A Handbook of Contemporary Theology

Tracing Trends and Discerning Directions in Today's Theological Landscape

Smith, David L.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781441206367
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This introduction to contemporary theology looks at the origin and history of each movement, their major figures, and doctrinal emphases. The author evaluates the teachings and practices of each system in light of biblical Christianity.

One. Fundamentalism

Fundamentalism originated in early twentieth-century North America as a movement to preserve and promote conservative, biblical Christian orthodoxy. It was a militant reaction against challenges from liberal theology, the theory of evolution, and higher critical methodology in biblical studies.

The Early Days

The term “fundamentalist” (generally credited to Curtis Laws in 1920 in the Baptist Watchman-Examiner) probably came as the result of the publication of a series of twelve pamphlets (1910-15) entitled The Fundamentals. The project was underwritten by two Los Angeles laymen, Lyman and Milton Stewart, who wanted to ensure that “every pastor, evangelist, minister, theological professor, theological student, Sunday School superintendent, YMCA and YWCA secretary in the English-speaking world” might receive these booklets in which were discussed the essential theological topics of the day.[1] Writers included noted conservative scholars and preachers such as G. Campbell Morgan (Westminster Chapel, London), Edgar Y. Mullins (Southern Baptist Seminary), James Orr (United Free Church College, Glasgow), and Benjamin B. Warfield (Princeton Seminary) to name a few. Their essays addressed what these writers saw as enemies of the Christian faith: socialism, cultic heresies, higher criticism, evolution, spiritism, and so forth. Positively, they affirmed the Virgin Birth, deity and substitutionary atonement of Christ, and the unity and plenary inspiration of Scripture. Their work was scholarly, systematic, and biblical without rancor of any sort.

Presbyterian fundamentalism. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, defenders of the Christian fundamentals became well organized and mounted an offensive against the foes of orthodoxy. They were especially aggressive within the Presbyterian and Baptist denominations. Under their influence the General Assembly of the northern Presbyterian Church in 1910 issued a five-point doctrinal summary declaring as essential beliefs the inerrancy of the Bible, Christ’s virgin birth, His substitutionary atonement on Calvary, His physical resurrection, and the sharing of His love and power through literal miracles. This declaration was reaffirmed in 1916 and in 1923.

In 1922, Harry Emerson Fosdick, a Baptist liberal theologian on the Union Seminary faculty—and an outstanding preacher—who was acting minister of New York’s Old First Presbyterian Church, reacted by preaching a sermon entitled, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Although the sermon was a plea for peace and toleration, it was not received in such a spirit by fundamentalists, who used the Five-Point Declaration to demand that Fosdick either become a Presbyterian and accept Presbyterian doctrine or else leave the church. After a protracted controversy, Fosdick resigned and returned to the Baptists.

The liberal Presbyterian wing was not long in effecting a counterattack. Their battlefield was the seminaries, where teaching became increasingly liberal. In 1929, for example, they were successful in ousting J. Gresham Machen from the faculty of Princeton Seminary. He, in turn, helped to found Westminster Seminary as a conservative alternative. In 1936, the increasing liberalization of the northern Presbyterian Church resulted in his departure from that denomination and the founding of a new Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

Baptist fundamentalism. The struggle was equally virulent among the major Baptist groups in North America. In 1919, William B. Riley of the Northern Baptists, Frank Norris of the Southern Baptists, and Thomas T. Shields of the Canadian Baptists, founded the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association in Philadelphia. Its goal was to recapture for biblical Christianity the primary place in American religious life through literature, debates with liberals, and Bible conferences. It was joined in its endeavor by other organizations, such as the Anti-evolution League and the Bible Crusaders of America.[2] In 1923, Riley, Norris, and Shields circulated a “Call and Manifesto” to their Baptist colleagues and, as a result, the Baptist Bible Union of North America was born in Kansas in May of 1923. Its purpose was “to give the people the fullest information respecting the ravages of Modernism in all departments of . . . denominational life.”[3]

Southern Baptists, while not untouched, were the least bothered by liberalism. They had long seen themselves as the protectors and sustainers of orthodoxy. Their denomination was in the hands of a conservative leadership and they were (at this point) untroubled, for the most part, by questions of higher criticism and modern science. Consequently, they did not react very sympathetically to the carping of hyper-fundamentalists, especially those like Norris, who had an unsavory reputation for fear-mongering and divisiveness. At Memphis in 1925, the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a Confession of Faith (based on the New Hampshire Confession) which restated historic Baptist principles, along with a statement on “Science and Religion” (written by E.Y. Mullins) which promoted “free research,” but railed against the dissemination of theory as scientific fact. The following year at Houston, the Convention adopted a statement by its president, George McDaniel, which accepted the Genesis account of creation and rejected “every theory, evolution or other, which teaches that man originated in, or came by way of, a lower animal ancestry.”[4] These steps seemed to bring peace and harmony to Southern Baptists at large.

For Northern Baptists, it was a different story. Pluralism was exacting a frightful toll. Again, the battlegrounds were the institutions of higher learning. Newton, Crozer, and Chicago were Northern Baptist hotbeds of modernism. Some fundamentalists made efforts to secure control of the schools and the denominational bureaucracy. When they failed in their attempts, many decided to maintain purity of doctrine by separating in 1932 to form the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches (GARBC). Others stayed within the denomination, but countered by founding new, conservative colleges and seminaries such as Gordon College in Massachusetts, Eastern College and Seminary in Pennsylvania, and Northern Seminary in Illinois.

In Canada, T.T. Shields, celebrated pastor of Toronto’s Jarvis Street Baptist Church, attacked modernist teaching at McMaster University, the school of the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec. The result was his censure by that denomination in 1926. Two years later, he and a large number of other dissident Baptist churches withdrew to form the Union of Regular Baptist Churches, with Toronto Baptist Seminary as their school. During this same period, a number of churches in the West also broke ranks with the Baptist Union of Western Canada over modernist teaching at their denominational school, Brandon College (in Manitoba). Many of these churches held strongly to dispensational pre-millennialism as promoted by Moody Bible Institute. Shields was much opposed to such eschatology and, when he roundly denounced it, many of his followers left him to found the Independent Baptist Fellowship, which held to the premillenial stance they espoused.

The advent of the Great Depression found fundamentalism in decline. The forces of theological liberalism were firmly in control of most of the major denominations. It may well be said that, by 1930, the modernist-fundamentalist controversy was over, with modernists clearly the winners.

The Emergence of Neo-Fundamentalism: The 1930s

Initially, fundamentalism was an alliance of many diverse groups all of whom were determined to preserve biblical Christianity. There were Calvinists and Arminians, those who were amillennial in their eschatology and those who were dispensational, those who were episcopal in their polity and those who were congregational. But these varied elements soon seemed predestined to fracture as a result of self-interest and intolerance of one another.

Those who had separated themselves from their denominations gradually began to look upon those who had chosen to stay and fight as “compromisers.” Increasingly, they drew apart from them, seeing complete spiritual separation as essential to the maintenance of all they held precious.

There was also a crystallization in theological focus. These separatist fundamentalists[5] began to identify themselves more and more with the dispensationalism of The Scofield Reference Bible (1909). Included was a strong adherence to a Calvinistic, deterministic “security of the believer” which, in some cases, went to the extreme of making a public decision followed by baptism a saving sacrament which ensured one’s place in heaven for eternity.

Once again, a basic area of activity was in higher education. A major contributor to the expansion of neo-fundamentalism was the development of the Bible institute. Initiated by A.B. Simpson (Missionary Training Institute, 1882) and D.L. Moody (Moody Bible Institute, 1886) some years earlier, these institutions were used by fundamentalists as an alternative to denominational colleges and seminaries. By 1930, there were more than fifty of these schools in existence. In addition to the two noted above, some of the more noteworthy were: Providence (Rhode Island) Bible Institute, Bible Institute of Los Angeles, Denver Bible Institute, Prairie Bible Institute (Alberta), and Winnipeg Bible Institute.

On the heels of the Bible schools came Christian liberal arts colleges. The major ones included Wheaton in Illinois (founded in 1857, but greatly expanded under the presidency of J.O. Buswell from 1926–40), Gordon (Mass.), and Bob Jones (first in Cleveland, Tenn. and, since 1947, in Greenville, S.C.).

The formation of the GARBC. It was largely during the 1930s that the movement developed its own denominational groupings. The General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, already mentioned, was an outgrowth of the Bible Baptist Union which became defunct in 1932. At its founding meeting, five key goals were identified:

1. An association of churches, not a convention.

2. Complete separation from and no association whatsoever with any Northern Baptist work.

3. Conformity to the London and New Hampshire Confessions of Faith.

4. The fostering of a spirit of missions among pastors.

5. Aiding churches in finding sound pastors.[6]

The GARBC constitution prevented any school or organization from having direct contact with the denomination. Each would have to make annual application for approval. In this way the GARBC could withdraw approval from any school or organization which drifted from its principles. In its early years five mission boards were approved: Baptist Mid Missions; the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism; the Fellowship of Baptists for Home Missions; Evangelical Baptist Missions; and Hiawatha Independent Baptist Missions. Two seminaries—Los Angeles and Grand Rapids—were approved along with five colleges: Western Baptist Bible College in Oregon; Los Angeles Baptist College in California; Faith Baptist Bible College in Michigan; Cedarville College in Ohio; and Baptist Bible College in Pennsylvania.

The founding of the IFCA. In 1930, the Independent Fundamental Churches of America (IFCA) was organized out of the American Conference of Undenominational Churches. At the organizational meeting were twelve Congregationalists, three Presbyterians, one Baptist, nineteen Independents, and four nondenominational persons. The IFCA closely matched the GARBC in growth, with thirty-eight churches in 1935 and seventy-five in 1940. Among the early leaders were M.R. DeHaan, John F. Walvoord, and J.O. Buswell, Jr.

The American Baptist Association. The American Baptist Association was organized in 1925 and was based on the thought of Southern Baptist preacher J.R. Graves (1820–93). His teaching was known as “Landmarkism,” for it commended a return of churches to the “old landmarks.” The true church, Graves believed, is one which affirms the local church and excludes any notion of a church universal. Baptism is valid only when performed by the duly ordained pastor of a local Baptist church (by immersion, of course!); and the ordinance of the Lord’s Supper must be restricted to the members of that specific local Baptist church where the ordinance is being observed. Graves also taught “the trail of blood,” a succession of true churches from the New Testament church to the present day, usually a martyrs’ church—always a believer’s church—and, despite what name it bore, always Baptist in doctrine.[7] The American Baptist Association differs from all other Baptists in its insistence that the baptism of John the Baptist was really Christian.[8]

The Grace Brethren. The Grace Brethren was another major group, founded in 1937 as an alternative to liberalism among the Brethren as modeled in the Ashland Theological Seminary. Its key institution was Grace Theological Seminary at Winona Lake, Indiana, founded under the influence of men such as Alva McClain, Herman Hoyt and L.S. Bauman.

Fundamentalists and mass media. Fundamentalists were among the first religious practitioners to understand the importance of the mass media to church growth. In 1925, Charles E. Fuller began the “Old-Fashioned Revival Hour” on radio. It was a weekly program and, by 1942, was heard on 456 stations in Canada and the United States. His program became a model for other fundamentalist radio shows such as DeHaan’s “Radio Bible Class” and Barnhouse’s “Bible Study Hour.” Over the years, fundamentalist schools purchased radio stations over which to air their beliefs: WMBI (Moody), Chicago; WMUU (Bob Jones), Greenville, South Carolina; and KBBI (Bi...