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I find it necessary for my own spiritual well-being to remember the history of the fundamentalist movement in particular. I was surrounded in my youth by people for whom painful memories of spiritual and theological battles were still very vivid. Many of them had left denominations and had been evicted from church buildings where they had served faithfully. They had seen schools and agencies they loved come under the influence of strange theological teachings. They had experienced the loss of "goods and kindred" because they refused to compromise their convictions.

I certainly entertain no illusion that the stories of their struggles were inerrant in all details. Nor do I deem it healthy to nurture past hurts in such a way that I insist on waging battles that no longer need to be fought. David Hubbard, the late president of Fuller Seminary, had a nice way of making this point. He said we evangelicals should look at the battles fought by previous generations in much the same way that American citizens honor the memories of those who fought in the Revolutionary War. "I can go to Bunker Hill," he said, "and feel patriotic, even though I have no animosity toward the present-day British."

Dr. Hubbard's image is an instructive one. Clearly it is important to remember our spiritual ancestors and to learn from their strengths and their weaknesses. But we do remember them as ancestors, as people who attempted to be faithful under conditions very different from our own context. We contemporary evangelicals must continue to visit our Bunker Hills. But the point of those visits is not to live in the past but to find new ways of engaging the present, knowing that to do so will require us to work together with—and learn important lessons from—Christian fellow travelers who regularly take their own detours, visiting very different shrines.

Excerpted from The Smell of Sawdust: What Evangelicals Can Learn from Their Fundamentalist Heritage, by Richard J. Mouw.

Copyright © 2000 Richard J. Mouw. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House.

Be sure to read today's related article, "The New Scarlet Letter" by Wheaton College theology professor Vincent Bacote.

The Smell of Sawdust can be purchased through Amazon.com and other book retailers, as can Joel Carpenter's Revive Us Again and George Marsden's Fundamentalism and American Culture.

Read more about Richard J. Mouw at Fuller Seminary's Web site.

Previous Christianity Today articles by Mouw include:

This World Is Not My Home | What some mainline Protestants are rediscovering about living as exiles in a foreign culture. (May 5, 2000)

Mormon Makeover | An effective evangelical witness hinges on understanding the new face of Latter-day Saints. (March 9, 2000)

Abraham Kuyper: A Man for This Season | The surprisingly relevant advice of a Dutch statesman for engaging postmodern culture. (Oct. 5, 1998)

To the Jew First | Witnessing to the Jews is nonnegotiable. (Aug. 11, 1997)

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November (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44