. Carnell at Harvard.

The most substantial expression of this vision was the founding in 1947 of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, with Ockenga as its president (though he remained in Boston). Evangelist Charles E. Fuller, whose "Old-Fashioned Revival Hour" was one of the most popular programs on the radio, provided most of the finances. On the seminary's early faculty were impressive younger scholars, including Henry, Carnell, and New Testament scholar George Eldon Ladd, another recent Harvard grad.

Ockenga stated in his inaugural address at Fuller, "Is it a time to build a theological seminary when the world is on fire? Yes, this is the fastest way of doing the job before us." Fuller Seminary, he said, would be "a Cal Tech of the evangelical world" and a "research center for evangelical scholarship." He and the scholars in this movement wished to strengthen an aspect of American evangelicalism that had fallen on hard times. Evangelicalism, as they saw it, was grounded in a strong theological tradition going back to the heirs of Luther and Calvin. That scholarly heritage had been eroded by the "can-do" activism of popular American evangelicalism, which placed a premium on quick results.

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