Those Incomprehensible British Fundamentalists

First of three parts

The conservative conception of truth is ‘shallow and elementary.’

Conservative Christians on both sides of the Atlantic will be keenly interested in a book entitled Fundamentalism. Its author is James Barr, distinguished Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at Oxford University. Having taught at both Edinburgh and Princeton in past years, Barr is an international observer of the religious scene. In the book he focuses on the British (mainly English) movement that he calls fundamentalism. His thesis is that conservative Christianity is logically incoherent and contradicts biblical faith, and that authentic Christianity, instead of resisting modern theology and biblical criticism, will welcome and promote them.

Barr dismisses as “completely wrong” not only the “entire intellectual apologetic” of fundamentalism but also “its doctrinal position, … especially in regard to the place of the Bible” (p. 8). He writes: “I do not find any of its intellectual arguments to have validity except in very minor respects” (p. 9). Fundamentalism, he complains, “uses the form, rather than the reality, of biblical authority to provide a shield” for its particular religious tradition (p. 11); its stance toward nonevangelical churchmen he sees as “fundamentalist mythology” (p. 100).

The present welcome for fundamentalistic religion is largely due, says Barr, to the current tendency to regard all forms of Christian belief—“the more rational and philosophical forms” and “the most widely irrational or the most unthinkingly biblicistic”—as equally absurd, intellectually if not emotionally (p. 102). Barr declares also that “conservatism was predicated … upon a rationalistic pattern of thought, and gained its security in fact from reason” (p. 220). He berates fundamentalists for their strongly intellectualistic underpinnings and the powerful role they assign to reason in biblical interpretation (p. 275). Because of their appeal to reason, Barr declares that “theologically … the dynamics of the fundamentalist group must be considered as a betrayal of justification by faith” (p. 321).

Yet Barr dismisses these intellectual interests as sham. The conservative conception of truth is “shallow and elementary,” he says (p. 129). “Fundamentalist polemics and apologetics are … a mass of inconsistencies of all kinds” (p. 314). And, contradicting his reproach of the role assigned to reason in scriptural interpretation, Barr censures conservative evangelicals for not insisting at least on “a very modest role for intellect in the handling of the Bible” (pp. 129 f.). “The average fundamentalist,” he declares, “seldom or never makes a philosophical statement, nor does he read a book of philosophy” (p. 271). Conservative students “probably know nothing about Hegel” except for fragments that they prize for assailing critical scholarship (p. 148).

According to Barr, “the fundamentalist policy is not to listen to the non-conservative arguments and then reject them: it is that the non-conservative arguments should not be heard at all” (pp. 315, 320). Modern conservative literature attributes to “all non-conservative theologians and biblical critics … a closed mind, … narrow prejudice, … failure to pay attention to modern trends in discovery and science, and … ignorance and incompetence” (p. 332).

Are such comments the balanced observations of a gifted scholar or the exasperated reactions of a biased observer? The evangelical reader must be patient and not decide prematurely.

Much research for his volume, Barr tells us, was provided by the British publisher, SCM Press. This is the publishing arm of the Student Christian Movement, which long ago forfeited the evangelical emphasis it once had to the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (formerly Inter-Varsity). Barr also credits Bishop John A. T. Robinson with contributing to his judgments (pp. 102, 349 n. 1).

Barr assures us from the outset that “most Christians do not approve of or like” the characteristics of fundamentalism (p. 1), that the term is widely considered synonymous with “narrowness, bigotry, obscurantism and sectarianism” (p. 2). The personal religious attitude of fundamentalism, he says, is “pathological” (p. 5); “fundamentalism is a pathological condition of Christianity” (p. 318).

According to Barr, fundamentalism is “a constellation of differing positions disposed around the centrality and inerrancy of the Bible” (p. 324). It invokes Scripture not to criticize its own traditions but to validate them (p. 37). Fundamentalists impose “their own preconceived theology … upon the texts” (p. 66). They believe “hundreds” of questionable things not because Jesus and the New Testament validate these beliefs but because they hold to the inerrancy of Scripture (p. 75). “The Bible in Fundamentalism is comparable to the Virgin Mary in Roman Catholicism”; to “analyze and criticize its seamless fabric is sacrilegious” (pp. 36 f.). The Bible is given a mythical role that undergirds the fundamentalist outlook (p. 37). Indeed, fundamentalists take “a completely unprincipled … approach … to the Bible” (p. 49), Barr affirms.

The most scholarly fundamentalist apologists, Barr adds, make “opposition to critical scholarship … the one supreme goal” (p. 82). Fundamentalists use critical tools solely to produce “conservative and traditional results” (p. 158).

Besides evaluative judgments like these, however questionable, one must note also Barr’s radical misconceptions of fundamentalist doctrine and his exaggerations that become misrepresentation. The Bible, not Christ, says Barr, is the “absolute and perfect symbol” in fundamentalist religion (p. 37). Fundamentalism holds that faith in Christ and personal salvation “are not separable from the inerrancy of the Bible” (p. 37). The fundamentalist so emphasizes Christ’s deity that “he knows nothing of the idea that Jesus Christ is equally God and man” (pp. 169 f.). Fundamentalists stress “the universal and almost metaphysical character of sin” (p. 26; Barr here might have noted Reinhold Niebuhr’s insistence on the intrinsic inevitability of sin, a concept that fundamentalists reject). Moreover, fundamentalists are said to believe in the sinlessness of the biblical prophets and apostles (p. 179). They insist, Barr adds, that the Bible cannot be “understood rightly except with prayer” (p. 33). The role of the supernatural is not very important for fundamentalists, says Barr; they manipulate it at will to preserve the semblance of inerrancy for Scripture (p. 278).

Barr also overstates fundamentalist weaknesses. He declares that fundamentalism exhausts its energies in disputes over inerrancy of scriptural authorship to the neglect of such theological concerns as whether biblical thought differs from that of other ancient religions, whether the covenant is the center of Old Testament theology, and what significance “the Son of Man” bears in the New Testament. Without a hint that most scientists at that time believed the earth had originated rather recently, Barr ridicules the use of Ussher’s chronology as the norm for early fundamentalism. He contends that conservative evangelicals consider “the ethical teaching of Jesus … not only useless but actually harmful if it is put before men as a way of life independently of the doctrine of atonement and personal faith” (p. 113)—as if fundamentalists did not believe that unrepenting men and nations should be told of the criteria by which Christ will judge them at his return.

Many of us who once were uncritically associated with fundamentalism and who later energetically criticized it in the light of Scripture will find far too many of these judgments excessive. Few if any fundamentalists anywhere on earth will see themselves reflected in the mirror Barr holds up. If his portrayal is accepted, it is nothing short of astonishing that fundamentalism has bewitched certain gifted members of the British academic community whom Barr almost repetitiously mentions and castigates.

American evangelicals have for a generation distinguished between what is desirable and what is undesirable in fundamentalism. We did not have to wait till 1977 and Barr to realize that fundamentalist preaching is often exegetically shallow, that fundamentalism uncritically elevated certain prudish traditions to scriptural status, that not infrequently its spokesmen argue that historical criticism “inevitably” tears apart the whole fabric of faith, and that many fundamentalists tend to appropriate selected bits of nonevangelical scholarship rather than to initiate creative studies, so that serious students all too often turn to mediating scholars for productive challenge. It may be proper to recall, among other literature, my own The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947), my CHRISTIANITY TODAY series on “Dare We Renew the Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversy?” (June–July, 1957), and the volume Evangelical Responsibility in Contemporary Theology (Wilkinson Lectures, 1957). We have not silently accepted the welcome fundamentalism gave to an overly simple, fragmented, and polemical theology and its shunning of hard philosophical engagement; the crass use of Madison Avenue techniques to promote evangelism; the extreme dispensationalist minimizing of the Sermon on the Mount; the gnostic eschatological insights claimed by some modern dispensationalist expositors; the temptation to make the expectation of Christ’s return a basis for resigning oneself to the social structures that now exist; the reluctance to criticize privileged elements of power and wealth in society; the confusing of civil religion with the kingdom of God; the suspicion of higher learning and of technical theological study; the lay preoccupation with sensationalism.

“If You Eye Cause You To Sin”

St. Mark 9:42–50

Limping into paradise,

a black patch over my one

offending eye, I’m glad to see

the children on the greengold lawns

gamboling unoffended.

More than once those kids strecthed

my pieties to the breaking point,

and once or twice a little beyound.

Now I wonder how the new earth

atmosphere changes what I

thougt was twelve-tone noise to magic ftute music.

EUGENE H. PETERSON

But when Barr declares that millenarian interest among fundamentalists is fueled by the modern appetite for witchcraft, the irrational, and the exotic (p. 206), when he asserts that fundamentalists welcome millenarian views because they entail “more violent rejection of modern theology and all biblical criticism” along with ideas of historical progress (p. 200), and when he ex pounds numerous other fanciful notions like these, we may rightly wonder whether London’s notorious fog may at times blur academic vision at Oxford. Fundamentalists, Barr tells us, restrict “fellowship in the community of Christ” to those who hold that “Moses wrote the entire Pentateuch, that Isaiah wrote the book named after him, and that Titus was written by St. Paul” (p. 266). Now, fundamentalists do indeed insist that the Pentateuch did not come from post-Mosaic sources nor Titus from post-apostolic sources, but I have yet to find one even in England who has added these beliefs to the Apostles’ Creed.

In doctrinal matters, too, Barr holds some strange notions about fundamentalism. He tends to misinterpret the evangelical insistence on general revelation, vis-à-vis Barth, as an unqualified acceptance of natural theology (p. 275). He declares that fundamentalism considers historical conservatism in biblical criticism “more important than evangelical Christianity” (p. 152).

Barr’s antifundamentalist bias is evident when he chooses to commend as the best example of evangelical ethical thought a work whose basic approach he says is “not very ethical and not very Christian at all” (pp. 116 f.). Barr is critical when conservative moralists demand social changes that conflict with his own views. He laments the enthusiasm for capitalism, yet he doesn’t display similar indignation over the ideological support given to socialism by many influential British churchmen (pp. 108 f.). He protests the resignation to the cultural status quo found among many evangelicals, yet he gives no hint that it was not evangelical Christianity but liberal Christianity that superficially viewed much modern historical development as a preliminary phase of the kingdom of God. A noteworthy non sequitur is found in Barr’s argument that eighteenth-and nineteenth-century evangelical leaders like Wilberforce and Shaftesbury and Wesley exhibited deep social concern because they lacked “hard unrelenting insistence on the inerrancy of the Bible” and would not have rejected critical views of Scripture (p. 116). Yet in the end Barr is constrained to defend evangelicals against the criticism that they are unconcerned “for the common life of mankind, for the rebuking of sin in social and political matters, or for the support of necessary reforms and improvements” (p. 113) and to moderate this censure into a softer complaint that evangelicals give priority to changing individuals rather than changing structures.

Barr complains that conservative evangelicals discourage the reading of nonconservative writers. Here he wholly misreads the American scene, if not the British scene as well. Nonevangelical works are much more fully read and evaluated and quoted on evangelical campuses than are evangelical works on ecumenical campuses. In one instance, at an ecumenical seminary that announced in print that its curriculum represented all Christian viewpoints, students as a last resort picketed—futilely—to get a single elective course on twentieth-century evangelical scholars. Barr apparently dismisses existing evangelical works on theology and philosophy as mediocre because their stance is evangelical. It is significant that he speaks of evangelical students’ “pressing” for the inclusion of evangelical literature on required-reading lists (p. 123). He acknowledges that in recent decades scholarship has become increasingly important for evangelicals, but then he goes on to say that evangelicals’ interest in ancient Near Eastern history and languages—from which many nonevangelical scholars are withdrawing—is largely propagandists (pp. 122 f.), a motivation to which Barr’s own viewpoints are presumably immune. Barr charges conservative scholars who oppose evolutionary explanations of the religion of Israel with “a clear attempt at denying freedom of research, only the latest in a long series of such attempts from the same quarter” (p. 148). That charge is beneath the dignity of a scholar of Barr’s stature; it is patently untrue.

Barr takes offense, on the other hand, when conservative writers quote nonconservatives who defer to conservative positions on biblical history and dating. Are such writers—Barr included—to be wholly ignored, or to be quoted only in an adversary role? Barr also laments (without here voicing uneasiness even about Tillich or Bultmann) the fundamentalist dismissal of modern theologians who “restate the gospel in categories that can be understood by the modern world” (p. 161). Fundamentalists are apparently damned if they do and damned if they don’t, because in Barr’s view they apparently are damned fundamentalists.

The payoff comes when Barr tells us that children who follow their parents’ fundamentalist commitment may be victims of manipulative indoctrination. He adds that when children of nonevangelical parents become fundamentalists, they may share in the modern psychology of revolt against their parents by viewing their parents as only nominal Christians (p. 327).

In short, Barr acknowledges no logical reason for the existence and survival of fundamentalists. Fundamentalist theological concerns, he asserts, are marked by “a failure of intellectual understanding” (p. 160). “Their failure to look critically into their own position and to consider whether it has involved, or still involves, philosophical elements, is total” (p. 276).

Whatever we do with Barr’s representations (and we must avoid discarding the wheat with the chaff and must give due consideration to theological aspects of his work that touch the vital nerve of evangelical witness today), his pungent portrait of fundamentalism raises several questions.

If fundamentalism is as disreputable as Barr declares it to be, why should a distinguished professor of biblical interpretation serving on one of the world’s most prestigious university faculties take the time to write such a lengthy book about it?

If fundamentalism is as repugnant as Barr says it is, why does an influential core of British university professors find many of its theological emphases persuasive?

If fundamentalism is as repulsive as Barr would have us believe, why do hundreds of gifted university students on scores of prestigious campuses respond to its appeal while ecumenical student ministries founder?

If barr is correct in his analysis, we are, in short, left with the colossal problem of comprehending these incomprehensible British fundamentalists.

It will help little, at this point, to distinguish between fundamentalism and evangelical Christianity. Barr recognizes that fundamentalists prefer to be called “conservative evangelicals” (p. 2)—or, more accurately, evangelicals. While he does not claim that “all conservative evangelicals are fundamentalists,” he holds that “the overlap is very great” (p. 5). More importantly, most evangelicals would doubtless reject Barr’s basis of distinction. Barr imports into the term “fundamentalism” everything he finds to be odious in evangelical Christianity and then stretches the term “evangelical” to embrace modern theology and biblical criticism as well. He confesses he is unsure whether the line between fundamentalism and evangelicalism is to be drawn slightly differently in America and in Britain (p. 5). But his terminology fluctuates; among the terms he uses are “old-fashioned Christian fundamentalist,” “fundamentalist,” “average fundamentalist,” “normal fundamentalist,” “extreme and consistent fundamentalist,” “fundamentalist-evangelical,” “evangelical,” “more average conservative evangelical,” “interdenominational conservative evangelical,” “consistent evangelical,” “strongly conservative evangelical tradition,” “new conservative,” “liberal evangelicalism,” and “critical … and non-conservative.” These distinctions sometimes recall the Delphic oracle, as when Barr himself writes: “Admitting exceptions, and dissociating modern conservative evangelicalism from the extreme …, it remains broadly true that … or at least …” (pp. 115 f.).

Barr’s imprecise terminology allows him to manipulate what he prefers or dislikes into one category or another. But his elastic use of “fundamentalism” to include at times not only what is biblically deplorable but also what is evangelically commendable forces the conservative scholar who seeks to refute Barr to identify himself on crucial matters with the fundamentalist cause, even where he would prefer to detach himself from much of the so-called fundamentalist mentality. In this way Barr wins the shallow propaganda victory of forcing those who deplore his extreme positions to come to the defense of what he prelabels an ugly fundamentalism. At one point he asserts that B. B. Warfield “moulded the set of ideas we now know as fundamentalism” (p. 262). Yet anyone familiar with classic evangelical works knows how energetically Warfield, Machen, and many other evangelicals fought certain aberrations that Barr identifies in fundamentalism.

The cat is out of the bag, however, when Barr candidly tells us that in his view “we must thoroughly reject the claim, that in order to be a consistent evangelical, one must also be a conservative evangelical” (p. 61). It is clearly conservative Christianity, or evangelical orthodoxy, that Barr repudiates; his lament over fundamentalism is an apologetic artifice for promoting a nonevangelical alternative.

The remaining installments of this article may serve to show that those incomprehensible fundamentalists whom Barr castigates are perhaps not so unintelligible as are the disconcerted nonevangelicals for whom Barr speaks.

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

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