The Legacy Of Modern Christian Fundamentalism

The word fundamentalism conjures up all kinds of images in the 21st century mind. Many equate fundamentalism with religious extremists who use violence to suppress or eradicate dissenting views. There was a day, however, when fundamentalism, in the Christian sense, simply meant to believe in the basics of the faith.

In an effort to stem the growing liberal theological tolerance of some of its leaders, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in 1910 adopted a list of 5 core beliefs that were "necessary and essential" to the Christian faith:

The inerrancy of Scripture.
The virgin birth of Christ.
The belief that Christ's death was an atonement for sin.
The bodily resurrection of Christ.
The historical reality of Christ's miracles.

If the fundamentalist movement had remained bound to these ideals and had not gotten swept away by other issues, there is no doubt that most if not all orthodox Christians would proudly wear the label fundamentalist today. Fundamentalism, like any movement that loses its focus, eventually became a caricature of itself that drowned out the values on which it was founded. One of the greatest conservative intellectuals who lamented this "drowning out" of pure fundamentalism was Dr. Carl F. H. Henry (pictured top left).

Dr. Henry wrote a short treatise on the subject published in 1947 entitled,"The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism"In this seminal critique of a movement gone astray, Dr. Henry wrote,

What concerns me more is that we have needlessly invited criticism and even ridicule, by a tendency in some quarters to parade secondary and sometimes even obscure aspects of our position as necessary frontal phases of our view. To this extent we have failed to oppose the full genius of the Hebrew-Christian outlook to its modern competitors.

It is indeed unfortunate for us that some brothers in Christ continue to follow that sad legacy of being distracted by incidentals. Even today as the majority of students in our churches "graduate from God" there are those who are drowning out the call for student ministry reformation with cries for emancipation and eradication. It is the hope of this student ministry leader and blogger that when the dust settles from this current crisis, we would see families equipped instead of churches stripped.