Canadian Baptist Fundamentalism, 1878–1978

Taylor Murray, Paul R. Wilson

• Editorial: Pickwick Publications
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781725260733
• Categoría: Teologia e religione
• Categoría: Fondamentalismo e sette religiose

As the first single-volume work to present a national picture of Baptist engagement with the fundamentalist movement in Canada in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Canadian Baptist Fundamentalism fills an important gap in the historiography. It explores the contributions of well-known fundamentalists, such as T. T. Shields, William "Bible Bill" Aberhart, and J. J. Sidey, while also introducing the reader to several lesser-known figures, including Joshua Denovan, E. J. Stobo, and T. A. Meister. Together, these studies demonstrate the diversity of the fundamentalist movement as it emerged and developed across Canada. By drawing on material from across the country, Canadian Baptist Fundamentalism addresses old themes in new ways--and, in the process, raises a variety of questions and possibilities for new avenues of study.

1

Identity and Ideology

An Overview of Canadian Baptist Fundamentalism, 1878–1978

Paul R. Wilson

Canadian Baptists have sometimes represented their experience as a perilous journey. In his centennial history of the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec (BCOQ), Murray J. S. Ford used the image of a ship on stormy seas to express this perspective: “The Baptists of Canada have rarely been able to sail their ship on smooth water. Most often the winds of controversy have whipped the waters to perilous heights and the ship has bobbed and tossed.”38 Without question the fundamentalist movement was a major contributor to the controversies that troubled the waters for Canadian Baptists.

This first chapter has one primary objective: It provides an overview of Canadian Baptist fundamentalism as a historical and theological movement from 1878–1978. This is no easy task. As the reader will soon discover, the Canadian Baptist fundamentalist movement was complex, full of ebbs and flows, both linear and circular, at times unified and at other times fragmented, sometimes in the limelight and often on the periphery, and driven by certainties and rerouted by contingencies. It is impossible to capture every change, challenge, controversy, expression, and nuance in this short chapter. Still, the account offered in the next few pages includes an historical analysis and key events, personalities, and developments that shaped the first one hundred years of the Canadian Baptist fundamentalist movement.

Absolute chronologies are always suspect, because social, cultural, and theological developments and movements do not always fit neatly into a rigid timeframe. Still, John Fea identifies four approximate phases in the development of American fundamentalism (1) an “irenic phase,” which runs from approximately 1893–1919 and serves as a harbinger to fundamentalism “proper”; (2) a “militant phase,” that runs from 1920–1936 and which encompasses the now famous “fundamentalist-modernist controversies”; (3) a “divisive phase” from 1941–1960, associated with the intramural fragmentation of fundamentalism into “evangelical” and “separatist” factions; and (4) a “separatist phase” from 1960 to the present, in which the term fundamentalism is applied to those Protestants who choose to remove themselves from the mainstream of American culture and religion.39 These phases are certainly helpful for understanding in broad terms the development of American fundamentalism.

Another significant recent study of the origins and development of the American fundamentalist movement is provided by Kevin Bauder and Robert Delnay. This insider history offers a sympathetic perspective on the American Baptist fundamentalist movement.40 Both men have a long history as participants, researchers, and observers. In their volume entitled, One in Hope and Doctrine: Origins of Baptist Fundamentalism 1870–1950, Bauder and Delnay provide a detailed chronological account of the emergence of fundamentalism in the Northern Baptist Convention and especially the theological controversies and schisms of the 1920s and 1930s. The contributions of Regular, Conservative, and Southern Baptists are also thoroughly examined. Among many other contentions and conclusions, Bauder and Delany argue that American fundamentalists were identified by five marks: “devotion to the Scripture,” “the hope of an any-moment return of Christ,” “separation, both from apostasy and the world,” “an attitude of conviction, even militancy,” and “a genuine devotion to Christ.”41 These marks, they argue, formed the core of the American Baptist fundamentalist identity.

As useful as these American studies are, they do not specifically address the Canadian Baptist context. In this context three approximate phases in the first one hundred years of the Canadian Baptist fundamentalist movement are discernable: a Formative Phase, 1878–1918; a Fight and Fragmentation Phase, 1919–1945; and a Decline and New Forms Phase, 1946–1978.

Formative Phase, 1878–1918

The work of Ronald Sawatsky provides valuable insight into how the movement began in central Canada. Although he did not provide an explicit definition of the term, in his doctoral disserta...