Dr. Nathan Busenitz · The Master's Seminary · 72 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Nathan Busenitz, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This lecture introduces the word this course has been building toward: fundamentalist. Before popular culture hijacked the term, it meant one thing, a Christian who held the fundamentals of the faith and was willing to do battle royal for them. The story runs from Spurgeon's lonely stand in the Downgrade Controversy through Moody and Billy Sunday, into the denominational wars of the 1920s, the Scopes trial, and the painful arithmetic of separation, including the question that split the movement: what do you do with believers who will not separate from unbelief?
Charles Spurgeon, a convinced particular Baptist beloved today even by traditions that would resist his Calvinism, preached to an estimated ten million people, often ten times a week, filling the five-thousand-seat Metropolitan Tabernacle for thirty-eight years, with his lightly edited sermons filling thirty-eight published volumes. When the Baptist Union downgraded Scripture from the inspired word of God to a merely human book, Spurgeon invoked 2 Corinthians 6, come out from among them and be separate, and left, writing in 1888 that where the basis of association allows error and invites it, complicity strips even the best men of the power to protest.
D. L. Moody, raised Unitarian in Massachusetts and converted at eighteen through his Sunday school teacher's word about the love of God in Christ, ministered in Chicago, was befriended and promoted by Spurgeon in England, popularized the wordless book in America after adding its gold page, and preached to crowds of twenty thousand, President Grant among his hearers. The lecture weighs the criticisms fairly, an Arminian cast to his evangelism and an ecumenical breadth, while placing him far from Finney's manipulation.
Billy Sunday, a professional baseball player converted at Chicago's Pacific Garden Mission in 1886, ran city-wide revival campaigns from 1895, claiming ninety-eight thousand decisions at one New York campaign, decisionism's arithmetic in full flower, and preached to the largest crowds of the pre-amplification era. A fierce champion of Prohibition, he preached against alcohol, tobacco, and dancing, foreshadowing fundamentalism's pattern of strong stands on the social sins of the day.
By 1900 Bible-believing Christianity had enormous momentum: the big denominations had grown exponentially and evangelists filled stadiums. But the threats had gathered: Darwin's Origin of Species from 1859, Nietzsche and rising atheistic secularism, higher criticism crossing from Germany, modernism enthroning science over revelation, and the social gospel hollowing the message. The coming battle was for control of the denominations themselves: would the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians be defined by Scripture or reinvented for the modern age?
Two strongholds anchored the resistance. The Niagara Bible Conference, meeting annually for a quarter century, produced its fourteen-point creed in 1878, verbal plenary inspiration, the Trinity, creation, the new birth, redemption by Christ's blood, and more, each point answering a live attack, and drew dispensationalists like C. I. Scofield alongside others. Princeton Seminary, through Charles Hodge, A. A. Hodge, B. B. Warfield, and J. Gresham Machen, stood as the century's bastion of orthodoxy, while Presbyterian courts tried and defrocked professors like Charles Briggs who denied inerrancy.
The Presbyterian General Assembly's Doctrinal Deliverance of 1910 named five doctrines defining biblical Christianity: the inerrancy of Scripture; the virgin birth and deity of Christ; the substitutionary atonement; the bodily resurrection; and the authenticity of Christ's miracles. Miracles made the list precisely because naturalism was the modernists' creed: affirming them planted the flag of supernaturalism. The lecture notes the striking overlap with Irenaeus' ancient summary of the apostolic tradition, the fundamentals were never new.
From 1910 to 1915 conservative scholars across the denominations, A. C. Dixon and R. A. Torrey among the editors, published The Fundamentals, twelve volumes of essays mailed to ministers and missionaries worldwide, answering higher criticism, liberalism, Romanism, socialism, the cults, and Darwinism. In 1920 Curtis Lee Laws coined the name: those who still cling to the great fundamentals and mean to do battle royal for them shall be called fundamentalists. Historically the word meant Bible-believing Christian, nothing more; its later cultural hijacking says nothing about its origin.
Samples from The Fundamentals show the movement's heartbeat: Philip Mauro on Scripture as a living book, not a relic of antiquity; A. C. Dixon retelling Luther's method of studying the Bible like gathering apples, shake the whole tree, then each limb, branch, twig, and look under every leaf, a portrait of expository study; George Pentecost on the word as the chart marking every rock and reef. The fundamentalists were, before all else, the people of the Book at the moment the Book was called outdated.
Through the 1920s the fundamentalists fought for the mainline denominations and lost nearly every battle; only the Southern Baptists were later recovered. The exiles built anew: Machen, forced from a Princeton gone indifferent, founded Westminster Seminary in 1929 and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church; the General Association of Regular Baptists formed under Robert Ketcham; and a wave of schools, Biola, Wheaton, Dallas, and the college that became The Master's College, rose to replace institutions lost to modernism.
In 1925 the ACLU recruited John Scopes to test Tennessee's ban on teaching evolution, and the trial became modernism versus fundamentalism, Clarence Darrow against William Jennings Bryan. The fundamentalists won the verdict, a fine later overturned on a technicality, and lost the country: the press painted them as country bumpkins, and the movement that had been America's insiders found itself outside, a wound that would later drive the neo-evangelical bid for cultural respectability.
Kevin Bauder's analysis sharpens the movement's essence: attitude, the willingness to battle, set fundamentalists apart from others who believed the same doctrines. Machen's bitterest opponents were not the liberals but the indifferentists, orthodox men like those at Princeton who held the fundamentals yet made peace with the liberals for the sake of institutional calm. When Machen left Princeton, it was not because Princeton had gone liberal; it had gone indifferentist.
The taxonomy that still defines fundamentalism: primary separation is separation from apostates and unbelievers; secondary separation is separation from true believers who refuse to practice primary separation. Applications ranged widely, and Billy Graham became the lightning rod: raised in fundamentalism and once its great hope, his 1950s decision to include liberal Protestants, and later Catholics, in his crusades made him the era's defining indifferentist, and most fundamentalists separated from him. A modern anecdote about a speaker withdrawing from a conference over a chain of associations four links long shows where degrees of separation can lead.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all fourteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. Spurgeon left the Baptist Union because
2. D. L. Moody was converted
3. Billy Sunday's ministry exemplified
4. The coming battle of the early twentieth century was over
5. The nineteenth century bastion of orthodoxy against New Haven theology and liberalism was
6. The authenticity of miracles was included among the five fundamentals because
7. The name fundamentalist was coined in 1920 by
8. A. C. Dixon's apple-tree illustration from Luther describes
9. In the denominational battles of the 1920s, the fundamentalists
10. The outcome of the Scopes trial was that the fundamentalists
11. Machen left Princeton because it had become
12. Secondary separation means separating from
13. Billy Graham became fundamentalism's lightning rod when he
14. Bauder argues that what set fundamentalists apart from other believers in the same doctrines was
All fourteen correct. Lecture 26 is complete.
Spurgeon judged that staying to reform the Baptist Union was useless once its basis of association invited error. How does a believer, or a church, discern when to stay and fight and when to come out?
Machen's hardest opponents were good men who agreed with him doctrinally but would not act. Why is indifference sometimes more decisive than opposition, and where might you be the indifferentist?
The separation question ran from principle to four-link chains of association. Where does faithful separation end and factionalism begin?
Come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing, and I will welcome you.
The lecture draws on Spurgeon's Downgrade writings, Douglas Sweeney's survey of fundamentalism, Kevin Bauder on the movement's essence, and The Fundamentals themselves, still in print.