On the Trail of Fundamentalism, Conclusion

In the light of the considerations outlined in the last two posts, the consensus today seems to be that most sincere and active Christians and churches would reject the “fundamentalist” description. They prefer “Bible-believing” or “evangelical”, each of which carries the idea of foundational New Testament beliefs and practices (thus avoiding the charge of liberalism). Such terms also allow churches to distance themselves both from the perceived rigid legalism of some (hyper-Calvinist) wings of the church, and from the 'lunatic fringe' associations attached to “fundamentalism” by the popular press and trendy atheism.

We do well to return to A W Tozer's analysis (see previous posts). Although written 50 years ago, his overview of trends is both timeless and masterly.

The human mind can endure textualism just so long before it seeds a way of escape... The masses of Fundamentalism reacted against the tyranny of the scribes.

In centuries past, perhaps, a matter so weighty to the Church might have required the convening of a Council of wise and respected leaders to confer and deliver a prescriptive ruling. Not so now!

The result... has been a religious debauch hardly equalled since Israel worshipped the golden calf... The separating line between the Church and the world has been all but obliterated.

Aside from a few of the grosser sins, the sins of the unregenerate world are now approved by a shocking number of professedly "born-again' Christians, and copied eagerly. Young Christians take as their models the rankest kind of worldlings and try to be as much like them as possible. Religious leaders have adopted the techniques of the advertisers: boasting, baiting and shameless exaggerating are now carried on as a normal procedure in church work. The moral climate is not that of the New Testament, but that of Hollywood.

This has come at a terrible cost:

Most evangelicals no longer initiate, they imitate... The holy faith of our fathers has in many places been made a form of entertainment, and the appalling thing is that all this has been fed down to the masses from the top.

And worst of all:

That note of protest which began with the New Testament and which was always heard loudest went the Church was most powerful has been successfully silenced. The radical element in testimony and life that once made Christians hated by the world is missing from present-day evangelicalism.

This is still the dilemma for Christians and churches today: to tighten up and risk "the tyranny of the scribes"; to let go and settle for a non-threatening but emasculated faith; or to be bold enough to cut a new path, which is nevertheless the old path of the New Testament: "a new commandment, but the commandment you heard from the beginning" (1 John.2:7).

On the Trail of Fundamentalism, Part 2

My last post on Christian fundamentalism has generated some discussion. Before returning to A W Tozer's analysis, we need to be sure what actually constitutes fundamentalist Christianity. Do an image search on an internet browser under those words and up come an inglorious succession of caricatures of clichéd tub-thumpers and slightly weird bible-bashers. This is clearly the perception 'out there'. This is as sad as it is uninformed. The origins of modern fundamentalism lie back in the 1890s and an attempt to safeguard the true foundations of Christianity, which had been attacked and eroded from all sides throughout that century. For example, the 1910 General Assembly of the [American] Presbyterian Church distilled the historic faith to "five fundamentals":

* The divine inspiration of the Bible, and therefore its inerrancy;
* The virgin birth of Jesus;
* The belief that Christ's death atoned for sin.
* The bodily resurrection of Jesus.
* The historical reality of Jesus' miracles.

Others added extra stones to these key foundations, principally the belief in Christ's divinity. Conservative, conscientious Christians rallied to these as to a firm rock in a stormy ocean. They became known as "fundamentalists".

As we saw last time in A W Tozer's trenchant analysis, what began as a laudable attempt to stay the tide that was pounding away at Christianity, morphed into a rigid system that regulated all belief - what Tozer calls "the cult of textualism". As Jeffrey O'Rourke commented after my last post, Tozer eloquently sums up the huge danger involved in a rigid, mental reliance on prescribed beliefs.

"The error of textualism is not doctrinal. It is far more subtle than that and much more difficult to discover, but its effects are just as deadly. It assumes, for instance, that if we have the word for a thing we have the thing itself. If it is in the Bible, it is in us. If we have the doctrine, we have the experience. If something was true of Paul, it is of necessity true of us because we accept Paul's epistles as divinely inspired... Assurance of individual salvation is thus no more than a logical conclusion drawn from doctrinal premises, and the resultant experience wholly mental."

John Vagabond's comment on my last post ably shows the process whereby "fundamental-ism" (the correct process of returning to what God actually said and wants done) turns into Fundamentalism (a doctrinal system which allows a self-righteous elite to pass judgement on others): When belief hardens into principle, thereafter into doctrine which people then are willing to defend, textual criticism becomes its own harbinger of destruction.

As Tozer rightly points out, the human mind can endure textualism just so long, before it seeks a way of escape, and this is what I hope to turn to in Part 3.

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.