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By: Brother David Cloud
[Distributed by Way of Life Literature's Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Copyright 1997. These articles cannot be stored on BBS or Internet sites without permission from the author. The articles cannot be sold or placed by themselves or with other material in any electronic format for sale, but may be distributed for free by e-mail or by print. They must be left intact and nothing removed or changed, including these informational headers. This is a listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. Our goal is not devotional. OUR PRIMARY PURPOSE IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR. If you desire to receive this type of material on a regular basis, e-mail us, tell us who you are and where you are located, and request to be placed on the list. Also include your postal address and the name of the church of which you are a member. Please note that we take up a quarterly offering to fund this ministry, and you will be expected to participate. Some of these articles are from the "Digging in the Walls" section of O Timothy magazine. David W. Cloud, Editor. O Timothy is a monthly magazine in its 15th year of publication. Subscription is $20/yr. Way of Life Literature, 1701 Harns Rd., Oak Harbor, WA 98277. The Way of Life web site is http://wayoflife.org/~dcloud. The End Times Apostasy Online Database is located at this web site. (360) 675-8311 (voice), 240-8347 (fax). dcloud@whidbey.net (e-mail)]
Updated May 30, 1998 (David W. Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, 1701 Harns Rd., Oak Harbor, WA 98277) - The following is part one of a three-part article entitled Fundamentalism, Modernism, and New-Evangelicalism by David W. Cloud, copyright 1995. It was first printed in O Timothy magazine, Volume 12, Issue 1, 1995--
"The New Evangelicalism is a theological and moral compromise of the deadliest sort. It is an insidious attack upon the Word of God." --Dr. Charles Woodridge
I am convinced that few errors are as destructive to Fundamental, Bible-believing churches as New Evangelicalism. When people leave our churches, where do they go? Do they join the Roman Catholic Church? Do they join a modernistic Protestant church, such as the United Methodist or the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. or the United Church of Canada? Do they join a cult? Very seldom. No, most people who leave Fundamental, Bible-believing churches join the positive-thinking, easy-going New Evangelical church down the street or across town.
Few false philosophies more directly pull at members of Fundamental Baptist churches than New Evangelicalism. Church members are confronted with it on every hand--through popular radio and television preachers, at the local ecumenical bookstore, through members of Evangelical churches, through evangelistic crusades, through political activity.
It is therefore crucial that we understand the nature of New Evangelicalism.
We are concerned that a great many of the members of good churches do not have a clear understanding of exactly what New Evangelicalism is, nor of the history of the doctrinal battles which have been fought to preserve the Truth in the past 100 years.
To be ignorant of the insidious nature of New Evangelicalism is to be unprepared to identify and resist it. In this first section of we define New Evangelicalism in the context of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversies of the first half of this century.
The term "Fundamentalism" has come to mean any number of things and is commonly used in a derogatory and slanderous way by those who do not believe the Scriptures. It is used to describe all sorts of extremism--terrorist Muslims, snake-handlers, the demonically-possessed Jim Jones who caused the mass suicide of his followers, the racist Ayrian Nations.
In a historical Christian context, Fundamentalism arose out of the doctrinal controversies which embroiled American churches at the turn of the century when modernism began to take root in seminaries and Bible colleges and in leadership positions in the denominations. According to historian D.O. Beale, "The editor of the Baptist periodical Watchman-Examiner coined the term Fundamentalist in 1920 to describe a
group of concerned Baptists who had just met at the Delaware Avenue Baptist Church in Buffalo, New York, to discuss the problem of Modernism in the Northern Baptist Convention" (Beale, S.B.C. House on the Sand?, p. 195).
Though Fundamentalism is a North American church phenomenon, it arose because of theological problems which originated in Europe.
Theological Modernism (or Liberalism) had its origin in Europe, particularly in Germany, in the 19th century and was merely the rationalistic thinking of that time applied to Christianity. It was the dawn of the "scientific era"; many men felt they were on the verge of discovering the secrets of the universe and solving the problems of mankind. Anti-Christian thinkers such as Darwin, Hegel, and Marx led the movement to dethrone God and place Man in His place. Unregenerate "Christian" professors in many European universities and seminaries had already rejected the Word of God, so they gladly accepted the humanistic thinking of the day and set out to apply evolutionary philosophies to the Bible and Christianity. The result was tragic: The Bible was considered simply another human book, inspired only in the sense that Shakespeare's writings were "inspired." Jesus Christ was considered a mere man--good and influential--but a mere man nonetheless.
Modernists taught that the Bible did not come to us by direct revelation from God through the Holy Spirit's ministry to holy men of old, but came, rather, as a purely human evolutionary process. Supposedly, as men's ideas about God became more sophisticated, the writers of the Bible drew an increasingly more sophisticated picture of God, until we come to the allegedly higher theological ideas of the New Testament. Modernists do not believe the Bible's historical accounts are accurate and do not believe the miracles actually happened. They do not believe there actually was an Adam and an Eve, a Garden of Eden, a worldwide Flood, nor do they believe the miracles recorded in Exodus and other parts of the O.T. happened as recorded, but believe these are religious myths much like the Hindu stories. According to Modernism, the first five books of the Bible were not written by the historical Moses as He received it as Revelation from the hand of God, but were not assembled together in their present state until the time of Israel's kings. Many Modernists do not believe in that Christ was virgin-born, nor that He is truly God, nor that He actually rose from the dead, etc. They do not believe that the Gospel accounts of His life are factual, and they assume that we do not have in the Bible an accurate idea of what Jesus Christ was truly like.
A key platform of Modernism is the historical-critical approach to Bible interpretation. According to this theory, the Pentateuch did not come from the hand of God through the prophet Moses, but evolved gradually over the centuries.
An example of Modernism is found in the writings of the men who translated the Revised Standard Version of 1951. This corrupt version was produced by apostates, men who rejected the faith once delivered to the saints. Consider a few excerpts from their books:
"Revelation has sometimes been understood to consist in a holy book. ... Even on Christian soil it has sometimes been held that the books of the Bible were practically dictated to the writers through the Holy Spirit. ... I DO NOT THINK THAT THIS IS THE DISTINCTIVELY CHRISTIAN POSITION. If God once wrote His revelation in an inerrant book, He certainly failed to provide any means by which this could be passed on without contamination through human fallibility. ... The true Christian position is the Bible CONTAINS the record of revelation" Clarence T. Craig, The Beginning of Christianity, New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1943, pp. 17,18 ).
"The mere fact that a tomb was found empty was CAPABLE OF MANY EXPLANATIONS. THE VERY LAST ONE THAT WOULD BE CREDIBLE TO A MODERN MAN WOULD BE THE XPLANATION OF A PHYSICAL RESURRECTION OF THE BODY" (Craig, Ibid., p. 135).
"The dates and figures found in the first five books of the Bible turn out to be altogether unreliable" (Julius Bewer, The Literature of the Old Testament, New York: Columbia University Press, 1940).
"The writers of the New Testament made mistakes in interpreting some of the Old Testament prophecies" (James Moffatt, The Approach to the New Testament).
"One cannot of course place John on the same level with the synoptic Gospels [Matthew, Mark, Luke] as A HISTORICAL SOURCE" (William Albright, >From the Stone Age to Christianity, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957).
"He [Jesus Christ] was given to overstatements, in his case, not a personal idiosyncrasy, but a characteristic of the oriental world" (Henry F. Cadbury, Jesus, What Manner of Man?).
"As to the miraculous, one can hardly doubt that time and tradition would heighten this element in the story of Jesus" (Cadbury, Ibid.).
"A psychology of God, IF that is what Jesus was, is not available" (Cadbury, Ibid.).
"According to the ENTHUSIASTIC TRADITIONS which had come down through the FOLKLORE of the people of Israel, Methuselah lived 969 years" (Walter Russell Bowie, Great Men of the Bible, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937, p. 1).
"The story of Abraham comes down from ancient times; and how much of it is fact and how much of it is LEGEND, no one can positively tell" (Bowie, Ibid., p. 13).
"WE DO NOT PRESS THAT GOSPEL [JOHN] FOR TOO GREAT VERBAL ACCURACY IN ITS RECORD OF THE SAYINGS OF JESUS" (Willard L. Sperry, Rebuilding Our World).
"This phrase [ бе Thus saith the Lord'] is an almost unfailing mark of SPURIOUSNESS" (William A. Irwin, The Problem of Ezekiel).
"Only bigotry could bring us to deny an EQUAL VALIDITY WITH THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL in the religious vision of men such as Zoraster or Ikhnaton or, on a lower level, the unnamed thinkers of ancient Babylonia" (Irwin, Ibid.).
"The narrative of calling down fire from heaven upon the soldiers sent to arrest him is PLAINLY LEGENDARY" (Fleming James, The Beginnings of Our Religion).
"What REALLY happened at the Red Sea WE CAN NO LONGER KNOW" (James, Ibid.).
"We cannot take the Bible as a whole and in every part as stating with divine authority what we must believe and do" (Millar Burrows, Outline of Biblical Theology).
A more recent illustration of Modernism comes from the pen of John Shelby Spong, a bishop in the Episcopal Church in America:
"Am I suggesting that these stories of the virgin birth are not literally true? The answer is a simple and direct бе Yes.' Of course these narrativesare not literally true. Stars do not wander, angels do not sing, virgins donot give birth, magi do not travel to a distant land to present gifts to a baby, and shepherds do not go in search of a newborn savior. ... To talk of a Father God who has a divine-human son by a virgin woman is a mythology that our generation would never have created, and obviously, could not use. To speak of a Father God so enraged by human evil that he requires propitiation for our sins that we cannot pay and thus demands the death of the divine-human son as a guilt offering is a ludicrous idea to our century. The sacrificial concept that focuses on the saving blood of Jesus that somehow washes me clean, so popular in Evangelical and Fundamentalist circles, is by and large repugnant to us today" (John Spong, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture, Harper, 1991, pp. 215,234).
It is shocking to see how these supposed Christian scholars deny the Holy Scriptures. Modernism flies under many flags, and not all Modernists are as bold and plain speaking as Bishop Spong, BUT ALL DENY THE PERFECT INSPIRATION OF HOLY SCRIPTURE and question the miraculous.
It is important to remember that all of this was prophesied by the Holy Spirit. The Lord's Apostles warned that many unregenerate false teachers would creep into the churches and would deceive many, and in fact, such false teachers were already active during the times of the Apostles. See Mat. 7:15-23; 24:5,24; Acts 20:28-30; Rom. 16:17-28; 2 Cor. 11:1-20; Gal. 2:4; Phil. 3:1,2; 3:18-19; Cor. 2:4-8; 1 Tim. 1:19-20; 4:1-3; 6:20-21; 2 Tim. 2:14- 21; 3:1-13; 4:1-4; Tit. 1:10-16; 3:9-11; 2 Pet. 2:1-22: 3:1- 18; 1 John 2:18- 19; 4:1-6; 2 Jo. 7-11; Jude. 3-19; Rev. 2:2,6, Rev. 2:14-15; Rev. 2:20-23; Rev. 3:15-17; Rev. 17.
Modernism quickly increased in popularity, especially from the middle to the end of the 19th century, and by the early 1900s, had became the predominant theology among Christian leaders in Germany and most other parts of Europe and had been introduced to American denominations through men who studied in prestigious (though apostate) European universities and through European professors who visited American schools and churches.
Though there were some who resisted Modernism in Europe, it more easily spread there than in America because Christianity in Europe was largely apostate when Modernism arose. Apart from Roman Catholicism, Protestant state churches were the predominant forms of Christianity in Europe, and since most of these groups taught infant baptism and were very ritualistic, they had become filled with unregenerate members and spiritual death long before the end of the 19th century. They had no power to resist Modernism, and the comparatively few independent churches in Europe were not influential enough to cause much of an uproar against the Modernistic teaching.
The situation was different in America. There were no state-controlled and affiliated denominations in the U.S., and America had been blessed with some powerful revival movements in the 1800s and the early 1900s.
Christianity in the U.S. was therefore much livelier than in Europe. As theological Modernism began gaining adherents in U.S. denominations, Christian leaders who were saved and who believed the Bible began to take a stand against it. The battle that followed was called The Fundamentalist/Modernist controversy.
The name "Fundamentalist" was popularized by a series of books which were written by Bible-believing men for the purpose of expounding the Fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith. Published over a five-year period from 1910-1915, the series, titled The Fundamentals, was composed of 90 articles written by 64 authors. With the financial backing of a wealthy Christian businessman, hundreds of thousands of copies of The Fundamentals were distributed to Christian workers in the United States and 21 foreign countries. The articles defended the infallible inspiration of the Bible, justification by faith, the new birth, the deity, virgin birth, miracles, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and other Bible truths. They addressed not only with the heresy of Modernism, but of Romanism, Socialism, and the Cults, as well.
Some have attempted define Fundamentalism as merely a concern for "the five fundamentals of the faith." G. Archer Weniger shows the falicy of this view: "The five fundamentals have only to do with the Presbyterian aspect of the struggle with modernism. ... The bulk of Fundamentalism, especially the Baptists of every stripe who composed the majority by far, never accepted the five fundamentals alone. The World's Christian Fundamentals Association, founded in 1919, had at least a dozen main doctrines highlighted. The same was true of the Fundamental Baptist Fellowship, which originated in 1920. A true Fundamentalist would under no circumstances restrict his doctrinal position to five fundamentals. Even Dr. Carl F.H. Henry, a New Evangelical theologian, listed at least several dozen doctrines essential to the Faith. The only advantage of reducing the Faith down to five is to make possible a wider inclusion of religionists, who might be way off in heresy on other specific doctrines. It is much easier to have large numbers of adherents with the lowest common denominator in doctrine" (G. Archer Weniger, quoted in Calvary Contender, Apr. 15, 1994).
An accurate definition of Fundamentalism was given by the World Congresses of Fundamentalists:
A Fundamentalist is a born-again believer in the Lord Jesus Christ who--
1. Maintains an immovable allegiance to the inerrant, infallible, and verbally inspired Bible.
2. Believes that whatever the Bible says is so.
3. Judges all things by the Bible and is judged only by the Bible.
4. Affirms the foundational truths of the historic Christian Faith: The doctrine of the Trinity; the incarnation, virgin birth, substitutionary atonement, bodily resurrection and glorious ascension, and Second Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ; the n ew birth through regeneration by the Holy Spirit; the resurrection of the saints to life eternal; the resurrection of the ungodly to final judgment and eternal death; the fellowship of the saints, who are the body of Christ.
5. Practices fidelity to that Faith and endeavors to preach it to every creature.
6. Exposes and separates from all ecclesiastical denial of that Faith, compromise with error, and apostasy from the Truth.
7. Earnestly contends for the Faith once delivered.
Many varying definitions of Fundamentalism have been given through the years, and the truth of the matter is that Fundamentalism has taken a great variety of forms. As a movement it has been largely interdenominational, yet many independent, separatist churches, such as independent Baptists and independent Bible churches, have accepted the label. Regardless of this variety, though, one of the chief hallmarks of Fundamentalism--its very essence, if you will--has always been a MILITANCY for the Faith of the Word of God. Anyone who is not truly militant in standing for the Truth has no title to biblical Fundamentalism.
The battle grew hotter as the years passed and as Modernistic thinking increased in popularity in American denominations, theological schools, and Christian organizations. Many Bible-believers, realizing that liberalism, having become rooted, could not be effectively resisted (1 Cor. 5:6; Gal. 5:9), separated themselves from those groups which were giving Modernism a home. They formed new churches, denominations, and organizations.
