Bible Heaven/Bible Heaven.iso/misc/answers/answers.001

Text File | 1990-07-10 | 16KB | 268 lines

                     What is Fundamentalism?

     The story of fundamentalism may be viewed in three main
phases.  The first lasted a generation, from the 1890's to the
Scopes Trial of 1925.  Fundamentalism emerged as a reaction to
liberalizing trends in American Protestantism; it broke off, but
never completely, from evangelicalism, of which it may be
considered one wing.  In its second phase, it passed from view,
but never disappeared and never even lost ground.  Finally,
fundamentalism came to the nation's attention again about twenty
years ago, and it has enjoyed remarkable growth since.
     Not counting quasi-Christian sects like like the Mormons and
Jehovah's Witnesses, fundamentalism has experienced the greatest
growth, in percentage terms, of any type of Christianity.
Converts have come from the large number of Americans who always
have been unchurched and from the large number of drop-outs from
other denominations.
     What has been particularly surprising is that Catholics seem
to make up a disproportionate share of the new recruits.  The
Catholic Church in America claims about a quarter of the
country's inhabitants, so one might expect about a quarter of new
fundamentalists to have been at one time Catholics.  But in many
fundamentalist congregations a third or even as many as half of
the members once gave allegiance to Rome.  This varies around the
country, of course.
     Fundamentalist churches in the South claim few converts from
Catholicism because there never have been many Catholics there
anyway.  In parts of the Northeast and Midwest, where Catholics
are more common, one finds former Catholics making up a majority
of some fundamentalist congregations.  And in the Southwest, with
a high Hispanic population, whole congregations can be found made
up of former Catholics.  Indeed, it has been estimated that one
out of six Hispanics in this country is now a fundamentalist.
Twenty years ago you could find almost no Hispanic
fundamentalists, so great and so rapid has the exodus been.
     Although present-day fundamentalism is almost exclusively
American and is, as a movement within evangelicalism, rather new,
its leaders speak as though it has been a well-formed whole since
time immemorial.  Many people think fundamentalism is unalloyed
Reformation religion.  And it is, in a way, but the lineage is
not as strong as one might think.  The direct historical line one
might expect to find is obscure.  In recent years fundamentalism
has received a considerable press, and most literate Americans
realize it is on the resurgence, but most of them also think it
was always around and only recently achieved notoriety.  That
isn't quite right.
     True, there have always been people who have been, say,
strict Calvinists, and fundamentalism is nothing if not
Calvinistic.  But until a long lifetime ago fundamentalism as we
know it was not a separate movement within Protestantism, and the
word itself was virtually unknown.  Those people who today would
be called fundamentalists were just Baptists or Presbyterians or
whatever back then.  But in the last decade of the nineteenth
century there came to the fore issues that made them start to
withdraw from mainline Protestantism.
     The issues were the Social Gospel, a liberalizing and
secularizing trend within Protestantism; the embrace of
Darwinism, which seemed to call into question the reliability of
Scripture; and the higher criticism of the Bible that came out of
Germany.
     Some new thinkers attempted to synthesize secularism and
Christianity and did so by giving up Christianity, or so the
conservatives thought.  In reaction to these trends early
fundamentalist leaders united around several basic principles,
but it was not until the publication of a series of volumes
called The Fundamentals that the movement received its name.
     The basic elements of fundamentalism were formulated almost
exactly a century ago at the Presbyterian theological seminary in
Princeton, New Jersey by men like Benjamin B. Warfield and
Charles Hodge.  What they produced became known as Princeton
theology, and it appealed to conservative Protestants who were
concerned with the liberalizing trends of the Social Gospel
movement, which gained steam about the same time.
     In 1909 the brothers Milton and Lyman Stewart, whose wealth
came from oil, underwrote a series of twelve volumes on what were
termed The Fundamentals.  Their subsidy was $300,000, and the
books received wide distribution until about 1920.  There were 64
contributors, including scholars such as James Orr, W.J. Eerdman,
H.C.G. Moule, James M. Gray, and Warfield himself.  They included
Episcopal bishops, Presbyterian ministers, Methodist evangelists,
even an Egyptologist.  As Edward Dobson, an associate pastor at
Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church, put it, "They were
certainly not anti-intellectual, snakehandling, cultic,
obscurantist fanatics."
     The preface to the volumes explained their purpose: "In 1909
God moved two Christian laymen to set aside a large sum of money
for issuing twelve volumes that would set forth the fundamentals
of the Christian faith, and which were to be sent free to
ministers of the gospel, missionaries, Sunday school
superintendents, and others engaged in aggressive Christian work
throughout the English speaking world."  Three million copies of
the series went out.  Harry Fosdick, himself a theological
liberal, wrote an article in The Christian Century called "Shall
the Fundamentalists Win?"  He used the title of the books to
designate the people he was opposing, and the label stuck.
     The fundamentals identified in the series can be reduced to
five: (1) the inspiration and infallibility of Scripture, (2) the
deity of Christ (including his virgin birth), (3) the
substitutionary atonement of his death, (4) his literal
resurrection from the dead, and (5) his literal return in the
Second Coming.
     This at least explains how the name of the movement came
into being.  The movement itself has a more confused origin.  It
had no one founder, nor was there a single event which
precipitated its advent.  Fundamentalist writers of course insist
that fundamentalism is nothing but a continuation of Christian
orthodoxy, which prevailed for three centuries after Christ, went
underground for twelve hundred years, surfaced with the
Reformation, took its knocks from various sources, and was
alternately influential and diminished in visibility.  In short,
according to its partisans, fundamentalism always has been what
has been left over after the rest of Christianity (if it can even
be granted the title) has fallen into apostasy.
     For practical purposes, it might be better to hark back to
the Great Awakening of the 1720's, by the end of which, two
decades later, perhaps a third of the adults in the Colonies had
undergone a religious conversion.  It began in New Jersey with
the preaching of Gilbert Tennent and was taken up in New England
by the Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards.  In Virginia Samuel
Davies was at the head of the effort among the Presbyterians.
What capped the movement was a tour of the colonies by George
Whitefield from 1739 to 1741.  That was the remote groundwork for
American fundamentalism.
     Nearer to our own time was the Methodist revival of 1866,
held on the centenary of the establishment of Methodism in
America, which was accomplished through the preaching of Philip
Embury in New York.  The revival culminated in the Holiness Camp
Meeting of Vineland, New Jersey a year later, and that culminated
in schism, the result being the Holiness Churches splitting off
from Methodism, which itself had split off from Anglicanism.
     Each of these movements was a stab at puritanism--not, of
course, the puritanism of the seventeenth-century Puritans, but
at that attitude which is at the core of every offshoot from
traditional Christianity, the desire to return to the purity of
the early Church.  And this kind of puritanism remains the
motivating force of fundamentalism, as demonstrated by one of the
key charges against the Catholic Church, that it has obscured the
original purity of Christianity with centuries of unscriptural
encrustations.  For the fundamentalist, one of the first duties
is to grasp the essence, the pith, of Christianity as it left the
mouth of its Founder--and then to admit no "inventions."
     Fundamentalists' attitude toward the Bible is the keystone
of their faith.  Their understanding of inspiration and inerrancy
comes from Benjamin Warfield's notion of plenary-verbal
inspiration, meaning that in the autographs all of the Bible is
inspired and the inspiration extends not just to the message God
wished to convey, but to the very words chosen by the sacred
writers.
     Although the doctrine of the inspiration and inerrancy of
the Bible comes first to the tongue of most fundamentalists, the
logically prior doctrine is the deity of Christ.  For the
Catholic, his deity is accepted either on the word of the
authoritative and infallible Church or because a dispassionate
examination of the Bible and early Christian history shows that
he must have been just what he claimed to be, God.
     Most Catholics, as a practical matter, use the first method;
many--the apologist Arnold Lunn is a good example--use the second
while not denying the first.  In either case, there is a certain
reasoning involved.  For the fundamentalist the assurance of
Christ's divinity comes not through reason, or even through faith
in the Catholic meaning of the word, but in a different way.
     As Warfield put it, "The supreme proof to every Christian of
the deity of his Lord is in his own inner experience of the
transforming power of his Lord upon the heart and life."  One
consequence of this has become painfully clear to many
fundamentalists.  When one falls into sin, when the ardor that
was present at conversion fades, the transforming power of Christ
seems to go, and so might one's faith in his deity.  This
accounts for many defections from fundamentalism; the dark night
of the soul results in jettisoning the fundamentalist position.
As an appendage to the doctrine of the deity of Christ, and
considered equally important in The Fundamentals, is the Virgin
Birth.  (Some fundamentalists list this separately, making six
basic doctrines instead of five.)  One might expect the reality
of heaven and hell or the existence of the Trinity to be next,
but the Virgin Birth is taken as a vital belief since it protects
belief in Christ's deity.  One should keep in mind, though, that
when fundamentalists speak of Christ's birth from a virgin, they
mean a virgin only until his birth.  Their common understanding
is that Mary had later children, all those disciples referred to
as Christ's "brethren."
     In reaction to the Social Gospel advocates, who said Christ
gave nothing more than a good moral example, the early
fundamentalists insisted on their third point, that he died a
substitutionary death.  He not only took on our sins; he received
the penalty that would have been ours.  He was actually punished
by the Father in our stead.
     On the matter of the Resurrection fundamentalists do not
differ from orthodox Catholics.  Christ rose physically from the
dead, not just spiritually.  His resurrection was not a
collective hallucination of his followers, nor something invented
by pious writers of later years.  It really happened, and to deny
its actuality is to deny Scripture's reliability.
     The most disputed topic, among fundamentalists themselves,
concerns the fifth point listed in The Fundamentals, the Second
Coming.  If there is agreement, it is only on the point that
Christ will physically return to Earth.  When that will be is up
for grabs.  Some say it will be before the millennium, the
thousand-year reign.  Others say it will be after.  There is
little consensus on just what the millennium itself will consist
of.  Some fundamentalists believe in the rapture, the bodily
taking into heaven of true believers before the tribulation.
Others find no scriptural basis for such a belief.
     And there is widespread disagreement on the nature of the
tribulation and its timing with respect to the millennium.  Some
think it is around the corner, with the Russians playing the role
assigned to the northern power in Daniel.  Others say it is in
the distant future.  If Catholics may be called partial to St.
Malachi's prophecies about the popes and the three secrets of
Fatima, fundamentalists may surely be termed absorbed in
chronicling the Last Days, the only difficulty being that no two
major commentators agree on what will happen or when.
     Such are the five (or six) main points discussed in the
books which gave fundamentalism its name.  But they are not
necessarily the points that most distinguish fundamentalism
today.  You rarely hear much discussion about the Virgin Birth,
for instance.  Of course, there is no question about
fundamentalists believing that doctrine (but not the perpetual
virginity of Mary), but to the general public, and to most
fundamentalists themselves, fundamentalism has today a somewhat
different emphasis.
     First to catch one's eye is their reliance on the Bible to
the complete exclusion of any authority wielded by the Church.
The second thing is fundamentalists' insistence in a faith in
Christ as one's personal Lord and Savior.
     "Do you accept Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?"
they ask.  "Have you been saved?"  This is unalloyed Christian
individualism.  The individual is saved, without real regard to a
church, the congregation, or anyone else.  It is a one-to-one
relationship, with no mediators, no sacraments, just the
individual Christian and his Lord.  And the Christian knows when
he has been saved, down to the hour and minute of his salvation,
because his salvation came when he "accepted" Christ.  It came
like a flash, never to be forgotten, the way it came to Paul on
the Damascus Road.
     In that instant, the fundamentalist's salvation was assured.
There is now nothing that can undo it.  Without that instant, he
would be doomed.  And that is why the third most visible thing
about fundamentalists is their evangelism.  If sinners do not
undergo the same kind of salvation experience fundamentalists
have undergone, they will go to hell.  Fundamentalists perceive a
duty to spread their faith--what can be more charitable than to
give others a chance for escaping hell?--and in that they have
been successful.
     Their success is partly due to their discipline.  For all
their talk about the Catholic Church being "rule-laden," there
are perhaps no Christians who operate today in a more regimented
manner.  Their rules--non-biblical, one might add--extend not
just to religion and religious practices proper, but to facets of
everyday life.  (Strictures on drinking, gambling, dancing, and
smoking come to mind.)  What's more, fundamentalists are
intensely involved in their local congregations.
     Many people returning to the Catholic Church from
fundamentalism complain that as fundamentalists they had no time
or room for themselves; everything centered around the church.
All their friends were members, all their social activities were
staged by it.  Not to attend Wednesday evening services (in
addition to one or two services on Sunday), not to participate in
the Bible studies and youth groups, not to dress and act like
everyone else in the congregation--these immediately put one
beyond the pale, and in a small church (few fundamentalist
churches have more than a hundred members) this meant ostracism,
a silent invitation to worship elsewhere.

                                        --Karl Keating
                                          Catholic Answers
                                          P.O. Box 17181
                                          San Diego, CA 92117