Historic Fundamentalism And Extreme Fundamentalism

In my mind Historic Fundamentalism as a movement was a good thing.  Sure, there were probably excesses.  Human are normally people who go to extremes in almost everything they do.  The goal and the purpose seems to have been honorable, however.

What went wrong?

Why is fundamentalism now distrusted and maligned?

Why is “fundamentalist” synonymous with “extremist”?

One of the issues is the fact that separation became an issue.  Some decided that they would rather not separate from error, but dialogue with those in error in an attempt to win them over.   Personally, I don’t think this has as much to do with the demise of fundamentalism as a movement as the following issues do.

Fundamentalists began to retreat from culture.  Instead of engaging and transforming culture, fundamentalists began to isolate themselves.  They did so to such an extreme that Carl F. H. Henry wrote a book entitled “The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism”.  His contention was that the fundamentalists’ understanding of the Scriptures should have led them to social activism in a redemptive context.  They failed in that respect.

In their retreat from culture and their separation from those in error fundamentalists began to separate from one another over various non-fundamental issues (dress, hair, Bible translations, music, etc.).  They committed a sort of intellectual and spiritual incest by creating their own institutions of learning and actively resisted learning from evangelicals or anyone else, choosing to recycle their students by bringing them into their faculty.  (This is a generalization, but it is an observation from this writer’s experience.)  This led to further isolationism, a clannish spirit within fundamentalism, as well as a growing anti-intellectualism.

Here we are today with fundamentalists struggling to find their identity.  They wonder what a fundamentalist is.  What does he believe?  And, should we even care?

It is this preacher’s contention that it does matter, and that we should care.

It is for this reason that we have this blog.  We long to call people back to the fundamentals of the faith.  We long to help those who have been hurt by extremism.  We long to point out error for the sake of helping those who are in error.

We have been down the extremist route, but we are Fundamentally Changed, though we are Fundamentally The Same.  We are fundamentalists with a capital “F”.  We have not abandoned that.  We have abandoned legalism.  May we encourage you, dear reader, if you are in legalism, to do the same?

Myopegesis and Hyperliteralism

The following quotation is a reprint of a post on my blog, Unorthodox Faith, from April 22, 2009. I felt at the time that there was no word to really describe the method of interpretation that leads to hyperliteralism.

There are two accepted terms for interpretation of Scripture:

• exegesis: a form of interpretation which attempts to allow the text to guide interpretation
• eisegesis: a form of interpretation which reads an agenda/doctrine into the text from an external source

I felt that there was a need for another word denoting a type of interpretation I observed in many forms through the years.

my·op·e·ge·sis (mahy-op-jee-sis) noun. a flawed method of interpreting Scripture in a near-sighted, limited way. The text is seen without consideration of greater context, supranarrative, and interpretational heritage.

In essence, myopegesis is a step beyond topical preaching. It is quite literally (pun intended) topical interpretation. It is interpretation based on the needs of the moment, in light of whatever the interpreter needs to address at the moment. This is a dangerous sentiment, but not an unknown one.

Pesher and the Evangelists

The Qumran communities, the authors of the now famous Dead Sea Scrolls, employed a similar interpretational formula known as pesher.  Although pesher is the generic Hebrew word for ‘interpretation’, it meant something else to the Qumran communities. Qumran pesher (pl. pesherim) interpreted the Scriptures in terms of the needs of the day rather than in its original context. It was an extreme form of hyperliteralism. Since the Qumran interpreters saw themselves living in the end times, the Scriptures must have a veiled, end times meaning. They believed that all Scripture had this veiled meaning.

In a sense, the Christian evangelists used a similar interpretational methodology. The evangelists re-interpret passages from the Prophets in light of Jesus as the Messiah. In some cases, these interpretations have absolutely nothing to do with the literal reading of the passages they are drawn from. Their justification, best explained in the Epistle to the Hebrews, was that everything they knew about the Tanach had to be reinterpreted in light of Jesus’ revelation as not only the Messiah, but also as the Son of God.

As Christians, we do embrace this variant of pesher. We have since the first apostles reached the inevitable conclusion that in order for Jesus to be who he was and do what he did, he must have been not only Messiah but God himself.

Since we do believe that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures, we cannot do otherwise. In fact, it could be argued that to not interpret the Scriptures in this way would be to deny the essence of Christianity itself.

The difference between Christian interpretation and Qumran pesher is that the Christians interpreted in light of their Messiah, not in light of their current context in general. In fact, the apostle Paul may have even argued against pesherim in some of his churches. (He seems to answer some kind of pesher in the letters to the Thessalonians and depending on how one reads Hebrews, the same might be true there.)

Certainly, the writer of the book of Revelation used some elements of pesher in his interpretation of the Prophets in his visions. This is not the only similarity of the Revelation to Qumran apocalypse literature, but again, his interpretations revolve always around Jesus. In his case, they revolve around the conflict between Jesus and Caesar -  both the Caesar of his day and clearly some kind of expectation of a coming Caesar, known traditionally as Antichrist.

Medieval Interpretation

Although the medieval church would never have admitted the influence of pesher on their interpretation, the use of allegorical interpretation by the likes of Thomas Aquinas had more in common with Jewish pesher than it did with literal interpretation. Scriptures were interpreted with a very distinct bias. Everything pertained to the Church which was, in many ways, indistinct from secular government. It was the fusion of the Church and government that produced the concept of christendom in European theology.

Thus, everything was interpreted in terms of the context of the moment. If a preacher needed justification for his position, he had only to find a verse that pertained to it, regardless of context. The Bible became a mine from which the interpreters extracted whatever ideas suited them.

This type of interpretation, commonly known as eisegesis, was not quite the same as pesher and was far from modern hyperliteralism, but it did set the stage for the emergence of the doctrine of sola scriptura during the Reformation.

Reformation Myopegesis

Although John Calvin is credited with the development of sola scriptura, it was a common sentiment of his day. The idea was simple. In reaction to the medieval abuses, Calvin and his contemporaries determined to read the Bible literally.

There was only one problem with their interpretational idea. They were removed from the original context of the Scriptures by at least 1,500 years. They lived in a post-Crusader world, a world where Constantinople had fallen to the Ottoman Turks. They read the Bible in Latin or from the few known Greek texts in existence. Hebrew was the language of the Jews, a group of people most Christian (even Protestants) considered to be heretics because they rejected Jesus. They had little access to information about the true context of the Scriptures and often made erroneous interpretations because of this lack of information. It was not their fault; but it did limit their ability to truly interpreting the Scriptures as it was intended for the original audience.

In some ways this contributed to a sort of Protestant pesher. For example, Luther maintained to his dying day that the papacy was Antichrist. His interpretation contributed vastly to the development of an anti-Catholic mentality that still exists in the Protestant churches. Although Luther was a very well educated man who knew the history of the Roman Empire and has most likely read the works of Erasmus, he still interpreted the Scriptures in the context of his day.

This kind of interpretation pervades the work of European Calvinists of the next couple centuries. It flourished in the Americas as well. This type of interpretation was often employed in Puritan pulpits and was even used to justify the persecution and murder of ‘witches’ in 17th century Massachusetts.

Now, Hyperliteralism and Myopegesis

Now we can fast forward about two millennia to the emergence of fundamentalism at the turn of the 20th century. The deluge of new textual, linguistic, historical and archaeological evidence shook the foundations of interpretation. I’ve already addressed the ways this affected how literalism should be understood, so there’s no need to return to the topic. But the reality is that we now have access to at least a pretty good approximation of many of the original contexts of the Scriptures.

Unfortunately, the myopegesis of modern hyperliteralism persists. Many interpretations are still being made based on the ‘need’ of the moment. Nowhere is this more evident in the realm of eschatology (the doctrine of last things) where a new theory emerges almost every week about the Second Coming of Christ. One has only to watch a Christian television station to be exposed to a varied and bizarre array of eschatological views, all of which seem to be looking for a way to do pesher with the Scriptures. They use the Bible to disparage world leaders, to whip up cultish followings, and generally to embrace their poor hermeneutic.

Myopic interpreters can only see their context, and worse, they have a pre-existing conclusion that they make the Bible conform to in order to justify their position. In some cases, entire passages are reinterpreted in the name of literalism just to make a single pesher point.

The Danger of Hyperliteralism

1. It is not the form of interpretation used by the biblical authors in the first place.
2. It ignores the original matrix of the Scriptures (things like genre, idiom and linguistic development) in favor of a reading based on the current matrix.
3. It places interpretation in the control of the interpreter.
4. It is closed-ended. It forces the expositor to close his eyes to reinterpretation.

How has Literal Interpretation Changed?

Probably the single most important aspect of The Fundamentals was the intense emphasis on the literal interpretation of Scripture. This had a lot to do with the rise of higher criticism in the 19th century, which the fundamentalists reacted to. Almost all of Volume 1 of The Fundamentals is devoted to essays concerning literal interpretation.

I should caution the reader that the views of the early fundamentalists were somewhat incomplete. Remember that they were writing at the turn of the 20th century. Very little was understood about the context of the Old Testament in particular, and even the New Testament was a bit obscure. Palestine and the Middle East were in Ottoman hands and archaeology had not developed many of the tools used to illuminate historical context. Much of the debate about the Bible was based on purely academic observations from both the literalists and the proponents of higher criticism.

Today’s literal interpretation of Scripture does not and should not look like the literal interpretation of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The resources available to the interpreter today are vast. We often have more data and analysis at our finger tips than whole university staffs had a century ago. We are able to lean on archaeological discoveries, manuscript analysis and contextual information that illuminate even the most obscure passages.

With all of that said, what were the main tenants of literalism in The Fundamentals? That is more difficult to answer than you might think. For the most part, The Fundamentals focused on the rejection of higher criticism and not on the exposition of a competing view. The authors assumed that the reader would know what literal interpretation meant. Here are the tenants of literal interpretation as I saw them in The Fundamentals.

• The Church requires the infallible revelation of God. As James Orr wrote, “There is no disguising the fact that…there is much uneasy and distrustful feeling about the Holy Scriptures.” The writers then set about allaying the uneasiness of the Church and confirming that the Bible was indeed the Word of God. They felt, right or wrong, that criticism of the Bible tore at the belief of inspiration. In Orr’s case, he went about his proof by arguing that there is a necessity of an inspired canon and then shows a need for said canon, followed by proofs that the Bible meets the needs.
• The Bible internally states that it is inspired. G. Osborne Troop, George Robinson, Dyson Hague and James Orr all wrote articles dealing with the internal cohesion of the Biblical books. Given the time and resources, the writers probably would have analyzed every book of the Bible, but they seem to have contented themselves with writing about the Pentateuch.
• Archaeology and history confirm the inspiration of Scripture. M. G. Kyle and George Frederick Wright both wrote articles in The Fundamentals arguing that archaeology supports the Biblical claims. Their arguments became the basis of many of the archaeological proofs still presented today.

The question before the modern literalist is whether we can confirm these statements, knowing what we know about the historicity of the Bible. In general, I think we can reaffirm these statements but they do require some clarification.

• Infallibility now must be understood to include the transmission of the Bible in cultural context. As an example, the Book of Job may not be, as Orr would have argued, a historical document. It is inspired, but it is a morality play of sorts, a work of poetry meant to convey ideas and not historical personages. The same would apply to the possibility of having two distinct creation epics in Genesis 1-2 or the seeming contradictions of the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles. This is not compromising literalism but understanding it better.
• The internal statements of Scripture still support the divine inspiration of the Scriptures. There is no denying that Jesus believed in a divinely inspired canon and that his belief was confirmed by the apostles. But this inspiration does not have precedents outside of the Scriptures. Human history does not hold that there must be an inspired book. It is the testimony of the Bible itself, which is circular by nature. The Bible claims inspiration but to embrace the Bible’s claims, the reader must already believe it is inspired. We must concede this as a point of faith rather than to try to rationalize it.
• Archaeology has indeed confirmed Scripture in the abstract but rarely in the details. We have competing records of events and timetables that are out of sync. Archaeology is not a discipline that proves the Bible, only one that confirms the plausibility of its records. Archaeology is not an exact science and should not be treated as such. It is very much subject to something akin to the Heisenberg principle – the state of the observer will often dictate what is observed.

In short, historical literalism can still be espoused based on the same observations. All of the modern scholarship of the texts has certainly shed light on the process of the transmission of Scripture, but it has not weakened the internal testimony of the Scriptures and if anything, it has confirmed the plausibility of the Bible’s accuracy. I should however contend that the Bible’s accuracy cuts both ways. It accurately preserves the words of the original authors, but it also accurately preserves them as the original authors wrote and the original audiences read. This means that Bible does not conform to our modern perception of accuracy. It reports things as they were recorded and not in the modern sense of accurate reporting.

If anything, literalism has become more flexible in the 21st century. We understand oral history, textual composition and transmission, genre and contextual study much better than we did when The Fundamentals were written. The arguments for literal interpretation are strengthened because the Bible is not required to conform to modern tests of accuracy but can show its age. What was taken to be the Bible’s inferiority in the 19th century has become its greatest testament of superiority. It has not been tainted by realignment over the ages but has actually remained in essentially its ancient states. The very things that were once criticized are now its greatest strengths.

Marriage, Essentials, and Separation: A Post From Which Fundamentalists Can Learn

“What you ultimately want is someone who is going to join with you in an ultimate trust and sell-out to God and his control over all things. That way, when the difficulties come (and they will) you both are handling them in a way that is more inclined to rest in him, not yourselves and you will build a legacy in this direction.”

Read the rest of this interesting post here.

What is interesting to me is the fact that MP presents to us some negotiable issues and some non-negotiable issues. It is refreshing to see that there are those who understand the need for separation. It is also refreshing to see the realization that charity covers many, many differences (not to mention all sins).

Fundamentally Reformed — My Story

Almost four years ago, I started my blog Fundamentally Reformed.  I wanted to share my story, and do a little thinking out loud about some important issues.  At the time, blogging was new to me, and I thought it’d be fun to have my own little corner of the world wide web.

Since the launch of my blog, I’ve realized that I stepped out into a rushing stream that pulled and moved me onward and forward.  There is a movement afoot today that I believe is of God’s Spirit.  Young people in fundamentalist circles are coming in contact with serious, conservative evangelicalism, and that encounter is leaving a lasting impression.  For some it is a positive development, for others it springboards them out to the emerging movement and beyond.  My goal in my online presence, and in my participation with this blog, is to help that movement stay rooted in Scripture and be glorifying to God.

I should back up a bit though, and offer my story.  I didn’t know much about blogging when I posted my dozen page (or more?) letter online as one post and called it My Story.  I’ve had lots of feedback, good and bad about that story.  But I find myself in a new setting, and a new venue.  And I’m interested in giving my story another go.  One that might be a bit more readable….

I grew up in an independent fundamental Baptist home.  My parents had attended Hyles Anderson College, and we were members in a church where the pastor had gone to school at Tom Malone’s Midwestern Baptist College.  I learned most of our standards through a cultural osmosis.  We were KJV Only (this became more important for us in the mid 90s, I believe), against “Christian Rock” (although I didn’t know exactly what that was, and the Southern Gospel groups we had in all the time, would be frowned on in other circles), and we were “old-fashioned”.  We had revivals and faith promise missions.  We had evangelists bring their motor-homes, and saw more missionaries come through our church doors than you could shake a stick at.  We had a solid diet of topical preaching, heavy on the emotions.  We drove 14 hours to go to a good teen camp where the preacher could cry, spit and scream at the same time (not to mention swing from the tabernacle rafters).  Oh, and we ran buses.  From as early as I can remember I followed my dad around on the bus route, and in the bus.

I was dragged around the country on deputation as a teen-ager missionary kid.  I learned a little about the various clicks and sub-groups within fundamentalism.  We were warned what not to say or do, in certain contexts.  We went to Hyles-Anderson affiliated churches, to BBF or WBF churches.  Big churches, little churches, somewhat liberal ones (from our perspective), and frighteningly hard-core.  It was here I first came in contact with an ultra-decisionist mindset, where numbers and “souls saved” were all that mattered.  Only a few of our stops were at places like this, but even as a teenager I thought something was wrong with all this.

When we got a hold of David Cloud’s Way of Life Encyclopedia, I eagerly read many portions of it, as I started to be more eager to learn the “why”s for all of our quirky positions.  After a year on the mission field, my home-school education was complete (I’ve been to my share of Christian schools too, and am familiar with ACE and ABeka curricula), and I came back to the States to enroll at Fairhaven Baptist College, in Chesterton, IN.  It was there that I learned the Biblical reasons behind the various positions that IFBs held.  I grew more conservative in my standards, and more confident in my faith.  I gained more experience working in a church environment, and at the same time, became dissatisfied with some of the tendencies I saw.

At College, I grew to loathe the “preacher-said” mindset.  So many were content to just follow the leadership without knowing “why”.  I saw a simplistic KJV Onlyism, too, that elevated the English above the Greek (I was one of the few who cared enough to take Greek as a minor).  I also could already see that the scholarship level in some classes was not very high.  And I was getting sick and tired of the standard topical sermon that used a text to launch of into a tirade not directly connected to any text.  This is not to say there wasn’t good preaching to be had.  I think these feelings grew as I stayed through College and into the 1 year Master’s program.  But even then, I thought the answer was taking our principles and being more Biblical in how we preached and used them.  I still greatly respected (and still do), the leadership of the school, although I saw room for improvement (and indeed it was improving in various ways while I was there).

After Fairhaven, I got married and moved to California to help in an expositional preaching church and school.  My wife taught first grade, and I was mentored by the pastoral staff for a while.  I learned a lot there, and loved the emphasis on education and scholarship.  They had written a book on the KJV issue, and it was the best I had yet read.  The KJV Only debate was already a special focus of mine, I had read 1500 pages on the topic for one of my Master’s papers.  While there I became more heavily involved in an aggressive, apologetic door-to-door evangelism model, too.  I learned a lot there.  I still am thankful for the time we spent at that church.  God took us through some hard bumps while there.  The pastors and people were kind and helpful during a difficult time in my personal life and in our family.  Looking back on it, I can see God’s hand even in the difficult time.  He was shaping us, even then.  After two years, I couldn’t find work, and my wife’s teaching career was finished with our need to have her stay home with our first daughter.  My brother found me a job in the Twin Cities, where he had been living, and we moved back to the mid-west to be closer to family.

It was at another strong IFB church in the Twin Cities, that God brought many things to a head for us.  I’ve neglected to mention in all of this, that my brother, a year younger than I, had gone to Northland Baptist Bible College in Dunbar, WI.  In that environment he had gradually changed and adopted Calvinism (thanks to John Piper’s influence), abandoned KJV Onlyism, found a love for contemporary worship music, etc.  For several years, every time we’d see each other, we’d debate theology.  Local church only ecclesiology, calvinism, KJV Onlyism, music, separation — the list of debate topics grew quite long!  I would think I had the answers for him, and that I could convince him of his errors.  But every time we talked, my arguments fell flat, and not only did they not work, I saw in Dave an attractive spirit and a love for Christ that was so different from what I knew of who he was before.  God had changed him, and was using his influence on me.

I resisted, but we would send books and articles back and forth to each other.  I always was one to read the opposing points of view, and so I set out to study different issues.  I never really thought through the debates from an objective standpoint, however.  I had a bias toward my own view, of course.  Plus in my circles, to abandon any small point in my system of theology, was to risk being ostracized and separated from.  Anyway, back to our time in Minnesota.

At the small church we were at, we weren’t as heavily involved in all the ministries as we had been for several years before.  As we soaked in the ministry of the church (we were busy too with settling in, and geting adjusted to parenthood, as well as getting ready for daughter #2), I became more and more dissatisfied with the teaching and preaching.  I believe God was giving me a distaste and showing me the end of being a church that fights over every small point.  The church we were in took pride in each and every small thing they stood for.  At least that’s how we saw it at the time.  We were out from the thumb of church leadership, in a sense, and had more freedom to think about things in a more objective light.  We were closer to my brother, who was now pastoring in rural ND.  I read more and more articles he gave me, and I had more and more talks with him.  Finally, when I had to be honest with myself about the KJV Only issue.  That I couldn’t believe in and error-free KJV.  Then I gained a new level of objectivity.  In a few months, the nagging questions and doubts I had, finally quieted as I started looking at things from a different perspective and a new point of view.

At this point, I should stress this wasn’t easy for us.  We were expecting a baby, and living in a town where we knew no one expect the few friends we had at church.  We risked familial displeasure from both sides of our family, and the little ties we had with friends would soon be severed as well over this.  I knew what the path to ministry looked like from within my current circles, but had not a clue how it would work outside of them.  There wasn’t much to be gained, except a peace in my spirit and a settled conscience.  But there was much to lose.  I felt the risk was worth the cost.  Especially as I thought of our children.  I had come to the point where I saw much of my previous life in shades of legalism in some kind of degree.  And the legalistic tendency seemed all too real if we remained in the extreme IFB circles we were in.

We cautiously left, in a careful way so as not to cause disruption in the church.  We visited a few other churches, a more moderate IFB church (later we came to view this as a mainstream IFB church), a Reformed Baptist church, and then what became our home church for the past 4 and a half years: Bethlehem Baptist, pastored by John Piper.  My brother had attended there for almost two years, and when we first started attending, there was much to get adjusted to for us.  But we came to love the Scripture focus, and Christ-centered ministry model.  God has blessed us immensely during our time at Bethlehem.  We have a new freedom in Christ, and a deeper understanding of God’s grace.  We believe God is at work in our lives, and are currently helping out with a Bethlehem-sponsored church plant in St. Paul.

I hope my story (again it ends up being long!) can help some.  It hasn’t been an easy road.  We still have hurt feelings with past friends, and loved family members.  The sacrifice was worth it for us.  Before I close, let me just specify that since that time, I’ve come to realize something important about our story.  It’s our story.  And it doesn’t have to be yours.  I don’t think God calls everyone who is awakened to problems in their church, to leave it.  God wants some to stay put and work for change from within.  God wants some to be reforming fundamentalists from within the IFB movement.  For others, God will not let them stay.  And for those who aren’t “reforming”, the vast majority are God-fearing, sincere believers.  I think they are led astray in many cases.  I think they are in a movement and surrounded by structures that will make it easy to be legalistic, and will tend toward a performance-oriented Christianity.  But as with other theological positions, just because there can be a tendency to drift, doesn’t mean that drift will happen.  There are many who serve God out of a pure heart of love, and they are to be received and approved in the spirit of Rom. 14-15.

I now am fundamentally reformed.  I still identify with fundamentalism, and uphold the fundamentals.  I still believe a certain separation for the truth is incumbent on all true Christians.  I also am thoroughly reformed in my theology.  I’m still a Baptist, but I respect reformed theology, and even Presbyterian baptism.  I’ve lost my dispensationalism, and have a respect for other expressions of Christianity that I wouldn’t always have had.  My Calvinism coupled with my life story, frees me to hope the best for everyone.  God is still at work in their lives.  On the same hand, as the name of this group blog makes clear, I’m still fundamentally the same.  I still love Christ, and uphold the fundamentals of the faith.  I believe in inerrancy, and still view large swaths of evangelicalism with distrust.  I see a great need for reform, and long for the Church to be more biblical.  Perhaps that will happen when more fundamentalists wake up to their own need of reformation.  Let’s work on the logs in our own eyes, the specks in others’ eyes can wait!

Blessings in Christ,

Bob Hayton
Fundamentally Reformed

I am glad to announce an exciting event that will take place next year at Mission Peak Baptist Church. We will be hosting 2010 Expositors Conference called “Preaching for a Change” because we believe that expository preaching of the Scripture is the best way to faithfully preach the Word. The opening up and exposing God’s Word to people is the best way to help them change into the image of Christ. Preaching in America today is at an all time low, and it’s my desire to do something about it! I want to encourage other preachers to hear a well laid out case for expository preaching by a man who is one of the finest expositors in America – Dr. Steve Lawson. He will be our keynote speaker with five sessions that will help equip pastors and teachers to effectively and faithfully declare God’s Word.

Dave Doran on KJVO’ism

“Why am I not surprised that the lunacy in defense of the KJVO position has gone this far?”

Article here.

Near the end Doran says

“here’s my basic stance on this: (1) our church and ministry will not have fellowship with any who claim for an English translation what can only be properly claimed for the autographs; and (2) we will not have fellowship with those who refuse to break fellowship from those who hold such false doctrine.”

Interesting manner in which he calls for us to deal with KJVO believers.  What do you think of it?

Theology Central on Bible Versions and Fundamentalism

The question is asked whether the Bible version that one uses is a fundamental of the faith?

I respond “no”, as do many historic fundamentalists.

Various Musings On Fundamentalist History

Marsden’s “Fundamentalism And American Culture” gives us much information about fundamentalism.   While reading in it I have noticed the following.

Liberals, or modernists, had an ideology that did not allow for much supernatural activity at all.  Fundamentalists were staunch believers in the supernatural.

My observation:  One’s view about the supernatural has a great effect on his view of Scripture, i.e. inspiration, infallibility, inerrancy, and even the miracles that the Scripture speaks of.  To reject the supernatural is to weaken, or totally reject all of those things.

Fundamentalists were not necessarily united in their manner of dealing with theological and social liberalism.  Some were revivalists and did not give much attention to scholarly efforts to uphold the faith.  Others were scholars and sought to uphold the faith by using intellectual arguments.

My observation:  It is no surprise that fundamentalists divided, then.  One group can easily be seen as heading toward an anti-intellectualism while the other would tend toward intellectualism with neither appreciating what the other was doing.  I can see that today.  Sadly, it seems that the anti-intellectual forces are very strong.

Revivalism, holiness, and dispensationalism were great forces in fundamentalism.

My observation: Revivalism seeks to move the person.  When that becomes the focus it is not long until one shifts from expository preaching to preaching that is more emotional in nature.  Once that begins it is hard to stop.  It is not long until anything goes in the name of getting people down the aisle.  Theologians and scholars are then described as the cold, dry, ivory tower sorts who would kill one’s zeal if they could ever convince them to study and think.

It is again possible to see how division would come within fundamentalism.  It is easy to move from holiness to “holier than thou” and divide with all who do not agree with you.  Dispensationalism can and has been easily diverted into sensationalism.  This, too, has divided many.  While I would agree that one’s view of the end certainly can have an effect on his present day behavior, once one begins to emphasize the end above the present day things can quickly get out of balance.  Today we can see much of that when we consider the proliferation of books, movies, songs, and sermons that warn of being left behind.  This is the result of an over emphasis, I believe, on dispensationalism.  Balance is so very necessary.

It is a sad thing, but the fragmentation of present day fundamentalism seems to have its roots in historic fundamentalism.  It’s not that the essentials of the Christian faith have divided fundamentalists.  It is that many of the historic fundamentalists themselves lost focus and began to emphasize their ideas of the end, revival, holiness, etc. above the essential truths of the Christian faith.  From there division came because of disagreements about those non-fundamental issues.

Just musing….

Prayer Request

Please pray for Erik DiVietro’s wife Nichole who is having thyroid surgery today.

Updates on Twitter.