Lecture 31: Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism
sermon called “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” The key disagreement is
a disagreement about how serious the disagreement is—whether it really
is about something fundamental. Princeton seminary professor J. Gresham
Machen presented the Fundamentalist side of the debate in his book
Christianity and Liberalism (1923). Fundamentalism suffered a severe
reversal at the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925,
especially due to H. L. Mencken’s characterization of them. After this point,
Fundamentalism became increasingly a separatist movement, alienated from
the mainline Protestant denominations in which it originated.When Fundamentalists began deliberately re-entering the American
mainstream in the 1950s, they were labeled “neo-evangelicals” and
eventually just “evangelicals.” The core of what is now called “evangelical
Christianity” in the United States consists of spiritual descendents of these
returning Fundamentalists. The label “evangelical” came to be applied to
groups that were never Fundamentalists but who were also opposed to the
Liberal theology of the mainline.The disagreement between evangelical and mainline Protestants is still often
very similar to the disagreement between Fosdick and Machen. The virgin
birth was often used as a test issue for commitment to the supernatural, as
Fosdick noticed. Liberal theology still tends to shy away from miracles and
the supernatural, preferring to see God at work in the history and the life
of the church. Behind this issue was a concern for the deity of Christ, as
Machen insisted. Liberals since Schleiermacher have typically af¿ rm the
deity of Christ but reinterpreted it in ways that conform to modern language
and assumptions. Fundamentalists and evangelicals charge that Liberals are
deceptively using the same terms with different language.A characteristic though not universal element in Fundamentalist theology
is premillennial Dispensationalism. What all Fundamentalists had in
common was roots in 19th-century Revivalist evangelicalism. At the level
of personal piety, Holiness and Keswick themes play a prominent role in
Fundamentalist theology.At the level of society and culture, Dispensationalism is the most distinctively
Fundamentalist approach to reading the Bible. Dispensationalism begins