Dr. Nathan Busenitz · The Master's Seminary · 71 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Nathan Busenitz, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
The final lecture of the course explains the map of American Christianity you actually live in. In the 1940s, historic fundamentalism split in two: separatists who guarded the message and lost their voice, and new evangelicals who gained a voice and, in the pursuit of influence, too often had nothing left to say. Fuller Seminary and Billy Graham embody the second story; Bob Jones and the strict separatists the first. The lecture ends where the whole course has pointed since Luther: the authority of Christ in his word, the biblical gospel preached, and the results left to God. A full exam review closes the term.
By the 1940s the fundamentalists, exiled from the mainline denominations, disagreed over separation and posture. A younger generation judged the movement too militant, too negative, and, after Scopes, too disgraced to influence the culture. In April 1942, a hundred forty-seven leaders founded the National Association of Evangelicals, a friendlier alternative to Carl McIntire's American Council of Christian Churches, and historic fundamentalism divided into separatist fundamentalists and new evangelicals, the ancestors of today's fundamentalists and evangelicals.
The lecture's timeline: turn-of-the-century Protestantism splits in the 1920s into liberal mainline denominations and exiting fundamentalists, who found the GARBC, the Conservative Baptists, and the IFCA; fundamentalism splits again in the 1940s; and Pentecostalism, born separately from holiness Methodism, flows into the mainline in the 1960s renewal and into evangelicalism through Fuller in the 1980s third wave. The historic fundamentalists, notably, regarded Pentecostalism as a cult; it was the new evangelicals who welcomed it as one more denomination.
Harold Ockenga, first president of the NAE and later of Fuller and Gordon-Conwell, coined the name new evangelicalism. Marsden's portrait of 1947 explains the hunger: fundamentalism seemed a cultural and intellectual wasteland, mocked as tent-meeting hucksterism, with no recognized scholar at the centers of culture. The remedy was to keep the fundamentals but present them in a nicer, academically credible package.
Fuller Seminary, founded 1947 with radio evangelist Charles Fuller declaring it would be the Caltech of the evangelical world, jettisoned inerrancy within a generation for the sake of academic standing. Students memorialized the drift by removing one letter from the campus sign: Fuller, the logical seminary. Under David Hubbard from 1963, who mocked inerrancy as the gas balloon theory, one leak and the whole Bible comes down, the slide accelerated; by 1982 perhaps fifteen percent of theology students held the founders' view of Scripture, and Carl Henry judged that his old school had become infatuated with numbers. The faithful founding vision decamped to found Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
Graham, raised in fundamentalism and once its great hope, wrote in 1951 that he would neither condone nor fellowship with any form of modernism. By the 1957 New York crusade, sponsored by the liberal Protestant Council of Churches, the position had changed: his stated principle became willingness to work with all who would work with him. The strict fundamentalists anathematized him; from then on, the fundamentalist label belonged to the separatists, and Graham became evangelicalism's defining figure, sponsoring Christianity Today under Carl Henry with Ockenga as board chairman.
Robert Godfrey names the disease: the belief that compromising truths wins more people for Christ, when in fact the compromiser is usually the one influenced. Graham's cooperation went beyond platforms: inquirers were sent back to liberal and Roman Catholic churches. The trajectory's end appears in his notorious interview with Robert Schuller, suggesting that people in other religions who never know the name of Jesus may be saved members of the body of Christ, a statement his own organization scrambled to reframe. Influence purchased at the price of the gospel influences no one toward it.
Meanwhile the separatist wing made separation itself the badge of identity: Bob Jones circles called it the very foundation of a fundamental witness, and Rolland McCune notes a man may be Calvinist or Arminian, dispensational or covenantal, and still be a fundamentalist, so long as he separates, and, in practice, rejects contemporary Christian music. One may guard the walls so tightly that no one outside ever hears what they protect.
The lecture's summary sentence deserves memorizing: fundamentalists maintained their message but lost their voice; evangelicals gained a voice but, once they had it, had nothing definitive left to say. Schaeffer diagnosed evangelicalism's automatic mentality of accommodation; Phil Johnson argues the two movements should never have split, since the church needs both doctrinal purity and gospel-driven engagement. Conservative evangelicalism, the right edge of one movement and the left edge of the other, is where that old historic conviction survives.
The course ends where it began with Luther: revival is never manufactured by fads or gimmicks but comes through the authority of Christ exercised in his word, the biblical gospel preached, unity built on doctrinal conviction, and the results entrusted to God. The fundamentals themselves are simply the gospel Paul delivered as of first importance: Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, was buried, and was raised on the third day.
For the exam: Descartes and rationalism, Locke and empiricism, Romanticism's reaction, deism; Spinoza and Eichhorn opening the critical attack; Schleiermacher the father of liberalism; Baur's Hegelian dialectic; Strauss and the quest, carried into English by Jowett's Essays and Reviews the year after Darwin's Origin; Ritschl and the social gospel; Wellhausen's JEDP; Harnack's What Is Christianity; Gunkel's form criticism and Bultmann's demythologizing; source, form, and redaction criticism distinguished; and neo-orthodoxy, Barth and Brunner, nearer orthodoxy but unsound on Scripture and unclear on the bodily resurrection that 1 Corinthians 15 makes essential.
Eliot, Mayhew, and Brainerd among the Native Americans; Carey, Judson, Morrison, Hudson Taylor, and Livingstone abroad. Smith and Young, Miller and White, Eddy, and Russell among the cults. Benjamin Rush and the temperance movement; Goodwill under Edgar Helms, the YMCA and YWCA, the Salvation Army; Gladden, Sheldon, and Rauschenbusch for the social gospel; Fosdick's Shall the Fundamentalists Win; and the Pentecostal chain from Parham and Ozman through Seymour to Bennett in Van Nuys and Wimber with Wagner at Fuller.
Taylor's New Haven theology and Bushnell's progressive orthodoxy as liberalism's American on-ramps; Princeton theology, Alexander, the Hodges, Warfield, Machen, as fundamentalism before the fundamentalists; the evangelists Moody, Sunday, and their circle; Brookes and Scofield, the Confederate soldier turned Niagara organizer and reference-Bible editor; the heresy trials of Briggs, Smith, and McGiffert; Bryan at Dayton; Machen's Westminster and the OPC; Ketcham's GARBC; McIntire's ACCC; Rice, Graham's longest-lasting fundamentalist defender, and Bob Jones Sr.; then Ockenga's three presidencies, Fuller, Trinity, Gordon-Conwell, Carl Henry, the tragic E. J. Carnell, and, in a closing smile of providence, the seminary that produced these very lectures, born in 1986 from Talbot's line when faithful men once again chose conviction over drift.
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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. The National Association of Evangelicals was founded in 1942 because younger fundamentalists
2. Historic fundamentalists regarded Pentecostalism as
3. Harold Ockenga served as the first president of
4. Fuller Seminary's founding ambition and eventual trade were
5. David Hubbard's gas balloon jibe mocked
6. The definitive break between Graham and the fundamentalists came when
7. Beyond shared platforms, Godfrey's deeper criticism of the crusades was that
8. In the Schuller interview, Graham suggested that
9. McCune's observation about fundamentalist identity is that a man may differ on Calvinism, translations, or the millennium and remain a fundamentalist so long as he
10. The lecture's summary of the split is that fundamentalists kept their message but lost their voice, while evangelicals
11. Phil Johnson's assessment is that fundamentalism and evangelicalism
12. The course's closing thesis on revival is that it comes through
13. Neo-orthodoxy, for exam purposes, is best summarized as
14. Princeton theology, Alexander through Warfield and Machen, is described as
All fourteen correct. Lecture 27 is complete.
Fundamentalists lost their voice; evangelicals lost their message. Which loss do you think your own church culture is nearer to, and what would recovering the balance require?
Godfrey argues the compromiser is usually the one influenced. Where have you seen the myth of influence at work, in institutions or in your own decisions?
The course ends where it began: the word of God as the church's authority and the gospel as its message. Looking back over twenty-seven lectures, what conviction has this history most settled in you?
Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, he was buried, and he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.
The lecture commends Marsden's Reforming Fundamentalism, Iain Murray's Evangelicalism Divided, and Godfrey's essay The Myth of Influence for the fuller story of the split and its consequences.