Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism

Lecture 31

What I want to do now is backtrack a little bit and trace developments

in English-speaking Protestantism up to the 20th century. This will be

probably more familiar to most of the audience, but it will also be more

treacherous because we’re going to have to use terms like “evangelical”

and “fundamentalist,” and those are terms that carry a great deal

of baggage.

E

vangelical is a term with a complex history and many meanings. It
comes from the word for “Gospel” in New Testament Greek. In most
of Europe, it is synonymous with Protestant. In England, it designates
various low-church conservative Protestant movements, both inside and
outside the Church of England. In America, it has been used to designate
the Revivalist tradition in the 19th century as well as the conservative
Protestants who broke off from Fundamentalism beginning in the 1950s to
re-enter American cultural and intellectual life. Because of this history, most
Fundamentalists don’t mind being called evangelicals, but many evangelicals
do not like being called “Fundamentalists.”

Fundamentalism ¿ rst became an identi¿ able movement in the course of the
Fundamentalist-modernist controversy in the United States. Fundamentalists
got their name from a series of books called The Fundamentals, published in
1910–1915. A variety of authors, including scholars and professors as well
as pastors and evangelists, contributed articles to the 12 volumes. The name
referred to fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith which evangelicals
thought Liberal theologians were abandoning. The authors represented a
variety of conservative Protestant views, including biological evolution.
The authors af¿ rmed scienti¿ c and historical methods of studying the Bible,
but rejected German “historical criticism” as unscienti¿ c because it was
prejudiced against miracles and the supernatural.

An identi¿ able Fundamentalist movement arose over the course of the
Fundamentalist-modernist controversies of the 1920s. In 1922, Liberal
Baptist Harry Emerson Fosdick set the initial terms of the debate with a