Dare we Renew the Controversy?

Fundamentalism counteracted the modernistic philosophy of religion from the standpoint of supernaturalistic Christianity. Certain essentials that had come under special attack dictated its test for orthodoxy: the authority of Scripture, the deity of Christ, his virigin birth, substitutionary atonement, bodily resurrection and literal return. The temporary test of assent to these specific tenets served its purpose well, for fundamentalism thereby exposed unbelief by boring beneath evasive declarations about the Bible and the supernaturalness of Jesus.

Nonetheless, concentration on “the fundamentals” often displaced doctrinal responsibilities of the church in the wider dimensions of historic creeds and confessions of faith. Evangelical pulpits resounded with “the fundamentals” supplemented periodically with “the case against evolution.” The importance of other theological indispensables became tragically marginal. The norm by which liberal theology was gauged for soundness unhappily became the summary of fundamentalist doctrine. The inevitable result was a premium on creedal brevity. This, in turn, brought further dangers. The organic relationship of revelational truths was neglected. Complacency with fragmented doctrines meant increasing failure to comprehend the relationship of underlying theological principles. Individual doctrines were reduced to simple cliches, without much thought of their profounder systematic implications.

Twentieth Century Movement

The fundamentalist movement became a distinctly twentieth-century expression of Christianity, characterized increasingly by reaction against liberalism. While adhering to “the heart of the biblical gospel” (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:1–4) in evangelism and missions and Christian education, in its campaign against the so-called “social gospel” fundamentalism tended to narrow “the whole counsel of God” and felt little obligation to exhibit Christianity as a comprehensive world and life view. In becoming other-worldly in spirit, fundamentalism not only neglected the exposition of Christian philosophy and constructive personal and social ethics, but even became distrustful of such interests. Because it failed to relate the Christian revelation to the broad concerns of civilization and culture and narrowed the interests of religion to personal piety only, fundamentalism—to borrow Dr. G. Brillenburg Wurth’s phrase, ran the danger “of degenerating into a morbid and sickly enthusiasm” (“Theological Climate in America,”—Christianity Today [Feb. 18, 1957], p. 13). Beneath this pietistic tendency lay an uncritical antithesis between the heart and the head to which most fundamentalist educators and ministers subscribed their schools and their churches. This belittling of the intellect and the phrasing of religious experience primarily in terms of the emotional and volitional aspects of life is a tendency actually more in accord with the anti-metaphysical temper of modernistic theology than with biblical theology. Nevertheless, many fundamentalists uncritically followed this distinction despite their insistence on a core of objective spiritual knowledge. In his work on the history of philosophy, Thales to Dewey (Houghton-Mifflin, 1957), Gordon H. Clark criticizes Protestant liberalism as a caricature of historic Christianity, but indicates as well fundamentalism’s disparagement of intellect.

Areas Of Neglect

Fundamentalism lacked theological and historical perspective. Calvinism and Arminianism it embraced side by side, not alone in polemics against the secular climate of the day, but in an intentional moratorium on discussing doctrinal differences. The result was scant devotion to the dedicated enterprise of theological study and research. Impatience and disinterest deterred precise formulations of doctrinal details.

Fundamentalism neglected the production of great exegetical and theological literature and derived a borrowed academic strength from reprints of the theological classics of the past. This failure to produce scholarly books was due in part to the staggering task of carrying forward on traditional lines the Christian program of missions and evangelism bequeathed by the modernist defection. Another reason was modernism’s capture of strategic educational leadership and facilities, while fundamentalism, in its distrust of higher education, did little to encourage and support scholarly study.

Furthermore, fundamentalism veered at times to antidenominationalism rather than to interdenominationalism. Not content with the promotion of rival nondenominational, interdenominational and superdenominational fellowship and cooperation, it gravitated frequently into caustic criticism of denominational effort. The rift between fundamentalists and modernists be especially pronounced just after the First World War and reached its bitterest extreme during that decade. The devout effort to preserve the Christian churches from paganizing influences through a searching and scholarly analysis of the alternatives drifted into a reactionary current. The World Christian Fundamentals Association, formed in 1918, although carrying on a positive spiritual program of missions, evangelism, Bible conferences, Bible institutes and Christian colleges, nevertheless engaged more and more in vitriolic polemics.

Neglect of the doctrine of the Church, except in defining separation as a special area of concern, proved to be another vulnerable feature of the fundamentalist forces. This failure to elaborate the biblical doctrine of the Church comprehensively and convincingly not only contributes to the fragmenting spirit of the movement but actually hands the initiative to the ecumenical enterprise in defining the nature and relations of the churches. Whereas the ecumenical movement has busied itself with the question of the visible and invisible Church, the fundamentalist movement has often been preoccupied with distinguishing churches as vocal or silent against modernism.

Many fundamentalists, moreover, identified Christianity rigidly with premillennial dispensationalism. Some even were prone to label non-dispensationalists as incipient modernists. Doubtless the premillennial spirit was already in evidence in the very beginnings of the fundamentalist movement eighty years ago, when the Niagara Bible Conference in 1895 first proposed the “fivefold test” to determine ministerial attitudes toward the fundamentals. But it was not until after the First World War that fundamentalism became largely a premillennial enterprise.

These fundamentalist features—neglect of the organic interrelations of theology, of the bearing of the Christian revelation upon culture and social life, and of the broader outlines of the doctrine of the Church—exacted a costly historical toll. When the classic liberal theology was at last overtaken by an inevitable judgment and collapsed, fundamentalism, with its uncompromised regard for the authority of Scripture, saw the theological initiative pass not back to the evangelical forces but rather to neo-orthodoxy, a movement fearless to criticize liberalism in terms of both internal philosophical and external biblical points of view. However unsatisfactorily its principles of the theology of the Word and of the witness of Scripture were applied, neo-orthodoxy nonetheless earnestly and aggressively produced a vigorous commentary and dogmatic literature.

A Classic Heritage

In surveying fundamentalism’s eighty-year life cycle, one must regret today’s contrast to an earlier stature of positive, profound influence. At one time fundamentalism displayed a breadth and concept of theological and philosophical perspective, a devotion to scholarly theological enterprise not characteristic of the present movement. The twelve-volume set, The Fundamentals, distributed to the ministry in 1909 as the gift of two evangelical lay leaders, and reaching ultimately a circulation of three million copies, illustrates the fact. A cursory examination of the booklets discloses many evidences of evangelical strength. Here one finds polemic without bitterness, and a concentration upon great issues besides evangelism and missions, important as these are.

James Orr of Glasgow discusses the virgin birth of Christ in the opening article of Volume One. He enriched the evangelical outlook on both sides of the Atlantic both through significant books and as general editor of The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. Benjamin B. Warfield, one of America’s ablest exegetical scholars, wrote the second article, on Christ’s deity. His meticulous theological works still serve the evangelical cause. The third essay, “The Purposes of the Incarnation,” is by G. Campbell Morgan, one of the finest Bible expositors of the past generation. It is noteworthy that both postmillennialists and premillennialists supplied opening articles, united in an evangelical witness to the person and work of Christ. Today’s fundamentalist movement, in its present reactionary position and mood, could hardly rally the participation of such representative and distinguished scholars and leaders as the contributors to The Fundamentals. With A. C. Dixon and R. A. Torrey as editors, the participants (besides those already named) included W. H. Griffith Thomas, Melvin Grove Kyle, William G. Moorehead, Handley C. G. Moule, E. Y. Mullins, George L. Robinson, and George Frederick Wright, among others.

High View Of Scripture

No sense of pressure or panic shifts their whole emphasis to the inspiration of the Bible, important as this theme was for contributors like Orr and Warfield, who even prepared separate books on this subject. An article on higher criticism, near the end of the first volume, carefully avoids blanket condemnation of higher criticism as such, and in fact vindicates a positive role for higher as well as for lower criticism. This first volume, indeed, does not end without a resounding emphasis on “the authority and authenticity of the Holy Scriptures,” a conviction infusing the entire series. All the contributors believed that the sacred Hebrew-Christian writings must be referred to a special divine activity of revelation and inspiration; all emphasized that in matters of doctrine Scripture is the only reliable and authoritative canon. Yet they were not required to agree “jot and tittle” in their expositions of inspiration, as anyone familiar with the writings only of Orr and Warfield will recognize at once. The fundamentalist movement’s later uniformity and rigidity in formulating inspiration resulted from reliance upon cliches more than upon a readiness to define its fuller doctrinal implications. This development contributed needlessly to liberalism’s prevailing misunderstanding of the evangelical view of Scripture.

Only uncritical and unrepresentative expositions, however, supplied the slightest basis for ascribing to fundamentalists such straw views as belief in a specially inspired King James Version, or in the veritable divine dictation of Scripture. Truly representative fundamentalist expositions, while upholding the normative and trustworthy character of Scripture, refuse to sketch divine inspiration in terms of sheer dictation. The contributors to The Fundamentals, however, retained creative liberty to expound the witness of Scripture to its own inspiration. No premium, of course, rested on disagreement and difference. But Scripture ever remained the conspicuous final authority by which fundamentalist expositions were to be governed and judged. The older apologists appealed confidently to the lordship of Christ and to the witness of the Spirit, being less inclined than recent evangelical thought to rest everything on the bare inerrancy of Scripture. This did not imply their displacement of objective revelation by subjective considerations, for fundamentalism has always resisted modernism’s substitution of immediate for mediated revelation. But whether the self-authenticating character of an inspired and authoritative Scripture is derivable from objective indications alone, or whether this self-authenticating character involves also the witness of Christ by the Spirit, was the issue in debate. The older apologetic was less hesitant to begin with Christ—not because it sought to detach Christology from bibliology, but because it sensed the danger that biblicism might seem to ascribe superiority to some principle other than the Christological.

The Larger Perspective

Something of the earlier fundamentalist range and perspective comes from a hasty glance at other volumes in The Fundamentals series. The second book, in support of biblical as against critical views, sweeps into the field of archaeology and closes with a doctrinal essay on justification by faith. An article on inspiration, which begins the third volume, is followed by the testimony of a seminary professor who has rejected his earlier concessions to negative criticism. Between these chapters are essays on the moral glory of Christ, on Christ’s revelation of the fatherhood of God and on the significance of Christian experience. Other volumes present science and Christian faith, the weaknesses of Darwinism, the knowledge of God, the Holy Spirit, sin and judgment, the science of conversion, the nature of regeneration, salvation by grace, the nature of the Church, the efficacy of prayer, the sanctity of the Lord’s day, the Christian use of money, Christianity and socialism, competitive cults and religious movements like Christian Science, Mormonism, Millennial Dawnism, Spiritualism and Roman Catholicism. The essays indubitably differ in quality, but when one recalls that The Fundamentals sought a rather general reading audience, the series creditably reflects a scholarly competence, a refreshing range of interest, an application of biblical Christianity to the wider problems of life and culture and an avoidance of restrictions and negations frequently associated with fundamentalism in our times. A delightful absence of caustic apologetics and polemics pervades these writings. Restraint is shown toward men of dissimilar views; no attempt is made to depreciate their abilities and skills.

Christianity And Science

In the matter of Christianity and science, the early fundamentalists quite carefully avoided a dogmatic dismissal of the whole scientific enterprise as perverse speculation. Contributors to The Fundamentals doubtless agreed on the inadequacy of any explanation of the universe and man in merely evolutionary terms; in this respect they anticipated the dangers of the naturalistic-communistic view of life better than those apostles of “Divine immanence” who merely baptized evolutionary theory with a capital E. Genesis the early fundamentalists regarded as an inspired account of beginnings; they deplored its dismissal as legendary and mythical. Some contributors more than others deferred to scientific opinion in supplementing the creation narrative. The message of The Fundamentals centers in the great affirmations of the creation narratives. Its support of Christian supernaturalism is wary of whatever threatens biblical theism, and it is certainly not proevolutionary. At the same time the writers are neither suspicious nor distrustful of science. They are open to the facts, but unconvinced that all the facts have been introduced.

Fundamentalists questioned the factuality of development rather than exposing the inadequacy of evolution. This disposition, to exclude scientific explanations, rather than to evaluate their adequacy, has maneuvered fundamentalism repeatedly into a tardy and retarded awareness of the constantly changing scientific scene. Some fundamentalist popularizers boldly disparaged scientific studies as a whole, using sarcasm and ridicule to reinforce their deficiency of logic. More cautious spirits, however, refused to dogmatize against every possibility of development in nature, and inclined to agnosticism rather than to skepticism in relationship to evolutionary theory. Some evangelicals in America requested of science only that it refrain from tampering with the reality of the supernatural, with the role of transcendent divine power in creating the graded levels of life and the essential uniqueness of man. They did not feel called upon to exclude a scientific supplementation of the Genesis account of beginnings. The main thrust of the fundamentalist interest in science, however, had become mainly anti-evolutionary. Nature as a divine laboratory in which men may read the plan and thought of God and science as a sphere of divine vocation where Christian young people may facilitate the control of nature to man’s purposes under God were all but lost as motivating concepts.

Decline Of Dignity

Outside conservative theological circles, especially among unchurched people and among members of many liberal churches, the word “fundamentalism” became a term of reproach. Secular newspapers and magazines use it today, quite in the Fosdickian spirit, as a badge of obscurantism. This is less than fair to the traditions of the movement as a whole. To dismiss the fundamentalist as an obscurantist is a strategy often appropriated by those hostile to belief in the supernatural. It gains credibility in liberal circles through the reactionary spirit of some present fundamentalist groups who seem to align themselves against higher education, science and cultural interests.

Such reactionary tendencies in fundamentalism, therefore, caused men of profound biblical loyalties to hesitate to identify themselves with the movement as such. Aware of the undesirable connotations of the term fundamentalism, they prefer to be called conservatives or evangelicals. Already by 1923, when Machen wrote his penetrating critique of modernism, Christianity and Liberalism, men of his theological acumen preferred to call themselves evangelicals.

The real bankruptcy of fundamentalism has resulted not so much from a reactionary spirit—lamentable as this was—as from a harsh temperament, a spirit of lovelessness and strife contributed by much of its leadership in the recent past. One of the ironies of contemporary church history is that the more fundamentalists stressed separation from apostasy as a theme in their churches, the more a spirit of lovelessness seemed to prevail. The theological conflict with liberalism deteriorated into an attack upon organizations and personalities. This condemnation, in turn, grew to include conservative churchmen and churches not ready to align with separatist movements. It widened still further to abuse of evangelicals unhappy with the spirit of independency in such groups as the American Council of Churches and the International Council of Christian Churches. Then came internal debate and division among separatist fundamentalists within the American Council. More recently, the evangelistic ministry of Billy Graham and of other evangelical leaders, and efforts whose disapproval of liberalism and advocacy of conservative Christianity are beyond dispute, have become the target of bitter volubility.

This character of fundamentalism as a temperament, and not primarily fundamentalism as a theology, has brought the movement into contemporary discredit. Doubtless it is unfair to impute this mood of rancor and negation to the entire fundamentalist movement. Historically, fundamentalism was a theological position; only gradually did the movement come to signify a mood and disposition as well. Its early leadership reflected balance and ballast, and less of born bast and battle. Only later did a divisive disposition show itself, plunging the evangelical movement into internal conflict.

The recrudescence of fundamentalism during the Second World War involved a diversification within the movement. On one side were those eager to detach the great theological affirmations from a recent negative reactionary spirit and to strengthen constructive theological and ecclesiastical activity; on the other, those who add to reactionary spirit by multiplying divisions and by disowning brethren in the former category. The first group insists that fundamentalists of the latter definition are severing themselves from the spirit of historic evangelical Christianity; the second group claims that evangelicals of the former category are making a subtle retreat to a compromised fundamentalism.

Call To Repentance

By mid-century, fundamentalism obviously signified a temperament as fully as a theology. Despite its belligerency, many evangelicals courageously stayed with fundamentalism, remembering rather its contribution to Christianity’s age-old battle against unbelief. Others, however, weary of the spirit of strife, wrote off a pugnacious leadership with the declaration that “fundamentalism is dead.” None, it should be noted, showed the same courage and earnestness in calling fundamentalism to judgment and repentance as did Barth and Brunner in approaching classic liberalism. Should evangelical leaders as candidly admit the excesses of fundamentalism as have neo-orthodox leaders relative to the prevailing liberalism? They dare not do less. The growing revulsion toward the fundamentalist temperament is but one evidence that orthodoxy is being chastened in our day. A renewal of biblical Christianity will involve not only a restoration of the fundamentals, but also a revival of fundamentalists imbued with a new mind set and a new method in ecclesiastical life.

If modernism stands discredited as a perversion of the scriptural theology, certainly fundamentalism in this contemporary expression stands discredited as a perversion of the biblical spirit.

TO BE CONTINUED

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