Fundamentalism and American Culture

by Marsden, George M. ;

  Keswick ideas were so well suited to these positive aspects of the American evangelicalism of the day that they seem to have met with little opposition from those with more traditional views of sanctification. Even The Presbyterian, the conservative guardian of Reformed tradition, in 1917 gave high praise to a Keswick conference held at Princeton. The editors emphasized the similarities, rather than the differences, between the new and the traditional teachings. They found sanctification and “surrender” a welcome alternative to the social ethics of liberalism.27

  When the Keswick conferences came to Princeton, from 1916 to 1918, they were entering the lair of the aging lion of strict Presbyterian orthodoxy, Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield of Princeton Theological Seminary. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Warfield was not in the least distracted by the popularity, success, or practical results of a doctrine. True to the Princeton tradition, he spotted a major doctrinal innovation and pounced. During the next several years, in a series of sharp and condescending criticisms, Warfield attempted to tear apart once and for all innovative holiness teachings of every sort.

  The essence of Warfield’s criticism was, as he put it in a review of a work by young Lewis Sperry Chafer, that the Keswick teacher was plagued by “two inconsistent systems of religion struggling together in his mind.” One was Calvinist, so that he and his “coterie” (one of Warfield’s favorite words) of evangelists and Bible teachers often spoke of God’s grace doing all; but behind this Calvinist exterior lurked the spectres of Pelagius, Arminius, and Wesley, all of whom made God’s gracious working subject to human determination. The resulting synthesis, Warfield said, was “at once curiously pretentious and curiously shallow.”28

  Warfield found the popular writings of Charles Trumbull expecially culpable on the score of shallowness. Trumbull often used the slogan, “Let go and let God.” This Trumbull explained in terms of “Christ within us” who would control our lives so long as we did not resist him. This formula, said Warfield, made God wait for our act of faith (a common Calvinist objection to most modern evangelism). So Christ was supposedly let in and out of peoples’ lives like steam or electricity turned on or off. This view led to an unresolvable dilemma, said Warfield. Once Christ had taken over our lives, who made the decision if we fell into sin? It could not be Christ. Neither could it be our old nature—which was counteracted by the filling with Christ’s Spirit. It must be an independent agent within us—our free will— that operates apart from both our old and new natures. So, said Warfield, Mr. Trumbull is guilty of a “bathos of inconsequence” when he asserts that Christ has “constituted Himself my very being (save only my power to resist Him) my body, mind, soul and spirit.” If this were the case, Warfield queried sarcastically, why did we have victory only over known sins? “There is indeed one dogma,” he concluded, “which takes precedence in Mr. Trumbull’s mind to the dogma of ‘Christ in us.’ This is the dogma of the inalienable ability of the human will to do at any time and under any circumstances precisely what in its unmotivated caprice it chances to turn to.”29

  W. H. Griffith Thomas, a rather distinguished English scholar who taught in Toronto, and one of the few of the “coterie” of evangelists and Bible teachers for whom Warfield indicated any respect, replied at length. Thomas defended the essentially Augustinian character of the Keswick position. He admitted that he found more truth to the idea of “freedom of the will” and “more power in Methodism than Calvinists usually would admit.” While chiding Warfield for his polemical tone, Thomas had a barb of his own to thrust at the Princeton theology’s most sensitive spot. Warfield’s writings, he said, manifest “the absence of any recognition of the fact that the Movement he criticizes and condemns expresses a spiritual experience and not merely a theological theory.30

  This debate, unlike those that separated advocates of various Holiness and Pentecostal doctrines from each other, remained for the time being a quarrel between allies. By 1919 the controversy with modernism had pre-empted all other concerns and conservatives of all sorts within major denominations were trying, despite their differences, to close ranks.

  Warfield’s critique pointed out some of the characteristic traits of the Bible institute movement and the direction in which much of revivalist evangelicalism in America had been moving for at least a century. The Puritans in early America dwelt on the sovereignty of God’s grace and the inability of sinful individuals to influence God’s will. Jonathan Edwards, for example, when he analyzed religious experience made clear that the “divine and supernatural light” that a Christian perceived was not contingent on the agency of a free human will, but on the prior gracious work of the Holy Spirit who granted the ability to see and respond to that light.31 After Edwards’s time revivalist theology in America moved steadily toward emphasizing the human side of religious experience. This tendency was manifested in various ways of positing the free and decisive character of the human free will. Free will was virtually an American dogma; indeed it was practically an unassailable article of faith for most of Western culture. It was also a concept that was a great aid to evangelism, which seemed most effective when based clearly on personal “decision.” Even Keswick’s tradition, which was clearly stressing supernatural grace when it spoke of the “filling with the Spirit,” “Christ dwelling in you,” and “let go and let God,” still reserved (as Warfield pointed out) a key place for the free individual. It also tended to shift the emphasis toward the emotional aspect of the individual’s decisions. The experience had to be dramatic and recountable. The best evidence for Christianity ultimately was the saved individual who could “witness” to what God had done. Hence intense prayer and witnessing stood high on lists of fruits of the Spirit.

  Strict Calvinists objected to emphases on free will in revivalist theology. Tract printed by the [Moody] Bible Institute Colportage Association (Chicago, n. d.).

  Keswick’s teaching played at least two important roles complementary to dispensational premillennialism in the Bible institute movement.32 First, it provided an important subjective confirmation of the faith to stand alongside more objective arguments from the Bible and common sense. Secondly, while premillennialism involved abandonment of the optimistic estimate of the conquering power of the Holy Spirit throughout society, Keswick promised personal “victory.” Although one might not expect to see the millennium in this age, in one’s own life there was hope for a spiritual outpouring which would result in an era of personal victory, peace, and practical service. The light of optimism, then, still prevailed in the American evangelical outlook—only it now shone on the individual rather than on the culture.

  During the years just before World War I, when Keswick and other holiness teachings flourished, the personal piety, optimism, and activism that characterized these movements might well have been taken for the overwhelmingly dominant traits of conservative American Protestantism generally. Yet while these things were prominent and probably helped delay some outbreaks of controversy, they were accompanied by other intellectual and theological characteristics that fostered contentiousness. This was especially true of evangelicals in the more-or-less Calvinistic traditions, where most of the doctrinal militancy against modernism appeared. These two tendencies— the personal, practical, and irenic on the one hand, and the eager to engage in controversy on the other—sometimes worked at cross-purposes. Both tendencies, however, could be found in the same individual. As A. C. Dixon put it at (of all places) an ecumenical missions conference in 1900, “Above all things I love peace, but next to peace I love a fight, and I believe the next best thing to peace is a theological fight.’33

  The Defense of the Faith

  XII. Tremors of Controversy

  Both dispensationalism and holiness teachings developed into significant movements in the context of a troubled culture that had always thought of itself as Christian and was now rapidly becoming secularized. As in every age, evidence of moral decline was readily at hand; in the decades spanning the turn of the century t
he spectre of teeming cities, the immorality and irresponsibility associated with urban poverty, the disruptiveness of industrialization, and the strangeness of non-Protestant immigrants gave particular credence to suspicion that this might be the end of an era—the Christian era.

  Although not fully explainable in terms of their social causes, dispensationalism and holiness teachings were partially a response to cultural conditions. Neither of these movements was co-extensive with fundamentalism. Yet each contributed important elements to the emerging fundamentalist outlook. What made them part of fundamentalism as such was the direct and explicit reaction against one aspect of the apparent secularization—the rise of theological liberalism.

  In almost every major American denomination, sometime between the late 1870s and World War I, serious disagreements broke out between conservatives and liberals. In these struggles the traditionalists were not necessarily fundamentalists in any strict sense. They were first of all denominational conservatives who had their own distinct traditions and characters. Some, like the traditionalists among the Disciples of Christ, were regarded as a part of the fundamentalist movement largely because their aims were parallel and in certain of their attacks they had common opponents. What made others more fundamentalist was their combination of militant anti-modernism with participation in a larger movement that, despite its mix of separable elements, possessed some degree of conscious unity. The active cooperation of denominational traditionalists with the theologically innovative dispensationalists and holiness advocates in the battle against modernism was particularly important in shaping a distinct fundamentalism. These traditionalists were found mostly among Baptists and Presbyterians. B. B. Warfield is a striking example. Warfield apparently despised the newer holiness teachings and certainly disdained dispensationalism. His own position was Old School Presbyterian traditionalism. Yet he cooperated with the larger fundamentalist movement, even with dispensationalist and holiness teachers, and in fact made an important contribution to fundamentalism, as did the Old School Presbyterian tradition generally.

  The issues debated so intensely in the denominations usually centered on the authority of Scripture, its scientific accuracy, or the supernatural elements in Christ’s person and work. There were also parallel and closely related disputes over denominations’ distinctive doctrines or traditions— strict Calvinism among Presbyterians, immersion among Baptists and Disciples of Christ. Almost every major denomination struggled with some such issue, although some denominations avoided at least temporarily any dramatic disruption.

  In the South the debates were in most cases short-lived, because dissent was simply not tolerated. As early as the first half of the nineteenth century, advanced theological views had usually been associated with advanced social views and abolition. Southern theology already had a strong conservative bent. The War Between the States simply intensified Southern determination to resist change. Hence there was a strong anti-modernist impulse in Southern religion well before modernism became a distinct movement in America. This theological conservatism, often combined with the warm revivalist evangelicalism inherited from the early nineteenth century,1 created in Southern religion many characteristics that resembled later fundamentalism. Until the 1920s, however, Southern revivalist conservatism and Northern fundamentalism developed more or less independently, although in parallel ways. The principal direct connection between the two movements was that several important fundamentalist leaders came from the South.2 When in the twentieth century fundamentalism became a distinct entity, Southerners with a long history of revivalist conservatism eventually flocked to the movement.

  An early sign that sparks of liberalism would quickly be snuffed out in the Southern atmosphere came in 1878 when Alexander Winchell was forced by the Southern Methodist denomination out of his position at Vanderbilt for holding questionable views on Genesis. In the following year Crawford H. Toy’s resignation from the Southern Baptist Seminary at Louisville had similar causes.3 The Toy case was followed some years later by that of his friend, William H. Whitsitt, who had the indiscretion to publicize historical research showing that baptism by immersion had not continued as an unbroken tradition since apostolic times. The Landmark Baptists, an especially rigid traditionalist group, speaking through the vitriolic Western Recorder of Tennessee, led the fight that forced Whitsitt’s resignation as president of the Southern Baptist Seminary.4

  Among Southern Presbyterians serious scholarly discussion of the issues was similarly brought to a quick end with the dismissal of James Woodrow, uncle of Woodrow Wilson, from Columbia Theological Seminary for his claim that evolution was compatible with the teachings of Scripture.5 In the South, but not in the North, evolution was already a chief symbol of heresy. Southern thought had been shaped by Puritan, Scottish philosophical, and Baconian influences, which together encouraged an enormous reverence for Scripture as a source of hard fact, as opposed to speculative hypotheses such as those of Darwin.6

  In the North, by contrast, the cultural forces for change which fanned the new religious ideals were so strong that stamping out the spark in one place could not prevent a general conflagration. Many of the major Northern denominations suffered through painful heresy trials. Even conservative victories turned out to be largely illusory. Liberalism continued to grow almost as though the trials had never taken place. Among the Congregationalists, from the time of the flurry over future punishment in 18777 through the 1880s, conservatives were temporarily successful in their efforts to restrain liberalism. At Andover Seminary, where the move toward the New Theology centered, they even managed to have Professor Egbert C. Smyth removed from the faculty for a time. Yet by the 1890s the issues were settled in favor of the progressives and conservativism was defunct as an ecclesiastical force.8 Among Northern Methodists, the emphasis on the experiential religion of the heart and its practical moral consequences was congenial to a rapid development of liberal theology during the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century. Conservatives made some counter-efforts in the early twentieth century and charged Boston University theologians Hinkley G. Mitchell and Borden P. Bowne, two leading advocates of a personalistic theology, with holding lax views of Scripture. Bowne was acquitted, but Mitchell was dismissed from his post. In 1908, however, in connection with appeals of the Mitchell case, the General Conference effectively ended such trials of professors.9 The Protestant Episcopal Church had a similar isolated case in 1906 when the Reverend Algernon Sidney Crapsey was convicted for denying the Virgin Birth. In general, however, the Episcopal tradition of toleration for diversity prevailed.10

  The Northern Baptist and Northern Presbyterian controversies had the most to do with the development of interdenominational fundamentalism.11 The Baptists, who had much greater local autonomy, developed much greater diversity, with all the major parties—denominational traditionalists, dispensational premillennialists, and avowed liberals—well represented within the same denomination. In America, the Baptists had long been a coalition of diverse elements. On the one hand they had a confessional Calvinist tradition; yet at the same time they had a strong emphasis on doctrinal freedom. Calvinism was strong in the seventeenth-century Puritan origins of the American movement and also in the important eighteenth-century separation of New England Baptists from Congregationalism after the Great Awakening. Baptists, however, had an individualistic view of the church as a voluntary association of individuals who had experienced conversion. The Calvinist confessionalism was qualified by opposition to ecclesiastical centralization and vigorous affirmation of the individual right to theological freedom. Moreover, the emphasis on conversion in the pietist camp and especially in nineteenth-century frontier revivalism reinforced Arminian doctrines which emphasized human freedom of choice and were, as much as Calvinism, a venerable part of the diverse Baptist heritage.

  In this relatively open atmosphere Biblical criticism and liberal theological tendencies appeared early among Baptists in the Northern United States and soon fl
ourished as in no other evangelical denomination, except perhaps the Congregationalist. By the 1870s three positions on Scripture were already perceptible. Some scholars, under German influences, rejected the infallibility of Scripture in favor of subjective experiential verification of the truth of Christianity; most still assumed that the Bible was infallible in doctrine and without error in detail; others stood in a middle position. During the next decades militant conservatives won two isolated victories, removing Ezra P. Gould from Newton Theological Seminary in 1882 and Nathaniel Schmidt from Colgate in 1896. Nevertheless, they could not begin to hold back the liberal enthusiasm which swept over all of the Northern Baptist seminaries regardless of the degree of their earlier orthodox opposition. By 1900 liberals were well represented everywhere and by World War I strict conservatives had almost disappeared from the older seminaries.12 Moreover, under the leadership of President William Rainey Harper, the (Baptist) Divinity School at the University of Chicago became after the 1890s the leading American center for aggressive theological liberalism, including on its faculty such outstanding “modernists” as Shailer Mathews, George Burman Foster, Gerald Birney Smith, and Shirley Jackson Case.13 At Colgate Theological Seminary William Newton Clarke, whose views on the kingdom we have already encountered, was another outstanding voice for Baptist liberalism. Perhaps most important was the combination of pragmatic liberal theology with the new “Social Gospel” in the work of Walter Rauschenbusch at Rochester Theological Seminary. Rauschenbusch developed the liberal idea of the kingdom into an optimistic social theology that explicitly opposed the individualistic and otherworldly emphases often associated with revivalist evangelicalism.