FUNDAMENTALISM, BIBLICAL

The term fundamentalism is used in two related but clearly distinguished senses: (1) to designate what is more generally called a conservative type of Christian thought, as opposed to the liberal or modernist tendencies that became influential in the second half of the 19th and

even more so in the first half of the 20th century; and (2) as the name of a specific conservative movement with it own organizations and agencies devoted to the propagation of a definite doctrinal program (the five points of fundamentalism) that, it was claimed, constitutes the true Christian faith. In the first sense the term is more often used by liberals to describe conservatives than by the conservatives to describe themselves.

Organized Movement. In the second sense fundamentalism is a religious movement that began in the U.S. in 1909 among very conservative members of various Protestant denominations (mainly Baptists). Its objectives were to resist the spread of modernism in theology and to maintain traditional interpretations of the Bible and what they believed to be the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith. A series of 12 books or pamphlets was issued between 1910 and 1912, subsidized by two laymen, Milton and Lyman Stewart. Five points of doctrine were set forth as fundamental: (1) the literal inerrancy and infallibility of the Bible, (2) the virgin birth and full deity of Christ, (3) the physical Resurrection of Christ, (4) the atoning sacrifice of His death for the sins of the world, and (5) His second coming in bodily form to preside at the Last Judgment. The Stewart brothers also founded the Los Angeles Bible Institute and established the Stewart Evangelistic Fund in order to promote their tenets. In 1918 the World's Christian Fundamentals association was founded. Its chief objectives were to resist all anti-Christian influences throughout the world, especially in the U.S., and to defend the strict literal sense of the Bible. The main fundamentalist controversy was among the Baptists, though it spread to other denominations, in particular to the Presbyterians. At Dallas, Texas, in 1923, the bishops of the Episcopal Church issued a pastoral letter requiring strict conformity to the 39 Articles.

Repercussions. Tension between liberals and conservatives arose in many Bible colleges throughout the U.S. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, a liberal Baptist preacher at the First Presbyterian Church, New York, refused to accept the church's required doctrinal positions and was forced to withdraw from his post. Repercussions were felt in other areas of public life. Laws against the teaching of evolution in the public schools were passed in some southern states of the U.S. In the famous Scopes trial at Dayton, Tenn., in 1925, William Jennings Bryan, a fundamentalist, won the state's case against John T. Scopes, a public high school teacher charged with teaching evolution. The influence of the fundamentalist movement was strong on both clergy and laymen in Protestant circles. It occasioned the organization of the American (now International) Council of Christian Churches in opposition to the Federal (now National) Council of the Churches of Christ in America (now in the United States of America). The fundamentalist movement exercised its strongest influence in the southern and agricultural areas of the U.S. in the 1920s. Fundamentalist theological seminaries were founded to counteract the influence of the more liberal theological schools of Crozer, Princeton, and Union, and Harvard University and the University of Chicago. By the late 20th century, fundamentalism had lost the extensive influence it once had. While no means extinct, the movement changed its methods and less frequently used that name.

Bibliography: j. w. johnson, Fundamentalism versus Modernism (New York 1925). w. lippmann, American Inquisitors (New York 1928). a. w. robinson, The New Learning and the Old Faith (New York 1928). s. g. cole, The History of Fundamentalism (New York 1931). j. l. neve and o. w. heick, A History of Christian Thought, 2 v. (Philadelphia 1943–46) 2:325–328. f. e. mayer, The Religious Bodies of America, rev. a. c. piepkorn (4th ed. St. Louis 1961).

[t. a. collins]