Nothing in Moody’s views on personal or social questions was out of the ordinary in the middle-class individualism of the day. Moody rose to fame in the heyday of American individualism and his thought is pervaded by its assumptions. The sins he stressed were personal sins, not involving victims besides oneself and members of one’s family. The sinner stood alone before God. The Christian community provided emotional support, encouragement, and example;24 but ultimately the decision to accept the message of salvation was, in the democratic American and Arminian tradition, essentially the decision of each individual, as was the decision to conquer sin. “Whatever the sin is,” Moody exhorted in a typical statement, “make up your mind that you will gain victory over it.”25
This last remark, however, also reflects one of two genuinely new directions in which Moody was helping to move the revivalist wing of American evangelicalism. After about 1870 Moody actively taught a new version of holiness doctrine which emphasized “victory” over sin. He also taught premillennialism. Influential new forms of each of these teachings were also promoted through closely related movements organized in America by some of Moody’s closest friends and younger lieutenants, including Reuben Torrey, James M. Gray, C. I. Scofield, William J. Erdman, George Needham, A. C. Dixon, and A. J. Gordon.26 These movements and these men, as we shall see, had a great deal to do with shaping fundamentalism. Of the two related movements, Moody was more directly involved with promoting the holiness teachings. Holiness was a central emphasis at his Northfield conferences and he published two books loosely presenting the new teachings.27 With respect to premillennialism, a more divisive issue, he was careful to avoid the doctrinaire and partisan spirit of the movement. Although he preached regularly on the subject, and many of Sankey’s hymns dealt generally with the theme, Moody never endorsed the details of the new dispensational version of premillennialism.28
Premillennialism did, however, give shape to the general outlook of the new evangelism Moody was promoting. He professed to be attracted to it because its pessimistic view of culture gave a strong impetus to evangelism.29 So his most quoted statement, which summarized his philosophy of evangelism, appears in the context of his standard sermon on the return of Christ. “I look upon this world as a wrecked vessel,” he said. “God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, ‘Moody, save all you can.’”30
The view that “the world” would “grow worse and worse”31 was an important departure from the dominant tradition of American evangelicalism that viewed God’s redemptive work as manifested in the spiritual and moral progress of American society. The departure was by no means complete. The separation from the world that was demanded was not radically outward as in the Anabaptist tradition, but rather an inner separation marked by the outward signs of a life free from specific vices. Despite the hopeless corruption of the world, there was no demand to abandon most of the standards of the respectable American middle-class way of life. It was to these standards, in fact, that people were to be converted.
Moody was quite ambivalent toward American culture and its prospects. He never gave up, for instance, the nineteenth-century American evangelical hope that the republic of virtue could be saved by the revival. “Revival,” he declared in 1899, in a statement that might just as well have come from Timothy Dwight or Lyman Beecher at the outset of the Second Great Awakening in 1801, “is the only hope for our republic, for I don’t believe that a republican form of government can last without righteousness.” Moody remained hopeful that American culture would not become increasingly worse. “I think it is getting very dark,” he said in the same 1899 sermon,
but don’t think for a moment I am a pessimist…. Pentecost isn’t over yet. The rivival of ‘57 isn’t over yet by a good deal. Some of the best men we have in our churches were brought out in ‘57. Why shouldn’t we have now at the close of this old century a great shaking up and a mighty wave from heaven.32
* * *
Moody’s central place in the heritage of fundamentalism suggests an important aspect of its character, shaped by a fondness neither for controversy nor for precise formulation of doctrine and the details of prophetic history. Fundamentalism was always a sub-species of the larger revivalist movement. As such it always involved an ambivalent attitude toward American culture, which evangelicalism had done much to shape. When the battles against modernism arose, fundamentalism always retained a tension between an exclusivist militancy and an irenic spirit concerned with holiness and saving souls. These latter elements in the tradition of Moody gave the movement its largest appeal. Yet when the organized and vocal core of militants attempted to speak for the hosts of true evangelicals and indeed even to lead them into battle, as in the 1920s, the ranks sometimes seemed to disperse. As for Moody, so probably for the majority of the sympathizers of the anti-modernist movement, evangelism and the next revival were always the chief aims.
PART TWO
The Shaping of a Coalition
This Age and the Millennium
IV. Prologue: The Paradox of Revivalist Fundamentalism
Fundamentalism was a mosaic of divergent and sometimes contradictory traditions and tendencies that could never be totally integrated. Sometimes its advocates were backward looking and reactionary, at other times they were imaginative innovators. On some occasions they appeared militant and divisive; on others they were warm and irenic. At times they seemed ready to forsake the whole world over a point of doctrine; at other times they appeared heedless of tradition in their zeal to win converts. Sometimes they were optimistic patriots; sometimes they were prophets shaking from their feet the dust of a doomed civilization.
Their attitudes toward intellect, ideas, and systems of ideas reflected this pervasive ambivalence. On the one hand, a major element in the movement, well developed in nineteenthrcentury revivalism, was the subordination of all other concerns—including concern for all but the simplest ideas—to soul-saving and practical Christianity. Dwight L. Moody stood in this camp. To Moody most formal ideas seemed divisive and hence all but the least controversial were to be avoided1 The stance of some of his closest associates, however, was strikingly different on this point. The differences came out clearly in a survey conducted in 1899 by The Record of Christian Work, a Moody publication. A number of prominent evangelists were asked, “What was the teaching of Christ regarding his disciples’ attitude towards error, and towards those who held erroneous doctrines?” Reuben A. Torrey, one of Moody’s best known lieutenants, responded with an unmistakable fundamentalist answer:
Christ and His immediate disciples immediately attacked, exposed and denounced error. We are constantly told in our day that we ought not to attack error but simply teach the truth. This is the method of the coward and trimmer; it was not the method of Christ.
D. L. Moody’s answer could hardly have been more directly opposed:
Christ’s teaching was always constructive…. His method of dealing with error was largely to ignore it, letting it melt away in the warm glow of the full intensity of truth expressed in love…. Let us hold truth, but by all means let us hold it in love, and not with a theological club.2
Behind these two answers lay not only contrasting personalities but different basic assumptions, assumptions concerning the importance of ideas as such. Both approaches are important to an understanding of the resulting movement. Moody’s approach showed one side of the revivalist heritage. Torrey, on the other hand, represented part of a major organizing force in fundamentalism that, far from rejecting intellect, assigned vast importance to ideas. This tendency is nowhere seen more clearly than in the commitment of such leaders as Torrey to dispensational premillenialism. Although the millenarian movement and the anti-modernist movement were by no means co-extensive, dispensationalism was nevertheless the most distinctive intellectual product of emerging fundamentalism and is the best indicator of one side of its basic assumptions.
The contrast between Moody and his dispensationalist associates points toward a feature o
f later fundamentalism and helps to explain some characteristics that otherwise seem contradictory. Not only did the later movement involve an alliance between revivalists in the pietist tradition and denominational conservatives in the Calvinist tradition (especially as represented by Princeton theology), but within the revivalist wing itself there was a thoroughgoing amalgamation (much more than an alliance) of these two traditions—the pietist and the Calvinist. This amalgamation had been an important aspect of American revivalism since its origins in the Great Awakening. Seventeenth-century Puritanism had combined highly intellectual theology with intense piety.3 The Awakening of the eighteenth century introduced into an essentially Calvinist context a new style of emotional intensity, personal commitment to Christ, and holy living inspired directly by German and Methodist pietism. In the unrestrained American environment this union spawned innumerable variations of Calvinist and Arminian theology multiplied by countless varieties of denominational and revivalist emphases. The Calvinists tended to stress intellect, the importance of right doctrine, the cognitive aspects of faith, and higher education. On the other hand, more pietistically and emotionally oriented groups, such as the Methodists, tended to shun intellectual rigor and to stress the practical and experiential aspects of faith. Yet many groups in America stressed both the intellectual and the experiential-practical aspects. Many Congregationalists and Presbyterians, especially those of the revivalist branches known in the nineteenth century as “New School,” combined educational and doctrinal emphases with intense emotion. Jonathan Edwards was their model. Even “Old School” Presbyte rians, including those at Princeton Seminary renowned for their doctrinal conservatism and severe intellectual demands, had a place for sentiment and some pietist leanings. The Baptists, who were less centralized and standardized, had some similar pro-revivalist intellectual leadership along with some distinctly non-intellectualistic elements.
The surge of revivalism associated with the rise of Charles Finney in the 1820s which developed in the “New School” tradition certainly did not forsake intellect, but it did create new channels for emphasis on emotion throughout American evangelicalism. Sandra Sizer in her analysis of the rise of the gospel song in nineteenth-century America has suggested that Finney’s revivals marked the beginning of the attempt to build a new Christian community united by intense feeling. The focal point for this emphasis was the “social religious meeting,” small groups gathered for prayer, Bible study, witnessing, and song. Witnessing, or testifying to one another about how God had transformed their lives, was an important way in which these communities built themselves up and provided emotional support. Finney added emphasis on such meetings to his more-or-less conventional mass-preaching services, but by the time of the remarkable businessmen’s revival of 1857–58 the awakening itself originated in noon-hour prayer meetings which were just such “social religious meetings.”4 Every new evangelical movement of this entire era, through the rise of fundamentalism and including the holiness, pentecostal, and premillennial movements, had a base in some form of “social religious” gathering.
The revivals of Moody and Sanky, Sizer argues persuasively, in a sense applied the principles of the smaller group meetings on a massive scale. The use of a song leader, which Sankey made a lasting part of evangelism, was a conspicuous means of building emotional ties. The most common theme was the distress of sin, to be relieved by a passionate surrender to the incredible love of Jesus. Hymns that told stories of prodigals reclaimed and the like made the song itself a kind of witnessing. In contrast to eighteenth-century hymns like those in the influential collection of Isaac Watts, the focus of revivalist songs shifted from praise of the awful majesty of God and the magnitude of his grace revealed in Christ’s atoning work, to the emotions of those who encounter the Gospel. Similarly, Moody’s sermons virtually abandoned all pretense of following conventional forms of explicating a text, and were closer to “layman’s exhortation” filled with touching anecdotes with an emotional impact comparable to that of personal testimony.5
Yet the emphasis on a community of feeling seen here is only half the picture, even if we look solely at the movement most closely associated with Moody. Nineteenth-century American evangelicalism involved a definite belief system as well as popular or rhetorical forms and strategies.6 Fundamentalism, as such, was concerned primarily with preserving the belief system; yet its proponents were equally concerned with promoting the popular forms, organizations, and strategies that were an inextricable part of the movement. Moody concerned himself primarily with this practical, less ideological, and more pietistic side. Yet his lieutenants Torrey, Gray, Pierson, Gordon, Blanchard, Erdman, and Scofield added to that piety a strong interest in ideas. In the type of fundamentalism that grew out of their work, these two emphases, on piety and on correct belief, were fused. In this respect their movement showed characteristics that had been common to American Calvinist tradition since the first Great Awakening, indeed since the Puritans.
In fact the millenarian (or dispensational premillennial) movement had strong Calvinistic ties in its American origins. The movement’s immediate progenitor was John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), who broke with the Church of Ireland and became the leader of the separatist Plymouth Brethren group. During his later career Darby spent a great deal of time proselytizing in North America. He found relatively little interest there in the new Brethren sect, but remarkable willingness to accept his views and methods of prophetic interpretation. This enthusiasm came largely from clergymen with strong Calvinistic views, principally Presbyterians and Baptists in the northern United States. The evident basis for this affinity was that in most respects Darby was himself an unrelenting Calvinist. His interpretation of the Bible and of history rested firmly on the massive pillar of divine sovereignty, placing as little value as possible on human ability.7
The organizers of the prophetic movement in America were predominantly Calvinists. In 1876 a group led by Nathaniel West, James H. Brookes, William J. Erdman, and Henry M. Parsons, all Presbyterians, together with Baptist A. J. Gordon, initiated what would become known during the next quarter-century as the annual Niagara Bible Conferences for prophetic study. To achieve wider publicity, virtually this same group in 1878 organized the first International Prophecy Conference, which became the model for similar conferences held every decade or so until the end of World War I. These early gatherings, which became the focal points for the prophetic side of their leaders’ activities, were clearly Calvinistic. Presbyterians and Calvinist Baptists predominated,8 while the number of Methodists was extremely small.9
A Calvinistic movement with a strong interest in complex details of prophetic interpretation might have seemed contrary to the prevailing trends of the day. Even to revivalist evangelicals like D. L. Moody, who accepted the outlines of premillennialism, this doctrinal rigor was unappealing. John Nelson Darby puzzled over how Moody could on the one hand accept the prophetic truths concerning God’s sovereignty in history, and yet inconsistently allow room for a non-Calvinist view of human ability when it came to personal salvation.10 But Moody was more American—or at least what is usually characterized as American. He preferred action to intellectual systems, and freedom to authoritarianism.
The more perplexing question is how Moody’s lieutenants, as American as he and quite popular as evangelists and pastors, could succeed so well in this American climate in promoting the complex system of dispensationalism. In fact, it was in the United States that this view of things, although imported from England, really took root. Even a century later it continues to have immense appeal.11 The question is just how this set of ideas and emphases fit into the American and evangelical worldviews in order to be accepted as widely as it was.12 For a substantial number of Americans, or American evangelicals, something in their outlook was conducive to the authoritarian and ideological character of dispensationalism as well as to the sentiment and activism more usually associated with American revivalism.
The intimate r
elationship between these two sides of the emerging fundamentalist movement can be observed strikingly in Reuben A. Torrey (1856–1928). Torrey came closest to being Moody’s successor, rising to prominence as a world-touring evangelist in the first decade of the twentieth century. Torrey was one of the principal architects of fundamentalist thought. For someone who aspired to popularity, Torrey seems to have been incongruously pompous. As William McLoughlin put it: “on the street he usually wore a high hat, and he always talked as though he had one on.”13 A Congregationalist and a graduate of Yale who had studied in Germany for a year, he was one of several leaders who represented the direct tie between fundamentalism and the New England tradition in which learning was so revered.14 A sympathetic biographer described him as almost immune to emotional persuasion: “rather was he swayed by the logical element of cold reason.”15 Another admirer said he did “not remember his ever getting a laugh from any congregation.”16 Torrey characterized his own preaching style as “scholarly” and said that he thought of his approach as that “of a lawyer” before a jury.17
A counterpoint to this somewhat unpromising approach to mass evangelism (although it must be remembered that Charles Finney also described himself as a lawyer-like preacher) was Torrey’s singing partner, Charles Alexander. “Charlie” who was less formal than Sankey, represented the religion of the heart to the same extent that Torrey’s style suggested a religion of the mind. His role in the Torrey campaigns was “warming up the crowd” (for instance, with singing contests between the audience and the choir, or between the men and the women). McLoughlin described his methods as “the techniques of a master of ceremonies at a Rotary convention.”18
Fundamentalism and American Culture Page 7
