On the Trail of Fundamentalism, Part 1

A question posed in response to my recent post on Tertullian has been occupying my thoughts. "What's the difference between 'dogged commitment to the truth' and blind fundamentalism?"

This is a big and far-reaching question and would require a whole essay, not a blog post. I was, though, reminded of an excellent piece from the pen of A W Tozer, which helps us forward, specifically as concerns Christian fundamentalism. "No Revival Without Reformation" was written in the 1950s and surveys trends in Christianity over the thirty years prior to that. Reading it, however, you would hardly know this, so timeless and relevant are his observations.

As a reaction to Higher Criticism and its offspring, Modernism, there arose in Protestantism a powerful movement in defense of the historic Christian faith. This, for obvious reasons, came to be known as Fundamentalism. It was a more or less spontaneous movement without much organization, but its purpose wherever it appeared was the same: to stay 'the rising tide of negation' in Christian theology and to restate and defend the basic doctrines of New Testament Christianity.

So far, so good. But, Tozer maintains, this "dogged commitment to the truth" (my starting question, you recall) fell victim to its own virtues.

The Word died in the hands of its friends. The voice of the prophet was silenced and the scribe captured the minds of the faithful. An unofficial hierarchy decided what Christians were to believe. Not the Scriptures, but what the scribe thought the Scriptures meant became the Christian creed. Christian colleges, seminaries, Bible institutes, Bible conferences, popular Bible expositors all joined to promote the cult of textualism. The system of extreme dispensationalism which was devised, relieved the Christian of repentance, obedience and cross-carrying in any other than the most formal sense. Whole sections of the New Testament were taken from the church and disposed of after a rigid system of “dividing the Word of truth.”

What had therefore been intended as a remedy (or prevention) became as harmful as the disease it set out to cure.

A kind of cold mist settled over Fundamentalism... The whole mood was different from that of the Early Church and of the great souls who suffered and sang and worshiped in the centuries past. The doctrines were sound but something vital was missing. The tree of correct doctrine was never allowed to blossom. The voice of the turtledove was rarely heard in the land; instead, the parrot sat on his perch and dutifully repeated what he had been taught. The whole emotional tone was sombre and dull... As [this literalism] triumphed, the Spirit withdrew and textualism ruled supreme.

Thus far Tozer's assessment of the birth of Christian fundamentalism, its virtues and its serious failings. In my next post we can take this further.