Fundamentalism and American Culture
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XIV. The Fundamentals
The Fundamentals was conceived by a Southern California oil millionaire and edited by Bible teachers and evangelists. Published in twelve paperback volumes from 1910 to 1915, it was meant to be a great “Testimony to the Truth” and even something of a scholarly tour de force. Lyman Stewart, the chief promoter and financial backer, described the prospective authors as “the best and most loyal Bible teachers in the world.” He had a businessman’s confidence that the product would “doubtless be the masterpieces of the writers.”1 Stewart hired as his first editor A. C. Dixon, a well-known evangelist and author, then pastor of Moody Church in Chicago. He had greatly impressed Stewart with a sermon attacking “one of those infidel professors in Chicago.”2 Dixon and two successors, Louis Meyer (a Jewish-Christian evangelist) and Reuben Torrey, assembled a rather formidable array of conservative American and British scholars, as well as a number of popular writers.3 Lyman Stewart, with the aid of his brother and partner Milton, set out to ensure that the truth would not languish because of unavailability. They financed free distribution to every pastor, missionary, theological professor, theological student, YMCA and YWCA secretary, college professor, Sunday school superintendent, and religious editor in the English-speaking world, and sent out some three million individual volumes in all.4
The public response, however, was not as great as must have been hoped. Although the publishers reported many individual positive responses,5 neither theological journals nor popular religious periodicals seemed to take more than passing notice.6
The Fundamentals, however, had a long-term effect of greater importance than its immediate impact or the lack thereof. It became a symbolic point of reference for identifying a “fundamentalist” movement. When in 1920 the term “fundamentalist” was coined, it called to mind the broad united front of the kind of opposition to modernism that characterized these widely known, if little studied, volumes. In retrospect, the volumes retain some usefulness in tracing the outlines of the emerging movement. They represent the movement at a moderate and transitional stage before it was reshaped and pushed to extremes by the intense heat of controversy.
At the center of the interdenominational expression of the anti-modernist movement were the evangelists and Bible teachers of the dispensational and Keswick movements; in The Fundamentals, however, they showed remarkable restraint in promoting the more controversial aspects of their views. Keswick teachings appeared rather extensively in the volumes, but these were not as yet cause for much dispute, at least not in the generally Reformed camp that made up the coalition. Dispensationalism and premillennialism, which were controversial, were almost entirely absent.7 Clearly an effort was being made to build and maintain alliances. Only about half of the authors selected were from the Bible teachers’ group. In order to establish a respectable and self-consciously conservative coalition against modernism, premillennial teachings were best kept in the background.
In the meantime, however, the same group of Bible teachers and evangelists who promoted The Fundamentals were moving on other fronts to promote their own distinctive dispensationalist views. Backed by Stewart money they founded the Bible Institute of Los Angeles in 1908. In the same year they also managed re-publication and massive free distribution of William E. Blackstone’s Jesus Is Coming. Probably most important, in 1909 there came the publication, by Oxford University Press, of the Scofield Reference Bible.8
In The Fundamentals the movement’s interests were focused on a broad defense of the faith. Perhaps one third of the articles defended Scripture, typically with an attack on the foibles of higher criticism. Another third dealt with traditional theological questions—apologetics, the nature and work of each of the persons of the Trinity, the doctrines of sin and salvation. The remaining articles are more difficult to classify. Each of the first five volumes, which were otherwise heavy on higher criticism and doctrine, concluded with personal testimony. Five other volumes (VII-XI) ended with polemics against modern “isms,” Russellism, Mormonism, Eddyism, Modern Spiritualism, and Romanism—indicating, as is evident in most conservative publications of the era, that the alarm caused by breakdown of the evangelical consensus extended beyond the menace of Protestant liberalism. Beginning with Volume VII there was a decided shift toward more popular topics. Volume XII, devoted to evangelism and missions, was intended as the capstone of the enterprise.9 Despite the interest in the defense of the faith that was giving the movement new shape, it was still close to the days of D. L. Moody, and its preeminent concern remained that of reaching lost souls.
Thus the practical essays and personal testimonies in The Fundamentals display an overwhelming emphasis on soul-saving, personal experience, and individual prayer, with very little attention to specific ethical issues, either personal or social. Political causes—even prohibition—were studiously avoided. Sabbath observance was urged, but not as a political issue. A few writers alluded to the dangers of communism and anarchy, but the one essay on socialism was remarkably moderate. The church should stay out of politics, it stated, but genuine Christian profession was compatible with personal advocacy of socialism.10 Charles Trumbull warned against too much “social service” at the expense of creating “victorious soul-winners.” But missionary leader Robert Speer, another Keswick advocate, stressed that the salvation of souls would help to free the world “from want and disease and injustice and inequality and impurity and lust and hopelessness and fear.”11 The coalition agreed that the church’s mission was not political, but as yet it did not seem to see itself as especially divided from its liberal brethren over social questions.
The crucial issue seems rather to have been perceived as that of the authority of God in Scripture in relation to the authority of modern science, particularly science in the form of higher criticism of Scripture itself. Despite the variety of nationalities and backgrounds of the contributors, in essay after essay the central argument on this point was, with few exceptions, virtually the same. True science and historical criticism were to be much applauded. The “Scientific and Historical method,” said Baptist professor J. J. Reeve, is “irresistible” to the scholarly mind. “The scientific spirit which gave rise to it is one of the noblest instincts in the intellectual life of man.12 “What is called ‘higher’ criticism,” agreed W. H. Griffith Thomas, “is not only a legitimate but a necessary method for all Christians, for by its use we are able to discover the facts and the form of the Old Testament Scriptures.” Thomas adamantly opposed, however, the “illegitimate, unscientific and unhistorical use” of this method.13
The thing that separated true scientific criticism from the illegitimate and false, most commentators agreed, was that the “true criticism enters upon its inquiries with an open mind”14 while the false is controlled by speculative hypotheses. Canon Dyson Hague of London, Ontario, whose essay was chosen to lead the series when a four-volume edition was issued in 1917, clearly sounded the themes which echoed through the volumes. “For hypothesis-weaving and speculation,” he remarked, “the German theological professor is unsurpassed.” Appealing to the Anglo-Saxon tradition associated with Bacon and Newton, Hague observed that “in philosophical and scientific enquiries … no regard whatever should be paid to the conjectures or hypotheses of thinkers …” for “the great Newton himself” had said, “‘Non fingo hypotheses’: I do not frame hypotheses.”15
These principles were the foundation stones for Reuben Torrey’s defense of Christianity, which he said was established on the basis of “historically proven fact.” Claiming to “assume absolutely nothing,” Torrey argued that “true science does not start with an a priori hypothesis that certain things are impossible, but simply examines the evidence to find out what has actually occurred.”16
The central unproven, unprovable, and wholly unscientific hypothesis or prejudice, everyone agreed, was the prejudice against the supernatural and the miraculous.17 While much specific evidence was marshalled to demonstrate the integrity of Scripture
and the conjectural nature of the higher critical theories,18 the arguments always returned to this basic point. Without an a priori rejection of the miraculous, Scripture would always prove compatible with the highest standards of science and rationality.
These champions of science and rationality did not strictly confine their defense of the Christian fundamentals to reason alone. A number, while acknowledging the value of true science, emphasized its limits with respect to knowing God.19 Occasionally, this approach was carried to an anti-intellec-tualistic conclusion. Philip Mauro, a fiery New York lawyer converted to a radical dispensationalist version of Christianity, was clearly an advocate of rationality; yet he unequivocally condemned all “philosophy,” which he defined as “the occupation of attempting to devise, by the exercises of human reason, an explanation of the universe.”20 The approach taken in an essay by B. B. Warfield was more typical. Warfield was certainly second to none as a champion of the rational defense of Christianity. Yet he carefully balanced his appeals to objective evidence with the subjective witness of the Holy Spirit. “The supreme proof,” he concluded, “to every Christian of the deity of his Lord is then his own inner experience of the transforming power of his Lord upon the heart and life.” This approach was thoroughly consistent with Common Sense philosophy, which grounded its first principles not in elaborate philosophical arguments but in the sense of mankind. So, said Warfield, the experience of the transforming power of the Lord is known by the Christian as surely as “he who feels the present warmth of the sun knows the sun exists.”21
On questions of the degree to which objective evidence was essential for proving Christianity there was still some room for variety within the conservative camp. Robert Speer, for example, defended the deity of Christ almost entirely on the grounds of the evidence of the doctrine’s practical benefits.22 More explicitly. President E. Y. Muliins of Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, based the proof of Christianity almost exclusively on the experiential and the practical. Noting that this approach gave Christianity a point of contact with the new philosophy of Pragmatism, Muliins argued that “Christian experience transfers the whole problem of Christian evidences to the sphere of the practical life.23 Mullins’s position genuinely mediated between the old theology and the new philosophy and so had something in common with the more liberal reliance on the experiential and the practical. The inclusion of his work in The Fundamentals, together with a number of other mediating essays,24 shows that the trenches were not yet deeply dug for the coming fundamentalist battle. Later, in the heat of the 1920s, mediating positions such as Mullins’s would be no-man’s-land.25
One line along which the dispensationalists at least were already well entrenched by 1910 was Biblical inerrancy. Departing from their usual practice, on this issue the editors chose only authors from their own camp. They did not have to turn to the Princeton theologians to find a strong defense of the complete inerrancy of Scripture. In fact their own emphasis on the supernatural character of the Bible was so strong that, despite their frequent protestations to the contrary, they tended to drift toward the dictation theory. Even James M. Gray, while mentioning the element of human personality in writing Scripture, immediately gives an illustration of a stenographer who changed a “now” into a “not” to show how every detail must be controlled by the original author. So by “miraculous control” the Bible was an “absolute transcript” of God’s mind.26 The Reverend George S. Bishop similarly spoke with no qualification of the “dictated inspiration” of the entire Bible and even referred to it as “a Book dropped out of heaven.”27
In remarkable contrast, and indicative of the mediating positions still allowed within the emerging coalition, battle lines were not yet firmly fixed against every sort of biological evolutionism. Although one essayist, “An Occupant of the Pew,” writing on “Evolutionism in the Pulpit,” suggested that all evolutionism was of the Devil,28 two of the men selected to write on this topic, James Orr of Scotland29 and George Frederick Wright of Oberlin College, were well known to allow that limited forms of evolution might have been used by God in creation. Each argued strongly against Darwinian claims that evolution could explain the origins of life or the uniqueness of humans. Each allowed, however (as was common among conservative evangelicals in the later nineteenth century), that the “days” of creation might have been very long, allowing the possibility of some evolutionary development. Such limited evolutionism, said Wright, certainly did not exclude God’s creative work. “If anything is to be evolved in an orderly manner from the resident forces of primordial matter it must first have been involved through the creative act of the Divine Being.30
The selection of the aging George F. Wright to write the most detailed analysis of biological evolution for The Fundamentals is a sidelight on the many-sided character of this early fundamentalism. Wright was a product of the old intellectually sophisticated New England Calvinism. During the 1870s he was the protégé of the foremost Congregationalist defender of theistic evolution, Asa Gray, and was even the target of conservative attacks. Wright never changed his mediating position, however, while the scientific community soon abandoned the attempt to defend both science and Scripture. Consequently, by 1910 Wright was clearly in the conservative camp,31 even though later fundamentalist standards he would have been a suspect moderate.
Wright edited the Bibliotheca Sacra, one of the most respected American theological journals, originally designed in the early nineteenth century for the defense of New England orthodoxy. Under Wright’s editorship, Bibliotheca Sacra stood with the emerging fundamentalist movement. After some uncertain years following Wright’s death in 1921 the jounal completed its odyssey, falling into the hands of the important new dispensationalist theological seminary in Dallas, Texas. There it remained as an at least symbolic link between militant fundamentalism and the former days of the scholarly New England battles for the faith.32 The moderation of Wright, as that of The Fundamentals, was clearly transitional in a movement that had not yet found any firm identity.
Christianity and Culture
XV. Four Views circa 1910
In retrospect, we can see that the decade preceding America’s entry into the Great War was the end of an era for the American evangelical establishment. Throughout the nineteenth century there had seemed to be reasonable hope for establishing the foundations of something like a “Christian America.” With the knowledge of what has happened since, it is apparent that this ideal was illusory and that the evangelical consensus itself was already irreparably damaged. The impasse that was to come could only dimly be perceived in the early twentieth century in the context of a long past of evangelical advance and a vigorous present. Competing denominationalists, liberals and conservatives, individualists and social reformers, confessionalists and primitivists had long worked together in many of the same interdenominational agencies, published in the same journals, prayed for the same mission causes, and shared many of the same hopes.1 There were indeed many sectarians and immigrant groups on the fringes which had little to do with the central evangelical movement. Yet the majority of Protestants who did identify with it had long since learned to live with some differences and cooperate in working for many common goals.
The new conservative coalition against liberalism was part of this establishment. It belonged to the mainstream and, as The Fundamentals project shows, aspired to bring about a consensus of religious thought in America. At the same time it was becoming more and more a voice of dissent, sometimes sounding a sectarian or anti-intellectual note.
If this emerging anti-modernist movement was in any sense a distinct entity, it was torn by internal disagreements and tensions. These differences could have a number of explanations, including incompatible denominational or doctrinal traditions. It may be more illuminating, however, to look at these divisions in the context of the spectrum of opinion on an issue central to the present inquiry—the relation of Christianity to American culture. Should the movement at
tempt to reshape the culture and its churches from within or rather condemn them and separate itself from them? On this central practical question, as the four representative types in this chapter illustrate, there was no consensus. Basic differences and internal tensions were temporarily obscured in the movement by the anti-modernist agitation of the 1920s. Yet the lines of fissure were always present so that fragmentations were likely whenever it attempted positive programs.
1. THIS AGE CONDEMNED: THE PREMILLENNIAL EXTREME
At one end of the spectrum was a small group of dispensationalist spokesmen who pushed the cultural pessimism of premillennialism to its logical extreme. The controversial Arno C. Gaebelein, editor of Our Hope, promoted this position aggressively, as did Isaac M. Haldeman, a vigorous writer and pastor of the First Baptist Church of New York City. In The Fundamentals this position was represented by several essays by New York lawyer Philip Mauro.
Not surprisingly, the favorite topic of these rigorous dispensationalists was “the signs of the times.” Gaebelein ran a regular feature in Our Hope, “Current Events and Signs of the Times—in the Light of the Word of God.” In 1910,1. M. Haldeman completed the most comprehensive dispensationalist volume to date on The Signs of the Times, which quickly ran through several editions. Haldeman’s signs, which were essentially the same as Gaebelein’s and Mauro’s, may be taken as fair sample of this prophetic world-view in the pre-World War I era.2
With one exception (the rise of the Jewish people in world leadership and the Zionist movement) the signs that the end was near could be seen in the grim evidence that civilization had failed. Haldeman and others, of course, could cite the usual assortment of famines, earthquakes, and pestilence; but they also could find considerable evidence, if not for wars, at least for rumors of wars. The “so-called ‘Christian nations,’” said Haldeman noting recent armament statistics, are better prepared than ever “to blow out each other’s brains.3 Meanwhile the new wealth of entrepreneurs fulfilled Biblical prophecies of “heaping treasure together” and wanton displays of luxury as marks of the end of the age. The growth of commerical ties among European cities together with their shipping and railroad ties to the Near East represented the literal revival of Babylon.4 And multimillionaire directors of trusts signalled the end times: “grasping after more, never content, and determined to rule, their wealth is a minister to corruption, an inspiration to official dishonesty, and a menace to the peace and comfort of society.5