Truth Unites - Fundamentalism 100 Years Ago vs. Today

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

In this video Gavin Ortlund explains how 20th century fundamentalism and evangelicalism is relevant to the church today. Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

This video is on a controversial topic. I think it'll be a little bit of a controversial video, unfortunately, though I hope it's helpful, but it's necessary for us to talk about these things happening in the church today. I want to share my heart more than I ever have before in a Truth Unites video about what we're seeing in the church today. Here's how I'll introduce it. Have you ever been called a fundamentalist by someone who's actually just a notch to the left of you? Or what about this? Someone who's just a smidge to the right of you on a couple of issues or just one issue concludes that you're a liberal. Seems like this is happening a lot these days and a lot more,

the overuse of these more extreme labels and categories. Many of us are called both from different angles, and that seems to be happening a lot. I've been thinking about this a lot, this proliferation of these labels, ever since I put up my responses to Megan Basham's book, Shepherds for Sale a few weeks back, and just seeing the various reactions to that

and the book itself may be more reflective about the broader moment we had, broader moment we're in as a church. More on that book at the end of this video, what I want to mainly do, though, is provide historical context for these terms, and especially the word fundamentalist. What is fundamentalism? It's a really interesting thing. Part of what I want to do here is defend that term a little bit, defend against unfair usages of it, just as a kind of a slur against people who are orthodox. As we'll learn, that was originally not a bad term. It referred to a movement that had many positive qualities. We're going to honor the good in that. But during the 1940s and

1950s, I will argue, fundamentalism and evangelicalism parted ways, and tracing out how that happened, can help us understand some of the negative tendencies of what has come to be known as fundamentalism that I think we need to be alert to today. Because my honest concern is that I think we see a reemergence of certain fundamentalist tendencies today, even within what we typically call evangelicals are facing some of the same pressures and temptations in that direction or in the opposite direction that we saw in the 20th century. So we're going to do church history here. If you know my channel, you know I love to do theological retrieval. That means going back and learning from church history. Usually that'll be more like the early church or the medieval church doctors

or something like this. But today we're going to talk about an earlier phase of modernity. I think we also have so much to learn from just the last couple hundred years of church history. That's a big passion of mine. So we're going to dive into the middle of the 20th century in American Protestantism and describe four aspects of fundamentalism and then draw application points for the church today. I'll put this up on the screen. First, you can see I want to identify one positive of fundamentalism and then three negatives of fundamentalism and will go in order.

Number one, this is a positive thing. Fundamentalism courageously opposes liberalism. Let me put up a quote on the screen. This will start us off here. In the 1930s, we were all fundamentalists. That is a comment from Carl Henry. Carl Henry, if you don't know that name, he was one of the great sort of theological architects of 20th century evangelicalism, sometimes called neo-evangelicalism, to distinguish it

from earlier usages of that term evangelical, like during the Second Great Awakening and so forth. Now, today, the word fundamentalist usually has a negative connotation. It usually is used as a pejorative for a group. It's used even for non-Christian groups today as well. You can hear about fundamentalist atheists and things like that. And usually it means someone who's closed-minded, someone who's dogmatic, someone who's mean-spirited, often someone who's anti-intellectual. In a Christian context, it will often connote political extremism and then certain theological commitments like dispensationalism. We'll talk about that word if you don't know what that means. But originally, it wasn't a bad. thing. Originally, the word fundamentalist just meant somebody who affirms the fundamentals. You know, if you think of the literal meaning of it, like, I like that word, actually. I want to affirm the fundamentals. You know, that's a great way to define yourself. So, you know, the virgin birth, the resurrection of Christ, and so forth. In the 1920s, to be a fundamentalist, primarily meant to be an Orthodox Protestant, to be a Protestant who's not following the mainline liberal

drift and can still affirm the Apostles' Creed and say it and mean it and so forth. So we'll trace this out here. Here's the basic snapshot. I even, this is cheesy, but I even just wrote it out on a sheet of paper and I will describe this and put it up for you to see. So you have two different splits. Split one in the red, split two in the green. The first split is liberalism versus fundamentalism. I know this is basic, but sometimes just extreme concept. I'm like addicted to conceptual This is why I like books like mere Christianity. They're so well written. I have a passion for be as clear as possible. So you have two splits. First split is the fundamentalists leave liberalism. So you have liberalism flooding into the mainline Protestant denominations in the 19th century,

into the 20th century, and this is causing people to deny the basic foundations of the faith, like I mentioned, the virgin birth and the resurrection of Christ. Those were the pressures at that time. It's interesting how the times change, and the spirit of the age always changes. At that time, people loved the morality of the Bible, but didn't like the miracles. Today, it's the opposite. Most people are fine with the miracles, but don't like the morality. So we're always having to change and resist the spirit of the age in different directions. But if you want to see a great articulation of the fundamentalist case, read J. Gresham-Machens, Christianity, and Liberalism. I'll talk more about that book, a fantastic book. However,

problems start emerging within fundamentalism and just, you know, opposing liberalism was not enough. They had their own internal problems leading to a second split between the evangelicals and the fundamentalists. And this is the green splits that I put up on the screen, and so you can see what that ultimately leaves you with is evangelicalism between two different, more extreme alternatives, one on each side. But what's interesting is that that wasn't clear from the beginning. In the beginning, as Carl Henry said, we were all fundamentalists. Evangelicalism began as a reform movement within fundamentalism. It's only in the 40s and 50s, you see a clear and official split. So in 1942, you have the founding of the National Association of Evangelicals, the N.A.E.

Under the leadership of Harold John Ackinke, he's a leading evangelical. He was the pastor at Park Street Church in Boston for many years. He helped found Fuller Seminary, Gordon Conwell, theological seminary and so forth. And this is a distinct entity from the American Council of Christian Churches under the leadership of Carl McIntyre. He was a leading fundamentalist in the Bible Presbyterian Church, which was a fundamentalist denomination. So you're starting to see emerge in the 40s, these differences, but they're not clearly distinct yet. And this is unfolding. In 1947, Carl Henry published the uneasy conscience of modern fundamentalism,

watershed book for the neo-evangelical movement we'll talk more about. 1947, you have the founding of Fuller Seminary, Pasadena, California, flagship neo-evangelical institution. In 1956, you have the founding of Christianity today. This is the sort of official publication of this movement, the neo-evangelical movement. And then in the late 50s, it's just really clear. I think a flashpoint is 1957, where you have Billy Graham's New York, crusade in the spring of that year, huge effort at evangelism. And he disassociates from his earlier

fundamentalist supporters who after the crusade are literally calling him the Antichrist. And they're saying he committed apostasy. He's getting funds from modernist churches, and it really became clear. We're just of a different tribe now. And the liberals are, of course, attacking Billy Graham as well at that point. And then later that same year in December, Harold John Ockinay releases a press release that explicitly distinguishes neo-evangelicalism from liberalism, neo-Orthodoxy, and fundamentalism. So you've got these different camps, and they're saying, we're at a different camp. So now you have two distinct movements. I'm going somewhere with this. This will be relevant to the church today. If you want to read more about this, oh man, I'll resist the temptation to talk on and on

about this book by George Marston called Reforming Fundamentalism. What I've just canvassed as a good summary of his thesis. It's about the first two decades of Fuller from 47 to 67, but he has an epilogue, sequel, and appendix that flesh out the story from later on. And it's a very well-written book, and it's a great example of how getting really granular when you're doing historical research can be helpful to see the big picture, just like biography can tell you all about an age. You learn about a person, you learn about their time, you learn about Fuller, you learn about the neo-evangelical movement as a whole. Amazing book, but one of the things you see in Marsden's history is shocked me to read how much in common the evangelicals and the fundamentalists had in their common opposition to

liberalism. Fundamentalists like Bob Jones Senior, founder of Bob Jones University, and John Rice, founding editor of the Sword of the Lord, an influential fundamentalist newspaper, were originally a part of the N.A.E. They were there at the table, along with Ackin Gay and Charles Fuller and others. Charles Fuller was a famous radio evangelist who helped found Fuller Seminary, hence the name, and these people are all in the same team at its founding. Fuller was a fundamentalist school. Marston says the unmistakable intention was reform from within, not a break from fundamental You've got fundamentalist faculty on their teaching at Fuller in those early years, self-avowed fundamentalists. People like Wilbur Smith and Charles Woodbridge, these people do not like Billy Graham.

They do not like evangelicalism. Woodbridge would later call neo-evangelicalism theological and moral compromise of the deadliest sort. So the point is, among those who are opposed to liberalism and committed to the essentials, you have these huge different that emerge. Now, why am I going on about this? Because I think we see the same thing today. I think that we are seeing a new wave of secularism and liberalism. It feels like the ground is moving underneath our feet. The Republican Party of today is pretty close to what Bill Clinton was 30 years ago. We're feeling the sea change underneath us. And people are responding. There are new fractures, new tensions emerging, new different camps. And I think that

we are seeing an uptick of certain fundamentalist tendencies. By the way, throughout this video, I am not intending. I know this is hard to talk about. I'm not intending to label any one particular person or institution or movement fundamentalist. I'm trying to draw attention to certain fundamentalist tendencies from the history and put them out there for us all to think about more, even as we can learn about evangelical temptations and dangers as well. So we all are going to need to be humble to consider ourselves in these conversations. But right now, you see the same fracturing. You see the same pulling apart at the seams.

It's painful. You know, people who hung out a lot 10 years ago and now they're not on the same camp anymore and it hurts, right? Just like in the 1930s, Bob Jones and Harold John Ockengay could go golfing and talk about their common hatred of liberalism. I don't know if they went golfing,

but you know what I'm saying. And by the 1950s, they're bitterly opposed in this totally different camp, and these things are happening. Now, I wrote a six-part review of Marston's book in 2010, way back on my blog, which has now, of course, been incorporated into the Truth United's website. I went back on Reddit. I came across this paragraph, to what extent do different leanings and emphases within contemporary evangelicalism foreshadow more definitive splits further down the road? You can read that whole thing if you want to talk about how, since evangelicalism is like the Puritan effort, a multi-generational movement, it has this danger of

fragmentation that's built in. I wrote those words in June of 2010, re-read them in connection to my thoughts over the last two and a half weeks. And I'm thinking, wow, we can learn so much by looking back to try to navigate and steward well what we're all going through. I'm going to be passionate in this video. I'm speaking from my heart. I'm genuinely jealous for the church. I'm worried about the sheep. I'm concerned about some of the things that are happening right now. So with each of these points, we've got a lesson. What's the lesson here? I'm going to boil it down to be real basic. Try to be worthy of your time if you're watching this video. Three things off this first point.

Number one, we can admit the different fractures happening today are real. I don't think we need to pretend they're not there. They're real. It's okay to admit it. It's happening. Number two, let's not use the terms fundamentalist and liberal too quickly. Just because someone might be a little more liberal than you are doesn't mean they're a full-blown liberal. Just because someone is a little more fundamentalist leaning than you doesn't mean they're a full-blown fundamentalist.

That's why we need triage more on that in point two of the downsides of fundamentalism coming up in a second. Third application point real quick, let's remember that there are dangers and temptations in both directions. And this is so hard. I have not done this perfectly. I have not always punched right and punched left with the right amount of emphasis at each particular moment. This is hard. We're all affected by our own history, by our own anecdotal, personal bad. battles that we've fought are by our temperament, by where we live. You know, we don't see everything.

But here's the great powerful insight of the evangelical heritage we have. I'm speaking mainly to evangelicals here. This ability to fight on two fronts, to recognize two different dangers. Both liberalism and fundamentalism are dangers. When Billy Graham is doing the 1957 crusade, the criticism in both directions was fierce, but it's coming in both directions. And this was part of the self-consciousness of the early evangelicals. They're saying, you know, yeah, we need to cling to the fundamentals, but the way some are going about that has some problems, and there's some ugliness, and there's some real dangers.

I think some people today are only fighting in one direction. Some people are only fighting against fundamentalism, or fundamentalist tendencies within evangelicalism, they see the ugliness of that. Others, though, are only fighting against liberalism, and I can get that because of the pressures of the times that we are in. It is no wonder to me that in the upsurge of liberalism that we are facing in the early 21st century and the changes in the world right now, no surprise at all that you're going to see an upsurge corresponding to that of a kind of new set of fundamentalist tendencies,

but we have to remember dangers in both directions. Let's identify three possible dangers in historic fundamentalism that we can see in the 20th century without a goal to label people, without a goal to draw direct arrows, but just to put them on the table, try to think about this together. Here we go.

I'll try to go fast, but I got a lot to say. Number one, fundamentalism often finds its identity and what it's against more than what it's for. Do we see that in church today? Yes. There are people who build massive social media platform doing nothing but attacking and tearing down other Christians. Now look, polemics is a part of faithfulness to the gospel. Sometimes people will say, look, your channel's called Truth Unites.

Why are you criticizing purgatory? Why are you criticizing it? It's truth unites. Being clear about what we're against is necessary. I'm not against theological polemics. But it's not healthy when that becomes your whole identity. when this is what gives you real passion and energy, when this is what draws an army to coalesce around you,

and people are doing that today. Note the emboldened words in this verse from Jude. He says, I was eager to talk about salvation, but it was necessary to content. This is how it should be. This should be the emotional prioritizations in our heart. Celebrating the gospel should be eager. We should be eager for that.

Contending against error should be a matter of necessity. A lot of people reverse that. That's a fundamentalist tendency. And Marston highlights how this tendency played out in the fundamentalist evangelical split. He talks about how part of the evangelical heritage is more open and expansive, but part of what went into evangelicalism is, note these words, closed, cautious, and defensive. Now, here's the thing. Any movement faces attention between a positive identity radiating out from the center and a negative identity, and a negative identity, reinforced around the edges. Does that make sense? Think of the nucleus in the center and then the membrane.

I'm kind of mixing different an atom and a cell. Think of the heart and the skin. Okay? You need the positive thing in the middle and you need the negative thing around the edges. Both are important. Al Moeller wrote a dissertation, I think he finished it in 1989, on evangelical responses to Carl Bart. Did you know this? Many of us know of Al Moller from other things he's done, and I've appreciated various things that he has done, but I also appreciated this dissertation. A friend and I read through it many years ago, it's really interesting, and it brings up this question. He brings up the question of whether evangelical identity should be what he calls a boundaryed or centered set of convictions. That's one way of getting at this. Should our identity

be positive coming out from the middle, or should it be negative reinforced at the fringes? This is tricky. Both are important. Okay? So, for example, a church needs to have a statement of faith that you have to sign on to be a member there and receive the Lord's Supper and so forth. But when someone first walks into the church, what they're experiencing isn't just a statement of faith. They're getting a sense of the core values, the overall vibe of the church, and so forth. A fundamentalist tendency is to focus so much on these edges, so much, and it gets defensive, and it gets fear-based. And it's more about kind of a negative posture towards the enemies out there than actually a positive, constructive celebration of the gospel. So we need the positive constructive celebration of the gospel that comes first, then that flows out into our polemics.

So many people are getting this order wrong today. Man, I could go on about this, but let me just hit the main point. May I speak with a little bit of passion here? Church of 2024, it is time to build and not just tear. things down. We are in a time of colossal disintegration. We need new institutions. We need new efforts at constructive, positive gospel work. This is what I want Truth Unites to be about. It even goes into the title of my YouTube channel. I want to give my life to something constructive. You know, it's like when you plant seeds in the ground and then 50 years later with enough water and rain,

you got something where birds can perch in it. That's what I want to do with my life. I want to put out a library of videos that can serve and meet needs and promote gospel assurance. But that's what I'm trying to do. I don't do it perfectly. But there is so much tearing down right now. Criticism, separation, drawing boundaries, denouncing. And like Jude said, that's necessary, but sometimes it seems like that becomes our identity. I think Galatians 515 is playing out on Twitter almost every day in the body of Christ. Richard Baxter said, be very careful when you have zeal for truth. Because if you have zeal for truth, it can feel so good. But if you don't have love for the people that you're correcting, you can be used by Satan to tear

people down, tear down the church. Is that happening today? Am I blind? Or am I the only one who is seeing a lot of Galatians 515 in the body of Christ today? Here's the second danger of fundamentalism. Again, not to label, but to draw this out from the history, put it out there and say, this is happening, let's work on it, let's talk about it. I'm not trying to back anybody into a corner, I'm trying to say, here it is, let's talk about it. Number two, fundamentalism often fails to do theological triage. Triage is when we rank different doctrines according to their level of importance. What is good about fundamentalism is it's willing to fight, like we saw at the beginning of this. It courageously opposes a real enemy. Fundamentalism is fighting a real enemy. The problem

isn't that the enemy is a phantom. The problem is it's doing it in the wrong way. And it becomes overly It fights too much. Often it makes every hill a hill to die on or at least too many hills, hills to die on. So let me give some examples. In the history of 20th century fundamentalism as it spills forward into the camps of evangelical and fundamentalist. Let me identify two issues that become kind of litmus tests. These various issues come up. They become battle markers. They become testing points. They tell you they become symbolic, you know, who are the friends and who are the foes. Two of them are biblical inerrancy and pre-millennialism. And I want to comment on both of these and basically say, these are not the same. You know, inerrancy makes a lot more sense to be one of those boundary issues, be one of those things that's the skin or the membrane or the edges.

Pre-millennialism makes less sense. So inerrancy came up very early on during the fundamentalist modernist controversy, late 19th century, 1880s, 1880s, you've got B.B. Warfield debating Charles Brigg. about the doctrine of scripture and Warfield is making biblical inerrancy a battlefront issue. From my standpoint, understandably and rightly so. And so it takes on that kind of connotation and that continues into the 20th century, and this is the big issue at Fuller. This split the faculty. And if you want to read chapter 11 of this book, Reforming Fundamentalism, you will get a dramatic story. And you can read about Black Saturday, December 3rd.

first, 1962, when it all came to a head and the drama of the following weeks. And that was a turning point at Fuller in a movement away from inerrancy. So in there, but all I'm trying to say right now is inerrancies, you know, and then it continues. You get the battle for the Bible in the 1970s and you've got Carl Henry and Harold Lenzell, two leading evangelicals, kind of teasing that out a little bit differently. Henry says inerrancy is a test of evangelical consistency. Lenzel says a test of evangelical identity. So even how we understand those boundaries and what we mean by that can differ from one person to another. But I'm just trying to point out, anerency was a battlefront issue. Now, even if you think there are some downsides to the sociology of all this, even if you think maybe

the way inerrancy is defined can be kind of more flat-footed sometimes, nonetheless, I would say this issue makes a lot of sense as a boundary issue because the truthfulness of scripture is kind of an obvious flashpoint in the struggle against liberalism. So I would say I affirm biblical inerrancy and I think I affirm it as a kind of boundary marker. I think it's, you know, totally fitting when it's put into, say, a statement of faith at a church or something like that because it's demarcating things. And one of the reasons for that is that this issue has a lot of historical backing. Okay. That's a doctrine that's sort of lowercase C Catholic. You know, read what the church fathers and others have said about the full truthfulness of scripture as the

inspired word of God. Pre-millennialism. is different. See, not every hill is a hill to die on, but premillennialism became, and I might offend some of the premill people out there. Apologies for that. I'm not trying to necessarily attack your position, but the way it's functioned sociologically is a problem, I think. So premillennialism became another one of those litmus test issues. It's amazing. For some of us, you know, it's kind of amazing that it was like this, but in the early history of Fuller Seminary, pre-mill, that was in the statement of faith, everybody's premil, and it's actually really controversial what kind of dispensational pre-millanialist you are. So, you know, historic premilal is controversial,

but even within dispensational pre-millanialism, I'm not going to go through all this. I have another video on this if you want to look it up. Basically, this just has to do with the sequence of events in the end times, you know, when does the rapture and tribulation, how do they all flow out one to another? And Marston calls this to split the faculty, you know, being a very important. You know, tree-trib, pre-trib, or post-tribb, he calls it a leading issue. And on the pre-tribulation side, you have Harold Lenzell, Wilber Smith, Gleason, Archer, Carl Henry, Everett Harrison, Charles Woodbridge. On the post-tribb side, you have the Liberals. That's how they reviewed. George Alden Latt, Edward John Carnell, Clarence, Roddy, Dan Fuller. And then you have, in 1956, George Latt

publishes a book called The Blessed Hope. It's a case for historic pre-millennialism. And he's basically saying, no secret rapture in scripture. And that was incredibly controversial. You know, he's still a pre-millanialist. He's just a historic premillal, rather than dispensational dispensational pre-millist little hard words to say. And this was controversial. This was a big bomb drop. Now, can you imagine? Is somebody on the faculty of Fuller in 1960 or 1958 came out as like postmill or ah mill, you know? Now, for us today, now, that issue still plays out like that in some, circles today, but many of us today, we look back on that and we're like, why was this such a big issue for them? Pre-trib versus post-trib, you know, for us today, we're facing, like, radical

transgenderism and things like this. And these, these, like, theological debates seem kind of small. It seems like a failure of triage. It feels like goblins are sneaking into our house through the windows as we speak, and people are fighting about which cupboards to put the dishes in, this kind of thing. But that's how it was. In some places, that's how it is. I apologize. I'm trying to, I'm trying to If you really think that those issues are that important, I realize I probably offended you. I'm not trying to make fun of that. I guess I'm maybe assuming it for the sake of this particular video. In that other video I've done and in my book, Finding the Right Hills to Die on, I make a case for that, a briefcase, but a case that we really shouldn't fight over the pre-mill stuff that much.

But I'm kind of assuming that, I guess, here. But the lesson is this, not even about pre-mill, is this is a huge issue with fundamentalist tendencies. You make too many hills to die on. You make things litmus tests for who is my friend versus who is my foe. And you have too many of those things. And so you end up narrowing to these really parochial boundary markers. And I see the big issue that plagues it is ignorance of church history. Did you know that premillennialism is a rare view historically?

Historically, you have some church fathers like Irenas who affirmed a version of it. But it's basically absent between August. and the 17th century. Let me say that again. Nobody's premail for over a millennium. Nobody. We're hardly anybody. I don't really know of anybody. And dispensational premillennialism was totally absent until the 19th century. Some people would push back on that a little bit, but in its essence, it was. It was a novelty. So think about this for a second. This helps us get perspective on our own battles today. I think we need to hear this, even though it's a little bit punchy. The faculty at Fuller is fighting over two views, neither of which existed for the first

1900 years of church history. Now, we look back today and we might see this as, okay, that's kind of, that's kind of weird, but what are our grandchildren going to look back at us and say, either we weigh under-emphasize something or we were like this. Let me give an example. I cannot tell you how many times in the last three weeks somebody has called me a liberal or a wolf because I am not a young earth creationist, dozens as things play out over the last few weeks. I'll put out a tweet. It's like John 316. Someone says, Wolf, you believe in millions of years, you know. And that seems to be growing. That seems to be increasing. But I think it's basically a function of historical ignorance. It's just, you know, let me just make the case real quick here as one representative

example of where I'm concerned about an uptick of fundamentalist tendencies. Same thing as people fighting over pre-mill without being aware of how that has no historical backing. If believing in an ancient world and rejecting young earth creationism is liberal, then the following people are liberal. Charles Spurgeon, the great Baptist preacher, June 17th, 1855, he preaches a sermon. He doesn't even blink to talk about the millions of years before Adam. It's just not even an issue. Like, you can just tell he's just throwing it out there. He's not even aware this is going to be controversial. Number two, Jay Gresham-Machin. He wrote the book, Christianity and Liberalism. I'll recommend that more at the end. Hallmark defense of the fundamentals. And he's saying,

certainly you don't have to be Young Earth. Number three, Warfield and Hodge at Old Princeton, the staunch defenders of conservative Presbyterian orthodoxy opposing higher criticism and liberalism. Number four, the Schofield Reference Bible. It advocated for the gap theory, which is a species of old earth creationism. If it's liberal, to reject a young earth, then the Schofield Reference Bible is a liberal document. Number five, William Jennings Bryan. You know who he was? He represented the prosecution at the Scopes trial. He's a liberal, though, because he held to a day-age view. It wasn't even an issue in his day, but today we think that's liberal. Number six, R.A. Tori. He was the fundamentalist

editor of the book The Fundamentals, published from 1910 to 1915. It gave definition to the term fundamentalists, lots of the contributors of the book are fundamentalists, and the book takes an old earth stance. You can see that from Tori himself and many of the other articles written in the text by fundamentalists like George Frederick Wright are explicitly advocating for an old earth view with potential and at times in their careers various kinds of openness to evolution. That's among the fundamentalists, okay, let alone the evangelicals like Carl Henry and Gleason Archer and others, R.C. Sproll was the one who drafted the original Chicago statement of biblical inerrancy, and he was commonly saying, I don't know how old the world is. The Bible doesn't

tell us. The Young Earth Creationist movement comes in more in the second half of the 21st century, and it's booming today, and people are just ignorant of church history. They don't realize this hasn't historically been the membrane or the skin or the boundary of orthodoxy. So when people make that a litmus test today, I think that's unfortunate. And I think people don't even realize they're actually being more fundamentalist than historic fundamentalism. And by the way, the reason that's a real problem is because of the boy who cried wolf. There's a real thing that is heresy. So let's use the term heresy for the real heresies. All right, here's the third danger of fundamentalism that I want to alert us to and encourage us to think about today. Fundamentalism

often fails to exhibit the fruits of the spirit. one fundamentalist tendency is not just to fight on too many hills, but to just fight in ways that lack charity and lack grace. To put it simply, fundamentalists can be jerks. Now, reactions against fundamentalists can be mean-spirited as well. Huge, I mean, I would say progressive Christians have all the same temptations and all the same tendencies. So people on the far left are nasty, you know.

And you can see it, that's the polarization we're always worried about. But this is a hallmark temptation of 20th century fundamentalism, this overly antagonistic attitude. Okay, you can see Carl Henry, for example, lamenting a book by another conservative, which he calls theological atom bombing, which has as its result that as many evangelical friends as foes end up as casualties. Think about that. What a metaphor?

Okay, what does it mean to do a theological atom bomb? A theological atom bomb is when I say, oh, look over there. There's an institution or there's a movement or there's a group of people and it has errors in it. Therefore, we just attack the whole thing. Anybody within the radius becomes criticized. Just drop a bomb over the whole thing, right? Anybody connected to it in any way. Does that happen today?

Yes. Another thing that Marston talks about in 20th century fundamentalism that was a temptation is second degree separationism. Okay, what's second degree separationism? This is when I say, okay, I need to disassociate from liberals, but over there is a moderate or over there is another conservative who isn't disassociating from the same liberals. So now I have to disassociate from them as well. Now, leave room here, right? For wisdom and charity, maybe in certain contexts you have to do that for certain, you know, this is extraordinarily complicated. Like at what conference will you speak with another speaker who has different views?

you know, leave room for this, leave some grace for people to wrestle with those difficult questions, but you can see how, in an unrestrained expression, second-degree separationism leads to just this wanton splintering and fragmenting everywhere and suspicion everywhere. And the question, this whole question of when do you separate from others? Huge question, huge question, huge complicated question, even within fundamentalism. You see it in the 1967 dispute between John Stott and Martin Lloyd-Jones. You see it in Jay Grisha Machen's loss of conservative support in his missions work in the 1930s. My friend redeemed Zumer. It's always talking about, you know, his whole thing, his concern is that we separate too much from the mainline denominations and their institutions and so forth.

It's a complicated question. My view is sometimes you have to separate, but it's complicated to know when. But I'm not even going to try to take an opinion on that. I'm just observing the fundamentalist temptation and tendency to separate too much and in too much of an end. antagonistic way. And I just, you know, we don't need to solve all the complicated questions for the purpose of making this simple point. However the Holy Spirit leads you and you're thinking about how to relate to other Christians amidst differences, don't be a nasty person in the process. And right now, do we see that in the church today? I am sorry to say we do. There is, unfortunately, there is

sometimes this mentality, like the fruits of the spirit are optional. It's like, well, desperate times call for desperate measures, so we don't have to worry about that as much. And look, I'm all for allowing public disagreement, public criticism. That is fine. But the mockery, the cancel culture dynamics, the contempt, the way we treat each other on Twitter, this is not good. This is not healthy. And I've been thinking about this over the last few weeks, you know, as I see various reactions to the Shepherds for Sale book. And I've already gone into another videos my concerns about that book itself about truth, truthful narration about people, and then triaging issues. Leave all that aside for here, but just a comment, it was sobering to me to see Christians

respond. Certain people went into attack mode. You know, I'm getting anonymous, harassing texts mocking me and my physical appearance. People are infiltrating my private discord server, which is just about Protestantism. It's not really mine, one that I'm a part of. I'm sort of the figurehead for it. And, you know, trying to dig up dirt to find something to spread about me, which they do. Other lies, just flat out lies, you know, people would just make up stuff. People, you know, for example, people are saying that I'm mobilizing my fans to review bomb that book. Now, on my honor, okay, I did not ask anyone to review that book in any way. On my honor, I swear that is true. I didn't do that.

It's just not true. But people are repeating this lie. Megan is promoting that on her Twitter feed. It's galvanizing this storm against me on Twitter. Lots of contempt, lots of mocking, stuff like this. It's very ugly. And then just other rumors, you know, I'm getting texts from friends saying, hey, I heard that you're pro Kamala Harris.

Is that true? And I'm thinking, what? No, I'm not. No, I have never been. No, I've never said that. It's never occurred to me to be that. and yet people just flat out make stuff up. And it's just, it's dismaying.

And so, you know, that particular episode, I've just sort of moved on. I've realized I can't engage with these people. But what has stayed with me is my concern about the broader state of the church that so many people are undiscerning about this. They're not more concerned about this behavior. Mocking people and lying is sin.

That is not the way. And yet I think this is the fundamentalist tendency. We're so scared of liberalism that we feel like we can cut corners. And what I want to say to everybody is, yes, liberalism is that bad. Yes, 21st century secularism is a unique, it's a bear. It's worse than anything that I can imagine us facing in the 20th century. I mean, it really is, we are facing strange times. We do need to oppose that. Vigorously, I'd get my head chopped off in a minute happily to oppose that enemy. But it matters how we oppose that enemy. And the fundamentalist tendencies are, they're there. they're on the table. And the irony is people who are most succumbing to that are calling the rest of us to discernment, right? And yet they are so undiscerning about some of these tendencies. It feels like somebody's petting a hungry lion and then telling you to be careful. And you're like,

you know, it's this double standard. It's like, yeah, we need to be discerning about liberalism. We also need to be discerning about lying because that's wrong too. And so this is the larger issue of just the times that we have to conduct our disagreements with a sense of honor and with a sense of integrity, less theological atom bombs, less second-degree separationism, more discernment about opposite dangers in different ways. Fundamentalism is another danger that is real and it has real consequences. That's the other thing. You'll see people acting like, oh, as if that were a real problem. It's like, yeah, it is. Remember what Baxter said about a lack of charity in the way you attack people? All right, wrapping up. So we've said,

fundamentalism is good because it's willing to fight. Summarizing what we've said, we said, it's good because it's willing to fight, but it's bad because it often finds identity in fighting. Second, it often fights over the wrong issues. And third, it often fights in the wrong way. Without trying to draw arrows or boundaries or make judgments here, we're putting these categories onto the table and saying, let's think about this. What do we do? In the meantime, three final suggestions. One is wherever we can have good faith conversations, when there's so many bad faith conversations where we just don't get anywhere. It's a real skill. So when we're trying to cultivate this, because we've all got work to do, I know I do. I don't see everything. You know,

I've got blind spots. I get that. But as we're trying to grow, we want to talk with people who are of good faith, who have a different leaning than us with an open heart. And I think we can make progress. So if there's somebody who, let's say I'm a fundamentalist leaning person, and I've got another, but I'm an evangelical who recognizes I have some fundamentalist leanings. And there's another Christian that I know is a good person. They're my brother, but they're an evangelical with what I regard as liberal leanings, okay? But if I know they're a good faith person, can we talk together more and try to better understand each other? Because I will say for myself, the more I've had these conversations, the more I realize,

this is actually complicated, you know, I actually realize I've got some things to learn from my friends who have fundamentalist tendencies, self-avowed, they might say that, and in the other direction as well. And I can think of specific things. I see differently because I've had conversations with people like, oh, okay, I can kind of see more like what they're wrestling with and what they're. So anyway, point is good faith conversations can only help us. Second thing is I think we need to study church history more.

This is one of the hallmark weaknesses of fundamentalism, and where we see an uptick of fundamentalist tendencies, as I think we do, just as we also see the sliding liberalism. Again, the big thing happening now is the polarization. I think a lot of what causes this more parochial mindset and feeds into the fundamentalist tendencies is just a lack of historical context. And even though I often recommend the church fathers, medieval era, the Puritans, etc., let me just recommend three books from the modern period that I've already talked about. Number one, Carl Henry's Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.

That book is so relevant to the questions of today. Number two, Machen's Christianity and Liberalism. If you just read that book, you'll get a great model for how to do it, you know. And then number three, Herman Bobbick, I would recommend James Egglinton's biography, fantastic biography, but what I really got from it, I mean, it's a model biography, but what I really got from it is I walked away from it with this sense of, wow, Bavink really did balance this well. We have examples of people in the earlier modern era who found this balance really well. They opposed liberalism, but they also opposed some of the negatives of fundamentalist

tendencies. Bavink's a great example of that, and that book really does a fantastic job laying that out. The last thing is, I think we need to pray for a revival. That's what I want to give my whole life to. I basically feel like I'm here, try to walk with Jesus, take care of my family, try to be a catalyst for the third great awakening. That's it. All that's really simple as that. With all the chaos of our times, it's one positive thing is it's a time to pray for what only God can do. It's a time to say, basically, let's just be desperate. Let's cry out to the Lord. Say, God, we need you. We need you to do something, especially among our young people right now. You know, let's try to unite around the basics. Unite around the Apostles' Creed and pray for a fresh pouring out of the Holy Spirit. This video is not definitive and it is not closing loops. This video is putting some stuff out on the table. There is so much more we need to keep talking about. But I'm going to draw it there to an end there because that's the end of my script. That's what I plan to say. And I hope this is helpful as we have ongoing conversation about this. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Do we have some of these same concerns? What do you think? What do you think we do about it? I would genuinely love to have further conversation about this because, like I say, I want to give my life to trying to help serve renewal in the church today any way that I can. So let me know what you think. Thanks for watching, everybody. If you are willing to like the video, share it, that kind of stuff, that always helps me. And if you'd like to support Truth Unites, you can see links for how to do that in the video description. Thanks for watching, everybody. We will see you next time.