Fundamentalism

Fundamentalism is an extreme right element in Protestant orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is that branch of Christendom which limits the basis of its authority to the Bible. Fundamentalism draws its distinctiveness from its attempt to maintain status by negation.

Fundamentalism dates its birth from the turn of the present century. Its initial “rugged bursts of earnestness” were among the finest fruits of the Reformation. The theory of evolution and the documentary hypothesis were examined with prophetic courage. Many fine scholars joined battle, publishing a series of essays entitled The Fundamentals. They sought to prove that modernism and the system of biblical Christianity were incompatible. They reached their goal.

But in due time fundamentalism made one capital mistake. This is why it converted from a religious movement to a religious mentality. Unlike the Continental Reformers and the English dissenters, the fundamentalists failed to develop an affirmative world view. They made no effort to connect their convictions with the wider problems of general culture. They remained content with the single virtue of negating modernism. When modernism decayed, therefore, fundamentalism lost its status. Neo-orthodoxy proved too complex for it to assess. It became an army without a cause. It had no unifying principle.

This is why fundamentalism is now a religious attitude rather than a religious movement. It is a highly ideological attitude. It is intransigent and inflexible; it expects conformity; it fears academic liberty. It makes no allowance for the inconsistent, and thus partially valid, elements in other positions. This attitude helps explain its crusade against the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. No study was made by the Fundamentalists of the canons of lower criticism or the delicate shades of meaning in Hebrew and Greek idioms. Such scholarly labor was considered unnecessary. Fundamentalism believes that liberals corrupt whatever they touch; and since liberals shared in the translation of the Revised Standard Version, the work is ipso facto heretical.

Fundamentalism is an ironic position. Its distinctives do not even comprehend the leading issue of the Protestant Reformation. The Roman Catholic Church affirms “the five fundamentals” – the infallibility of the Bible, Christ’s virgin birth, the substitutionary atonement, the resurrection, and the second coming. Fundamentalism fails to see the irony in its own position because it does not understand the interrelatedness of Christian doctrine.

Fundamentalism is a paradoxical position. It sees the heresy in untruth but not in unloveliness. If it has the most truth, it has the least grace, since it distrusts courtesy and diplomacy. Fundamentalism forgets that orthodox truth without orthodox love profits nothing. The more it departs from the gentle ways of Jesus Christ, the more it drives urbane people from the fold of orthodoxy.

Fundamentalism is a lonely position. It has cut itself off from the general stream of culture, philosophy, and ecclesiastical tradition. This accounts, in part, for its robust pride. Since it is no longer in union with the wisdom of the ages, it has no standard by which to judge its own religious pretense. It dismisses non-fundamentalistic efforts as empty, futile, or apostate. Its test for Christian fellowship become so severe that divisions in the Church are considered a sign of virtue. And when there are no modernists from which to withdraw, fundamentalists compensate by withdrawing from one another. They dispute whether the rapture takes place before or after the tribulation. Status by negation must be maintained or the rasion d’etre of fundamentalism is lost.

Many fundamentalists have taken refuge under the aegis of “dispensational theology.” But this affords only provisional security. The distinctives of dispensational theology are the postponed kingdom of the Jews and the parenthesis view of the Church. These distinctives are too far to the right to enjoy classical status.

Edward John Carnell. “Fundamentalism.” A Handbook of Christian Theology. Edited by Marvin Halverson. (New York: Living Age Books, 1958), p. 142-143.