What is a 'Fundamentalist'?

The word 'fundamentalist' is tossed around these days with a lot less precision than it used to be. I'm tempted to say that in most people's vocabulary, 'fundamentalist' serves as a term of abuse for anyone who is more conservative than you are. And because some people who are described as fundamentalists are willing to kill for their beliefs, the implication is that all fundamentalists are potential murderers.

It was not always the case. The word 'fundamentalist' actually has a precise historical meaning. In the early part of the twentieth century a group of conservative evangelical Christians, mainly in North America, published a series of twelve books called 'The Fundamentals'. These Christians were concerned about what they saw as the 'modernist drift' in the mainline denominations of their day, and so they set out to restate what they saw as the classic Christian position (whether or not they were accurate in their restatement of it is another issue altogether). You can find the table of contents of these twelve books, along with a list of their authors, here.

There is no doubt that these authors held very conservative beliefs. The Wikipedia article lists the ideas they disagreed with as follows:

The volumes defended orthodox Protestant beliefs and attacked higher criticism, liberal theology, Catholicism (also called by them Romanism), socialism, modern philosophy, atheism, Christian Science, Mormonism, Millenial Dawn (an early term for a particular Christian Bible Student movement which mostly later became the 'Jehovah's Witnesses'), Spiritualism, and evolutionism (an article by geologist George Frederick Wright).

A rather exhaustive list! But what were these early fundamentalists for? Another Wikipedia article sums up their beliefs as follows:

• The inspiration of the Bible by the Holy Spirit and the inerrancy of Scripture as a result of this.
• The virgin birth of Christ.
• The belief that Christ's death was the atonement for sin.
• The bodily resurrection of Christ.
• The historical reality of Christ's miracles.

Now I must admit that I have not read much of 'The Fundamentals', but a number of things stand out for me as I read about these books.

First, apart from the first item on the list, this is not a particularly controversial set of beliefs. In fact, I'm tempted to ask 'Is the historic Anglican Book of Common Prayer therefore a fundamentalist document?' All five of these beliefs are demonstrably present in the Book of Common Prayer and the other Reformation Anglican formularies. It's true that the BCP never actually states a position on any theory of the inspiration of scripture, but I think most scholars would admit that what would today be called a fundamentalist position (i.e. that the Bible was inspired by the Holy Spirit and therefore thoroughly reliable) was assumed by all the main Christian groupings in the Reformation era, Catholic, Protestant, or Anabaptist.

Admittedly, when we look a little more closely at the table of contents we see that the authors applied these principles in ways that many of us today would hesitate to affirm. There is no doubt, for instance, that they were thoroughly skeptical about evolution (some of them were even involved in the famous 'Scopes monkey trial'); they had no use at all for the emerging discipline of biblical criticism, they thoroughly defended the literal historicity of the early chapters of Genesis, the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, the unity of the Book of Isaiah, an early date for Daniel and so on. But many of the titles seem thoroughly non-controversial to me: 'The Deity of Christ', 'Justification by Faith', 'Christianity no Fable', 'The Certainty and Importance of the Bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the Dead', 'Observations of the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul', 'Is There a God?', 'The Person and Work of Jesus Christ'. If this is fundamentalism, then the fundamentalist movement is bigger than anyone thought.

Second, I'm interested in the list of authors. Charles B. Williams produced an early modern translation of the New Testament. Arthur T. Pierson was an American Presbyterian, born in a strongly abolitionist family, who followed Charles Haddon Spurgeon as pastor of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London; we're told that 'at the age of forty, while serving as pastor of the largest church in Detroit, he attended a series of evangelistic messages and realized he was prideful and greedy, and had sought the approval of the rich. As a result, he led his wealthy congregation to reach out to the poor of Detroit. He then moved to banish the practice of pew rents and committed to accept his salary on a faith basis' (I note that one of his articles in 'The Fundamentals' is entitled 'Our Lord's Teachings About Money'). R.A. Torrey was a Yale graduate who studied at Leipzig and Erlangen; he became a powerful evangelist and wrote several devotional and instructional books that are still highly valued in evangelical circles today. Charles R. Erdman was professor of practical theology of Princeton Theological Seminary from 1905 to 1936, and served a term as Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the USA.

I note a number of Anglicans on the list. Handley Moule had been the first principal of Ridley Hall in Cambridge and Norrisian Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University, and went on to succeed B.F. Westcott as Bishop of Durham. W.H. Griffith Thomas taught Old Testament at Wycliffe College in Toronto and wrote an influential book on the Thirty-Nine Articles entitled 'Principles of Theology'. Dyson Hague was rector of St. Paul's, Halifax and also lectured at Wycliffe College. John Charles Ryle was the leading evangelical in the Church of England at the end of the nineteenth century and the first bishop of the Diocese of Liverpool; while he was bishop, he took the controversial step of raising clergy stipends instead of building a cathedral for his diocese!

Nowhere on this list do you find a person who would defend flying aircraft into tall buildings to murder innocent people. Nowhere do you find suicide bombers or terrorists of any kind. Yes, these men (this was the early twentieth century, and they were all men!) had strong opinions, but so did many other people of their day. Yes, they tried to persuade the Church as a whole that it should adopt their opinions, but they did this in response to what they saw as the liberalist-modernist movement, which had itself successfully persuaded huge sections of the Church to adopt its opinions! Yes, some of these men were thoroughly unattractive personalities - but they did not by any means have the corner on that market!

So I want to speak a word of caution about our use of the term 'fundamentalist'. Of course, I am well aware that the word has shifted its meaning (the term 'Islamic Fundamentalist' would have been a nonsense term when 'The Fundamentals' were first written!), and this is legitimate; all language changes, and we need to be aware of the changes. But when a word that has originally been used to describe people who would have abhorred terrorism then gets used to describe terrorists, it's all too easy for everyone described by the word to get tarred with the same brush. And this would be unjust. The early Fundamentalists were not terrorists. They were conservative Christians who wanted to argue their case before the Church as a whole. Some of us may disagree with some of their opinions, but I don't think we should insult their memory implying things about them that are manifestly untrue.