Historic Fundamentalism

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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I'm going to be starting this evening and looking at fundamentalism in what seemed to me to be a fairly logical place, but it's not exactly a historical spot, and that is with the books that actually gave the name to the movement entitled

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The Fundamentals. Now, originally, The Fundamentals were not released in four volumes like I have it here.

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The Fundamentals were published between 1910 and 1915 in twelve separate paperback volumes.

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They were put into four volumes like this in 1917. They were sent free of charge to pastors, theologians, teachers, missionaries, theological students,

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Sunday School superintendents, YMCA, YWCA, all over the place. They were sent free of charge.

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Sixty -four different authors contributed to this series. There were a total of ninety separate articles that made up the series known as The Fundamentals.

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Now, some of those authors included some fairly famous men such as James Orr, George Frederick Wright, Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, better known as B .B.

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Warfield from Princeton, R .A. Torrey, C .I. Schofield, you may have heard the Schofield Reference Bible, H .G.

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Moule from Britain, G. Campbell Morgan, a very famous preacher, as well as it also included certain articles from men who were deceased such as Puritan Thomas Boston, and another article from Bishop Ryle that you may know of from his book

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Holiness. And so these were the authors whose works were included in this series.

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By the time the last of the twelve books was sent out, three million copies had been sent out free of charge.

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The whole project was financed by two men who were millionaires from oil money,

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Lyman and Milton Stewart of Los Angeles. The Stewart's were also the ones who founded the

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Bible Institute of Los Angeles, which you may better know as Biola.

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So they sent these fundamentals out free of charge to a large number of people.

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Now what topics were covered in the fundamentals? Well the primary topic that was covered was the

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Bible. A full one -third of the articles dealt with such topics as higher criticism, inspiration, inerrancy, and how archaeology substantiated the teachings of scripture.

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Articles on the unity of the authorship of Genesis and Isaiah, how only one author wrote these books.

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A defense of the Gospel of John being written by John himself. All of these contained attacks upon the modern higher critical theories that were at this time becoming in vogue that we'll talk about more in depth at a later point.

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Other articles dealt with supernaturalism. Many of them contained defenses of the miraculous, including the existence of miracles, the virgin birth, the resurrection of Christ, Paul's encounter with the risen

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Christ on the road to Damascus, and such doctrinal subjects as the deity of Christ, all of which at this time were under attack from the liberal perspective.

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They contained articles on the subject of theology, the atonement of Christ, justification by grace through faith, and the supernatural inspiration of the

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Bible were all addressed in the fundamentals. The second coming of Christ was also a prominent theme as well.

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And finally it contained articles on apologetics. Articles that were included that dealt with the apostasy of the

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Roman Catholic Church, as well as the errors of such groups as Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, which at this time were known as Russellites, Christian science as well as agnosticism.

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So these apologetic articles were sent out to all these people, and obviously someone felt very strongly that there is an important need for these beliefs to be defended.

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Well, what exactly were the fundamentals of the faith according to the series of books that we just described?

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Well, I've come up with about ten fundamentals of the faith on the basis of the series of books by that name called

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The Fundamentals. The key issue, the first and foremost issue in all of the fundamentals was the divine inspiration and authority of the

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Bible. This was what people, the fundamentalists themselves, the authors of these articles, felt was in fact in the greatest danger at this time.

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People were attacking the divine inspiration and authority of the Bible. We're going to take the time to go into the history and discuss where all this came from.

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That's the first fundamental of the faith. If one is going to be called a fundamentalist in the historical sense, then one would need to believe in the divine inspiration and authority of the

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Bible, not just simply in the sense of the Bible being a good book or maybe a book that God was involved with.

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We're talking here about the full -blown doctrine of inerrancy, just as, for example, it would be propounded by B .B.

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Warfield of Princeton, the inerrancy of Scripture. Secondly, the existence of the supernatural, including the miraculous.

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As you will see later, the fundamentalist movement was reacting against the influx of naturalism, the denial that the supernatural exists, the idea was that anything that takes place can be explained on the basis of natural law.

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For example, you've heard, I'm sure, of the explanations that are provided for, for example, the

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Lord Jesus walking upon the water. The liberal scholars and those affected by naturalism would attempt to come up with natural explanations for this.

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So in reality, the boat was close to the shore, and Jesus was actually walking on rocks that were just below the surface of the water, so the disciples were just a little bit confused by this, and it looked like that he was walking on the water or something along these lines.

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He was actually walking on the shore, on rocks, or something like that. Well, the fundamentalists said, no, the supernatural exists, the miraculous exists.

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The Bible, of course, is accurate in its portrayal of miracles. You can see how the first two go together.

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And we are not naturalists in our philosophy. Third, the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and the person of the

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Holy Spirit was one of the fundamental beliefs. The fact that the Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, are attacked by at least one article in the

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Fundamentals demonstrates that their concepts were considered to be heretical.

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The doctrine of the Trinity itself is not a major, major theme, but the deity of Christ and the person of the

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Holy Spirit are there, so obviously that whole concept is included in what is a fundamental of the faith.

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Fourth, the virgin birth of Christ. This would be one of the miraculous events that is considered to be absolutely vital.

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At this time, again, liberalism was coming into many of the denominations, and people were beginning to say, well, you know, it really doesn't matter whether we believe that Jesus was really literally born of a virgin.

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That's not really the important thing. The important thing is to learn some sort of lesson from this myth that we have in Scripture.

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And so the virgin birth of Christ, the literal biblical teaching of the virgin birth of Christ was considered one of the fundamentals of the faith.

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The substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ. Christ's historical death upon the cross as the propitiation for sin was considered to be one of the fundamentals of the faith.

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The atonement of Christ was not simply an example that was given to us.

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Many liberal theologians like to view the atonement as being a great example of how we show our love for God, and it lifts us up by giving us this moral example, etc.,

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etc., etc. The fundamentalists said, no, that's not what the Scripture teaches, that the death of Christ was specifically relevant to sin.

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He bore our sins and his body upon the tree. His was a substitutionary death in our place.

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The wrath of God came upon him in our place. Sixth, the physical or bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.

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Obviously, you can see how most of these things are relevant to point number two and point number one.

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They are taught in point number one and are supernatural events, as we see in point number two.

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And so the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, he did not just simply raise up in the consciousness of the church, as German liberals were at the time teaching, but that there was a true physical resurrection of Jesus Christ.

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Seventh, the literal, physical second coming of Christ to earth. Many of the fundamentalists, especially after the publication of the fundamentals going into the 1920s, were very strongly dispensational, very strongly premillennial in their eschatology, and therefore there was a strong emphasis connected with fundamentalism in regards to premillennialism, a pre -tribulation rapture, premillennial reign, the whole eschatological concept connected with premillennialism.

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Justification by faith in Jesus Christ, or personal conversion. There is an article,

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I think it is the one by Thomas Boston, on this particular subject. The fundamentals themselves are primarily

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Calvinistic in their theology, not thoroughly so, but most of the theology of fundamentalism, as we'll discover later, came from the old

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Princeton school, from people like Charles Hodge, A. A. Hodge, B. B. Warfield, Robert Dick Wilson, J.

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Gresham Machen and others who taught at Princeton in the early years up until 1929.

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A lot of the systematic theology came out of the old school Calvinism, as we'll see in a few moments.

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Number nine, the future punishment of the wicked, eternal damnation, the existence of hell, the fact that God is a wrathful

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God, and that God will punish sin if that sin has not been propitiated in the person of Jesus Christ.

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And number ten, the importance of evangelism and missions work. The fundamentals have a very strong emphasis upon proclaiming the gospel and doing missions work around the world.

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As I read the fundamentals and I look at them, these would be the ten fundamentals of the faith, as they were described by the writers of these articles.

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But, obviously, especially in those days, it must have been something very important that caused the

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Stewart brothers to set aside a quarter of a million dollars simply to print books and send them out to people all across the world.

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What brought this situation about that these beliefs, the vast majority of which, all of you that I know, would subscribe to, why was it felt at this point in history that these beliefs were under so much attack, in so much danger of being denied, that the people felt that they should send these books out and make a stand and really, in a militant fashion, come after those that were denying these tenets of the faith?

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Well, that brings us to the question of what brought all of this about. I believe there are four primary factors that we need to understand that brought about the fundamentalist controversy and the writing of the fundamentals.

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I can never get the thing to focus anywhere other than the middle, so I hope that's close enough for you all to see.

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Four primary factors, four primary philosophies, four primary developments in scientific thought, in psychological thought, however we want to categorize them, these four things are the primary factors that led to the fundamentalist -liberal split within the church.

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This is not to say that there had not always been conservatives and liberals in the church. But in America, the vast majority of those who called themselves

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Christians were predominantly conservative in their theology. If you looked at most churches in 1850 in the

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United States of America, they would have been, by and large, conservative, would not have questioned the absolute authority and inspiration of scripture.

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The Presbyterians, the Congregationalists, the Methodists, the Baptists, all obviously had their theological differences, but by and large were very conservative in their theology.

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Now, a hundred years earlier in this, in the 1700s, liberalism, full -blown liberalism, was developing in Europe, especially in Germany.

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And even by 1850, there are a large number of full -blown liberals in Germany.

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Germany itself is predominantly liberal in its theology. But we were a little slow to get caught up with Europe, you might say, which at this point was a blessing.

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And so we were predominantly conservative. There were liberal churches, especially, sorry to say, around Boston, where you had a lot of universalists.

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Even back in the days of Jonathan Edwards, he fought against Chauncey and the liberals in Boston and things like that.

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So yes, there always had been liberals. But by and large, in the major denominations, Presbyterian church,

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Congregationalist church, things were very conservative. The Bible was not being attacked or questioned. But these four things together, as they developed in the 1850s, 60s, and 70s, came together to present probably the greatest challenge to the

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Christian faith that had been launched during the last two millennia, within the cultures in which

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Christianity was a generally accepted thing. Now the first, obviously, was

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Darwinian evolutionary theory. Darwinian evolutionary theory. Now, in 1859,

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Darwin published The Origin of the Species. Most of us know the historical background of this.

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Darwin actually having once been a theological student, he was bored stiff by it, and then was supposed to become a medical doctor, but didn't think that was all that much fun either, and so he ended up taking the voyage on the

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Beagle. I think it's somewhat poetic justice that he was seasick the entire time that they were at sea, so would frequently get off the ship and try to walk to the next port of call so he didn't have to stay on that rocking boat.

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But as you know, in his observations, his botanical observations and observations of wildlife in the

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Galapagos Islands during the voyage of the Beagle, he developed his theory of natural selection and the evolutionary theory.

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So in 1859, Origin of the Species is published.

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And it is difficult for us today to even begin to understand the immense impact that the evolutionary theory had on Western thinking because we live past it.

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We live in a society that has already experienced this deep impact. And none of us know what it was like beforehand.

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So it's hard for us to see just how incredibly major... I mean, you would call this a paradigm shift.

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The way that people thought was changed by the introduction of this theory.

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Obviously, it caught on very quickly. In fact, even in America, it caught on very quickly.

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Within one decade, there was only one leading scientist left in America who questioned

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Darwinian theory. Within ten years, it's an incredibly fast transition of thinking.

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And the Darwinian theory, the concept of development from simple to complex by natural laws, was very quickly applied in many other areas.

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In fact, in all three other areas that we will look at, Darwinian evolutionary theory is very important.

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But the idea that things could change and change without purpose, that all of history was not guided by God's omnipotent hand, the idea that man himself was not distinct from or special, was not distinct from the created order as being created in the image of God, was not special, but was in fact an animal, had a revolutionary impact upon culture, thinking, education, science, everything.

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And the church as well had to deal with this issue. Now I think most of us would be surprised by the fact that almost from the very beginning, there were large numbers of fairly conservative ministers and theologians who had no problem with the

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Darwinian theory and very quickly embraced it. But I'm sure you can imagine within most denominations, if anyone took that position, there was very quickly those on the other side who took the other position and many of the churches were greatly strained and stressed by the introduction of Darwinian evolutionary theory.

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Well, you can see what kind of impact this would have upon those who held to what would eventually be called the fundamentals of the faith.

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Obviously, people could take the Darwinian theory just as they continue to do today and say this is clear and unarguable evidence that the

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Bible is nothing more than an ancient collection of documents in which ancient men who did not have scientific knowledge attempted as best they could to explain life as they saw it.

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And they did the best they could, but they didn't do a whole lot much better than the Babylonians, the Egyptians, or anybody else who had their various myths and legends about creation.

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And of course, it could also be then said, the Bible clearly presents seven days of creation, but if the earth is actually billions, well, back then millions and millions of years old, then this biblical teaching is clearly shown to be wrong, therefore the

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Bible is not inerrant, it is not inspired, etc., etc., etc. So there was this attack upon the faith in the form of Darwinian evolutionary theory that the church had to deal with.

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And we will see how this comes out more in a few moments. Second, Freudian psychology.

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Sigmund Freud lived from 1856 to 1939. In the late 1800s, his psychological theories began to catch on again, interestingly enough, most swiftly in the

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United States. And Freud viewed mental activity, viewed the way that men think, the way that we act, as primarily driven by our sexual desires.

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And he, of course, tied in the relationships that we have with our mother and our father and all the rest of these things.

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But in reference to our perspective, our subject this evening, and that is fundamentalism,

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Freud obviously viewed religion as primarily an example of neurosis.

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Religion, he wrote in his book, the future of an illusion.

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The future of an illusion, which is how he described religion. The Christian faith is an illusion that eventually will be done away with.

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Why? Because for Freud, religious beliefs, for example, our desire to have the right relationship with God, was nothing more than a neurosis that arose out of problem relationships with our parents.

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Our desire to have the right relationship with God was really a desire to have the right relationship with our parents, but since we didn't have that, then we projected this onto a

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God figure. And our fear of the wrath of God was our fear of being punished.

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And all of these things were in reality just neurotic problems on the part of mankind that were common to many of us, which is what explained the commonality of religion amongst most societies.

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And so obviously, the more and more we studied ourselves, the more and more we got to learn of ourselves and know of ourselves, then the less need we would have of religion.

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And eventually, as mankind's knowledge continued to increase, that eventually, this illusion of the need for religion would be done away with, and we would live in a religionless society.

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And of course, all of this concept masqueraded and frequently continues to masquerade under the banner of being scientific and scholarly and studied and so on and so forth.

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And since this theory took on so many believers so quickly in the

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United States, then it was quite easy for people to say, well look, all the psychologists believe this, or all the educated people have seen that this is true and that we've made this great breakthrough here.

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And this of course shows us that you're going out and telling people they need Jesus is in reality just you're attempting to offer a little balm or salve that covers up what is actually a deeper psychological need.

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And really, the saviors of the world do not come from Palestine, but they wear the spectacles and they have psychologists on their door and all you really need to do is go get psychotherapy and so on and so forth and get rid of your neuroses.

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You won't have any more need for anyone like the Lord Jesus. So this is the second attack.

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The third attack came under the form of comparative religion studies. There were a number of books that were published around this time.

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For example, The Ten Great Religions by J .F. Clarke, where individuals basically operating on the basis of the concepts that you find in Darwinian evolutionary theory, that is that everything develops along natural lines by natural law.

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Books started coming out that started comparing the major religions of man and emphasizing the similarities that exist between the major religions.

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The concept being that what you have here is in an evolutionary system of thought.

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Let's say you have man and you have chimpanzee. Physically, there are characteristics that are very similar.

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You have hands that look similar. The chimpanzee can walk upright, can learn certain words and things like that, can do things similar to a man.

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Of all of the animals in the animal kingdom, the chimpanzee, the monkey families, the apes and things like that, are closest to us and so the assumption is they are the closest to us in the sense of development.

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If you've got a man here, you've got man, and then over here you've got something like a monkey, then the idea is as they develop, some place back here is a common origin.

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When this is applied to religious studies, if you have similarities between two religions, then the assumption was made that there must be a common origin for these two religions.

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They must have either developed off of one another or were borrowing one from another, and so frequently it was asserted, hey,

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Christianity is nothing new and you continue to hear this today. You continue to hear people say, well hey, there were a lot of religions that had a dying god who comes back to life again.

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In the pagan religions of Palestine and of Mesopotamia, you had a god who would die in the fall and would come back to life again in the spring.

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It was connected clearly with the growth cycle and agriculture. Or you had other gods who, for example, would die when the sun started going down earlier and earlier and then at the solstice and all these pagan festivals that were connected with natural phenomena.

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And what you have in Christianity is just a refined edition of this. A refined version.

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And so the claim was basically being made that supernaturalism obviously doesn't exist because we now realize that anything can be explained by natural law.

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And then when we compare various religious beliefs from around the world, we recognize that they are very closely connected with one another, they have many similarities, and demonstrate simply that they are the creation of man attempting to deal with the same types of fears, living in a similar world, dealing with agriculture and the seasons and things like that.

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Finally, the fourth primary factor in the formation of the fundamentalist movement was, quote, higher biblical criticism, unquote.

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What does that mean? Well, normally when you hear the term biblical criticism, if you automatically have a negative feeling, you're probably a fundamentalist.

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It seems natural because most of us have been raised, and I was raised in a very fundamentalist background and perspective, that any type of biblical criticism automatically is evil.

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It smacks of disrespect for the word of God. But there are two kinds of biblical criticism.

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Lower biblical criticism is the same as, for example, textual criticism. And that is, it is simply an examination of the manuscripts of the

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Bible in attempt to determine the original text. It does not make any assumptions beyond that, it simply deals with the manuscripts of the

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Bible. And obviously many of you know that I very much enjoy studying textual criticism and engaging in textual criticism, working with the manuscripts.

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There's nothing wrong with that. That's not what the fundamentalists are responding to. Higher biblical criticism is a very different animal.

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And it's very difficult for me to even attempt to explain to you what higher biblical criticism is all about.

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And it's impossible for me to explain it to you without allowing some of my sarcasm to show through. I am a graduate of Fuller Seminary, and Fuller Seminary is a very interesting seminary in that you have a number of good conservative teachers there, but you've also got some other folks that aren't quite conservative.

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And so I know a lot about higher biblical criticism because I have been exposed to a great deal of it. What is higher biblical criticism?

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Well, there are different kinds. You hear such things as source criticism or redaction criticism.

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What are these? Well, source criticism is an attempt on the part of scholars to identify the different sources that came together to form the

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Bible. Different sources. For example, many of you might be familiar with the fact that many scholars today believe that the

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Old Testament, primarily the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, came from a number of different sources.

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This is called the Wellhausen Theory. And for example, you have the

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J, E, D, and P sources. J is the

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Yahweh source, the E is the Eloist source, the D is the Deuteronomist source, and the

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P is the priestly source. And supposedly what you've got is you've got these four different sources, four different documents, that are then put together by an editor, known as a redactor, who attempts to meld them together and form one document out of them.

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So redaction criticism, for example, is an attempt to study the different stages of editing that the document supposedly went through.

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Well, you can see immediately, if you're thinking with me, that the underlying presupposition of all higher biblical criticism is

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A, the text was not written by who it's claimed to be written by,

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B, the text was not written at the time it was said to be written, C, it was not written by one author,

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D, it probably isn't inspired or supernatural in the way it came about. Instead, what do we have?

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The Darwinian theory is applied to the Bible, and the final form of the

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Bible is looked at and said, well, it must have gone through some process to get to this point, and therefore it was once in a simpler form in different documents, and has been edited and changed over time until it finally reached the form that we have today.

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Now, you may not really be familiar with higher biblical criticism, but if you walked into, and I am not exaggerating, 95 % of the

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Protestant seminaries in our land today, and took a class in Old Testament, the textbooks that you would use, and the teacher you would study under, would present source and redaction criticism as the standard means of studying the

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Old Testament. And I am not exaggerating to say 95 % of the seminaries do that.

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Now, when I say that, that does not mean that every single one of those seminaries accepts that as being the final word.

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There's almost a strange thing in America. In your more conservative seminaries, they will present these theories so that you know what they are.

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In the liberal seminaries, they'll never present the other perspective. They'll never present the idea of a unitary authorship or an inspired text.

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They'd never touch that with a 10 foot pole. That's old, that's backwards, we don't believe in things like that. But in the conservative seminaries, they will present it so that you know what people are saying, so that you know what's being presented.

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But still, the vast majority of, for example, Old Testament scholars in the

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United States today would accept the concept that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses and is the result of a process of redaction and editing of different sources to put them into one form.

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And that probably the Pentateuch was put into its final form sometime around the time of Josiah, about 600 years before Christ.

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Now, even at a seminary that is considered as conservative from the world's perspective as Fuller, the commentary that I had to read in the book of Deuteronomy was by a man by the name of Dr.

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Gerhard von Rath. And von Rath's commentary on Deuteronomy called

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Mosaic authorship a pious fraud. And at many points in Deuteronomy would say that whatever redactor, whatever editor had worked on this particular point obviously was not very good at what he did.

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So this kind of thing is not in any way unusual. And in fact, for the majority of people going to church in America, we are the ones who are way out in left field who have not yet become enlightened enough to recognize the truth of higher biblical criticism.

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So these are the four primary factors that I would identify as coming together to bring about the fundamentalist controversy, the fundamentalist situation.

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I'm going to take a break in about ten minutes and let you all get a drink or something like that. But let's look at the response to the attack of naturalism.

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Because in reality, all those four primary factors share one thing in common.

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And that is a commitment to philosophical naturalism. And it bears repeating what that means.

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Philosophical naturalism rejects the existence of the supernatural. Rejects the idea that God is actively involved in his creation.

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So therefore, the miraculous would be rejected. Inspiration, which involves

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God's actively revealing himself in his word, would be rejected.

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And today, I would say that if someone were to walk up to me and say, what is the predominant worldview, the predominant philosophy, the predominant belief in America?

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It is naturalism. It is naturalism, especially in the institutions of higher learning.

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Most of the philosophies today, outside of the fringe elements like the New Age Movement, are highly naturalistic.

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In fact, the New Age Movement is, in my opinion primarily, a reaction against the long tyranny of naturalism in the educational institutions of this nation.

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People just can't live consistently within naturalism. But that certainly is what was coming out of the

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Enlightenment in Europe and then came over to America. Now there were three basic responses within Protestantism to these developments.

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Darwinian evolutionary theory, Freudian psychology, comparative religion. Three basic responses.

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Now Roman Catholicism handled it like this. We have the authority, we have the apostolic succession, they're all wrong, we anathematize them all, we go on from there.

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Roman Catholicism primarily responded in an authoritarian manner and said, they're all washed up, they're all wrong, and that's pretty much it.

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But Protestants don't have a pope to say, well I'm the final authority, you listen to me.

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The final authority for Protestants was what was under attack, and that was the scriptures themselves.

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So the Protestant churches responded in three ways. First, what we might call defensive accommodation.

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Defensive accommodation. What does that result in? Something known as Christocentric liberalism.

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And don't worry, we're going to define all these terms for you. Christocentric liberalism. That was one of the responses.

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The second response would be radical reevaluation, or what has become known today as humanism.

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And thirdly, militant opposition. That was fundamentalism. The Christocentric liberals are not militant, they're not attacking these concepts, they're not attacking evolution, they're not attacking

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Freudian psychology, they're not attacking comparative religious studies, they're not attacking higher biblical criticism.

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They accept all those things. So they accommodate their beliefs in a defensive manner, putting up a defensive shield, so that those things are no longer a threat to them.

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Others realize that that is just simply begging the question. And there was simply a wholesale abandonment of any religious pretense, and a shifting of religious emphasis from a quote -unquote

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Christian perspective, simply into that which resulted in humanism. And the concepts that, well, we want to keep the idea of doing good to your neighbor, we want to keep some of the philanthropic concepts that came from our

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Christian beliefs, but we don't really see much sense in keeping them within religious context.

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So let's get rid of the concept of a deity totally, and you have the beginnings of humanism.

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For example, in 1933, you have the first humanist manifesto provided that even uses the term of religion in reference to their perspective and their beliefs.

39:41

And so you have certain people leaving the Protestant denominations, leaving behind, looking at these things, going, well, if evolution is correct, and if this is correct, and this is correct, well, there's really not much sense in even holding on to any type of belief in Jesus Christ as a supernatural person, or even as a great moral leader.

40:01

Let's focus in on the development of the human race. And of course, Darwinism, evolutionary theory, is very, very closely connected with this.

40:10

And the idea of progression, and so on and so forth. And of course, then the third aspect, militant opposition.

40:16

The fundamentalists, up until about 1925, were militantly on the offensive, attacking the evolutionary theory, attacking

40:28

Freudian psychology. They were positively moving forward and attempting to gain control, for example, of denominational structures, attempting to hold on to professorships and seminaries, and putting forward a positive defense that contained within it a barb of attack in the fundamentals.

40:53

This is all through it. Defending, for example, the unitary authorship of Isaiah, and in the defense, also providing a counterpunch in attacking the various higher biblical theories that were being propounded at the time.

41:09

The liberals weren't doing that. There was no counterpunching. The liberals were backing off of any type of affirmation that could result in examination and attack by science or historical examination or anything along those lines.

41:29

I think what best to do for right now is I want to spend a fair amount of time on the subject of Christocentric liberalism because I think it helps us to define fundamentalism as it developed in a much more clear way.

41:48

Now, since the Septuagint became the

41:54

Bible of the Christians in North Africa, the

42:00

Old Testament, but it was in Greek, since that became their Bible, the one they were most used to, and it had the

42:06

Apocrypha in it, that is why there were early Christians who accepted the Apocryphal books as being canonical.

42:15

Okay? Now, you will notice, for example, that Augustine of Hippo, which is down here in North Africa, accepted the

42:32

Apocryphal books as being Scripture. But Jerome, who is the author -translator of the

42:43

Latin Vulgate translation, didn't. Why?

42:48

Because he traveled, actually, to Bethlehem, to Palestine, and learned

42:56

Hebrew from the Jews, and in so doing, discovered that the Jews had never accepted these books as being

43:02

Scripture. And when he looked into the historical aspects, he said, we shouldn't have either, and did not accept them, and did not want to translate them and put them in the

43:14

Vulgate, but was overruled, and was told to put them in the

43:20

Vulgate, and did. They were the last things he translated, put them in right at the end. And so, they went into the

43:27

Latin Vulgate, and sort of into a canonical limbo, you might say.

43:34

There wasn't a real firm decree that said these were

43:39

Scriptural books, until many, many years later, when something called the

43:49

Protestant Reformation takes place. And the Lutherans and the

43:56

Reformed are running around, and they utterly reject the apocryphal books.

44:01

They go, hey, the apostles didn't think they were Scripture, Jesus didn't think they were

44:06

Scripture, the Jews didn't think they were Scripture, so we don't think they're Scripture either. And in response to the

44:15

Protestant Reformation and the Protestant canon of Scripture, which was the same canon that we found in Palestine, the

44:24

Roman Catholic Council of Trent makes a direct decree in regards to the canonicity of the apocryphal books, and makes sure that all the good -faith

44:38

Roman Catholics know they're Scripture. Those Protestants don't know what they're talking about.

44:48

Now, what about the fact that the Bible mentions other books that are not a part of the canon?

44:57

Did you know that? The Bible mentions other books. For example, the book of Jasher is mentioned in Numbers 21 .14,

45:09

Joshua 10 .13, and 2 Samuel 1 .18. Now before we took our break, we were looking at the response to the attack of naturalism and we looked at three different ways in which people within Protestantism responded.

45:27

I want to look for a little while at the subject of Christocentric liberalism so that you can understand how this differed from fundamentalism.

45:39

I'm not going to spend much time on humanism. In fact, I'm probably not going to spend any more time on it at all. But how do we understand liberalism and what it presents?

45:48

Basically, what Christocentric liberalism means is that these folks did and continue today to speak much about Christ.

45:58

They speak much of dying with Christ, of living for Christ, of communing with Christ.

46:06

But when you start to ask real questions about what they mean by that, you don't find a whole lot of answers.

46:14

And why is that? Because what Christocentric liberalism really is is a withdrawal from making any positive statements about any of the

46:27

Christian faith. What liberalism did is it backed away from any statement or any belief that could be attacked from without.

46:40

So, liberalism doesn't proclaim that the Bible is inspired or that it's inerrant or that the

46:48

Bible is of supernatural origin. Therefore, all the higher biblical criticism, all the historical studies cannot attack the

47:02

Christocentric liberal because that's irrelevant to him. Oh, lots of different sources came into Genesis?

47:08

Well, that's fine. Doesn't bother me. I don't make any claims that Genesis is inspired revelation of God.

47:14

Well, what about the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the grave?

47:19

Here is something that Christians down through the ages have pointed to as an action in history that actually took place and it has good historical credentials behind it.

47:30

Jesus Christ of Nazareth, you can search in vain for his tomb. You can find his tomb, but you can't find his body.

47:38

He rose from the dead. There are 500 witnesses. And you can examine the issue and see how it stands up to historical scrutiny, but since it was historical in nature and since something might happen, the

47:52

Christocentric liberal doesn't emphasize or even really believe that Jesus rose physically from the grave.

47:58

That's not the important thing. Jesus rose in our hearts and he rose in the disciples' hearts and that's the real message of the

48:07

Bible is that Jesus rises in our hearts and inspires us to live a good life.

48:16

So, in point of fact, and I know of at least one of you who is well aware of this,

48:22

I have had numerous conversations with liberals, one of whom

48:27

I tried over and over and over again to answer questions about who

48:36

Jesus Christ was and who Jesus Christ is. But you might as well walk up to a brick wall and just start hammering your head against the wall as to hope to get an answer out of a

48:47

Christocentric liberal as to who Jesus Christ is because they can't tell you who Jesus Christ is.

48:53

They don't have the scriptures to go to because they don't believe, for example, that the words that we have in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John are

48:59

Jesus' words. In fact, they don't believe they're Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John's. In fact, in the 1850s, 60s, and 70s, it was very common for German liberal critics and theologians to believe that the

49:14

Gospel of John was written as late as the 3rd century, 250 years after Christ.

49:21

Very common. It was considered the scholarly, scientific thing to believe. Why? Because it contained such a high doctrine of Christ.

49:29

And obviously, since we all know that you develop from simple to complex, Darwin again, then that high level of teaching about Jesus must have developed over time.

49:41

It couldn't have been the primitive belief. Early Christians couldn't have believed that Jesus Christ was the pre -incarnate word and that he was

49:47

God and things like that. That must have developed over time. Of course, discovering scraps of John, like Manuscript P52, the date from 125

49:56

AD, sort of shot that theory down that the book was written in 250. When you find actual physical evidence of the book that dates to 125 years earlier, it sort of hurts your theory, but that's what they were saying originally anyway.

50:11

And so what the Christocentric liberal did is he supposedly focused on Christ and my relationship with Christ, a subjective feeling inside me.

50:23

Now I can't tell you who Jesus is. I can't tell you that this is right for you.

50:30

But it's my truth. And what they did is they withdrew within themselves, stopped saying that there is a truth that is relevant to everyone.

50:40

It's my truth. It's what's best for me. I can't tell you it's best for you. I can't tell you

50:45

Jesus is Lord for you, but he's Lord for me. I can't tell you who Jesus was or is, but I've got this real nice relationship with him.

50:53

I can't tell you he ever existed. And you see, there's no way to attack that. It's defensive.

51:00

There's no way to attack it. You can study all the history you want, rip the Bible to shreds all you want.

51:05

It doesn't affect the Christocentric liberal because he doesn't actually believe anything that you can attack, that you can examine.

51:11

It's a subjective feeling inside. That's all it is. Nothing more. Nothing more. Now liberalism is still around today.

51:22

It hasn't gone anywhere. It hasn't gone anywhere. It is still one of the major religious beliefs that the church has to deal with, but the church, by and large, is not dealing with it.

51:35

Is not dealing with it. Most Christians don't know anything about liberalism. And they don't realize that when they talk to a member of, say, the

51:44

United Methodist Church, that many, many of those people are in reality

51:49

Christocentric liberals, but they speak the same language. They say the same words. But they have very different meanings to them.

51:58

And so liberalism just backed off. And there's a joke that's very common, and it's not much of a joke. And I don't say it to be irreverent.

52:06

But it's a common joke, and it says a lot. The joke is told that one morning the cardinals come running into the

52:14

Pope. And they say, Your Holiness, something terrible has happened.

52:20

And he's sort of waking up. What is it? Well, they've been digging in Palestine, and they found the bones of Jesus.

52:28

And they can prove it was him. Oh, what should we do? So one of the cardinals goes,

52:34

Well, why don't we call that American theologian Paul Tillich? If you know who Paul Tillich is, you know that he is a liberal of liberals.

52:42

Was a liberal of liberals. Oh, that sounds like a good idea, supposedly, the Pope says. Ha, ha, ha.

52:48

And so they call Paul Tillich, and the Pope gets on the phone and says, We have a terrible problem. They have found the bones of Jesus in Palestine.

52:55

What should we do? And there is a silence. And Tillich's voice comes over the phone,

53:00

You mean he really existed? That is unfortunately extremely accurate.

53:11

For the Christocentric liberal, it doesn't matter whether he did or didn't. It's not the historical

53:17

Jesus that has any meaning at all. It's the cosmic Christ. The one with whom we have relationship today.

53:25

For the liberal, there is absolutely no connection between the cosmic Christ that we know today and the historical

53:33

Jesus of Calvary or of the empty tomb. And so, the liberal has little to defend because he makes little statement.

53:45

He is not attacking anything. He is not saying, This is truth! Because he has no basis upon which to define truth.

53:53

So, you maintain a religious form, you retain religious ceremonies, but you don't believe in them.

54:03

You don't believe in them. You don't believe what they actually said.

54:09

You may read the Bible, but if you start really pressing it, well, there is some great moral teaching in here.

54:16

Some great moral teaching. But then again, you can also find great moral teaching in the Bhagavad Gita or in the

54:22

Koran or in any other of these ancient mythological religious books. And there is little difference between them from the liberal's perspective.

54:33

So, this developed and it's still there today. It is still an important part of the religious scene.

54:41

But on the other side of that, you had those who said, Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I am not ready to capitulate my

54:47

Christian belief. I am not ready to bow down to the God of science. I am not ready to stop saying that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life.

54:58

I am not ready to do all those things. In fact, I believe what I believe.

55:04

I don't believe that Darwin was right and I don't believe that the higher biblical critics are right. And I have a reason for believing the way

55:11

I do. And that is what you see in the fundamentals. These men were doctors, PhDs, scholars, readers of the ancient languages.

55:19

Robert Dick Wilson at Princeton, one of the fundamentalists, could read 45 different languages and dialects.

55:25

He was nobody's dummy. But he didn't believe in higher biblical criticism and actually had a good old time ripping higher biblical critics apart.

55:36

But what came together to form fundamentalism? This fundamentalist movement.

55:42

The numerous different movements dating back into the previous century and before came together to sometimes form some strange bedfellows in the fundamentalist camp.

55:54

Almost every denomination had fundamentalists within it. Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Baptists.

56:03

And of course amongst the Baptists that was pretty much the entire group. The key issue for the fundamentalists was biblical authority.

56:14

Now what fundamentalism did, as I mentioned to you earlier, is it brought together primarily two different streams of thought.

56:24

It brought together an emerging belief in dispensationalism, most normally connected with the name of J .N.

56:33

Darby. Now Darby was a Calvinist in his theology, but he also developed the concept of dispensationalism.

56:39

And dispensationalism primarily is a belief that God has divided history up into a number of segments.

56:48

Originally it was three, then it became seven. Most of the dispensationalists this time would identify seven different dispensations.

56:55

And if you want a real rundown of all these, just go home, grab your Schofield reference Bible, and read in Genesis, and you'll have this huge note that takes up two pages about the second or third page in Genesis.

57:06

And you've got all the dispensations laid out for you. And the Schofield reference Bible was extremely important in the gain and rise in popularity of the dispensationalist perspective.

57:20

Now one of the things that the old school Calvinists from Princeton would have strongly objected to was the concept that is common in dispensationalism is that God dealt with men, especially relevant to the doctrine of salvation, in different ways in each dispensation.

57:39

The old school Calvinists would say no. Paul makes it very clear that Abraham and everyone else in the

57:46

Old Testament was made right before God on the very same basis you and I are today, and that is by faith in Jesus Christ, no other way.

57:55

It wasn't by their works of law, it wasn't by their obedience, it wasn't by their good works. It was by faith back then, it's by faith today.

58:03

But the attack of liberalism and naturalism upon the church resulted in a situation where the authority of the

58:12

Bible and the most basic beliefs in supernaturalism and the miraculous overrode the debate between premillennialists or postmillennialists and things like this, and caused people like J.

58:26

Gresham Machen of Princeton Seminary to be allied with dispensationalists because they agreed on the central facets of the faith, that the

58:38

Bible is the word of God, that it's inspired of God, so on and so forth. So you have different groups coming together and really we could draw another line down there in the middle and have what

58:48

I would call the pietists. Someone like D. L. Moody. Someone who was not an old school

58:56

Calvinist, he was not a Calvinist at all, he was an Arminian. Was sort of a dispensationalist, but didn't really push that either.

59:04

He was primarily emphasizing a pietistic Christian life of prayer and Bible reading and not really a whole lot of concern about various theologies, except that he would have united with all these people against liberalism and an attack upon the

59:19

Bible and the person of Jesus Christ and things like this. So you have a number of different streams coming together to form fundamentalism.

59:29

Now you might ask a question, what about the charismatic or Pentecostal movement? Well, as you know or may know,

59:35

Pentecostalism as a force, as a movement, did not really catch fire until the

59:43

Azusa Street revivals in 1906. And so you've only got the, for example, assemblies of God denomination starting to develop and to grow and to become a recognized entity in the mid -19, about 1915 -1916 around here.

01:00:01

And so obviously with the fundamentals already coming out, the controversies already engaged, they were basically late comers.

01:00:11

They would fall into the fundamentalist path because they would agree with all the fundamentals of the faith. But they themselves had very little impact, if any at all, in defining the issues.

01:00:21

They came too late. But they eventually, as they developed and grew, became identified with the fundamentalist movement.

01:00:29

Now you heard me say something before, that up until 1925, fundamentalism was on the attack, was moving forward.

01:00:39

In fact, I wish I had the quotation, I forgot to track it back down again, but there's a quotation from one man writing about 1926, where he says, if you're riding along in a

01:00:50

Pullman in the train, and throw an egg out the window anywhere in the United States, you'll hit a fundamentalist. The concept being, they're everywhere, they're all around us, they're behind every bush.

01:01:00

And yes, it was a growing movement. But 1925 was sort of the watershed year.

01:01:06

Does anyone have any idea what took place in July of 1925 that was very, very much a turning point in the movement?

01:01:17

Any guesses? The Scopes Trial. The Scopes Trial. It took place

01:01:23

July 10th through the 21st, 1925. You remember the great play,

01:01:30

William Jennings Bryan against Clarence Darrow, the meeting of these great minds. And William Jennings Bryan coming down as the great defender of the faith.

01:01:39

And of course, as you remember, Scopes is brought up on the charge of teaching evolution in school. And there's a law against the teaching of evolution in school.

01:01:46

And most people do not know the fact that he was found guilty and convicted. But the sentence was a very light one.

01:01:53

The main thing that happened was Clarence Darrow, his tactic in the trial was not so much to attempt to defend his defendant as it was to put fundamentalism itself on trial.

01:02:07

And if you're familiar with the story, he was able to ridicule fundamentalism, he was able to ridicule what was in actuality primarily a caricature of fundamentalism.

01:02:18

It was not an accurate representation of scholarly fundamentalism, but it didn't matter. When you're a defense attorney, that's what you're good at doing anyways.

01:02:26

And as a result, the way that the trial was reported throughout the land, fundamentalism as a scholarly position, as a position that a person who was a thinking individual could take, was by and large discredited.

01:02:44

And as a result, for the next 50 years, fundamentalism was in a defensive mode.

01:02:52

Not any longer in a militant advancing mode, but primarily in a defensive mode during that period of time, from 1925 on.

01:03:03

Now, coming up to our modern day, you notice I said about 50 years, mid -70s.

01:03:09

Obviously during the 80s, there was a great resurgence of fundamentalist belief, fundamentalists within scholarly life, within at least political life during the quote -unquote

01:03:20

Reagan years, especially with the election of Ronald Reagan. That brings us up to one of the main questions most of you have had in talking to me.

01:03:29

That is, what about today? What does the term mean today? And I'll have to admit that from my perspective, it has very little meaning.

01:03:38

Why is that? Because when a name or a description comes to have such an incredibly wide spectrum attached to it, it actually no longer has much value.

01:03:52

It's like the term human being. It doesn't really have a whole lot of value in describing a particular person, does it?

01:03:58

Because it can mean so many different things. And so fundamentalism today has become associated with political perspectives.

01:04:09

It has by and large become associated among quote -unquote scholarly people as a description of someone who is closed -minded, uneducated, and unwilling to learn.

01:04:23

Unwilling to know why it is, for example, an evolutionist believes what he does.

01:04:30

I don't want to hear what you have to say. And what's worse for many people to say that you're a fundamentalist means that you believe that everybody else has to believe what you believe, but you don't know what you believe very well.

01:04:42

You know what I'm saying? For most people in the world, when you think of a fundamentalist, it's someone who has a strong belief in something, but sadly enough is not much of a

01:04:54

Bible student, doesn't really know what they believe, they have not really thought much about it, they know that they're not consistent, and yet they'll be more than happy to tell you that you're going to hell if you don't believe what they believe, even though they don't show that they have the intestinal fortitude to think through what they believe.

01:05:12

And so a fundamentalist in our culture today, that term is normally a derogatory term.

01:05:22

I have a book in my office I forgot to bring with me this evening, recently published, that has a drawing of a

01:05:27

Bible with a serpent's tail coming out of it called The Dangers of Fundamentalism. And fundamentalism anymore is frequently described as almost a disease.

01:05:38

It's for the people who are sort of down and out, a little simple, not really with it, not really all that quick, and that's what you are if you're a fundamentalist.

01:05:47

So one of the questions that you might ask is, am I a fundamentalist? Or are you a fundamentalist? And when someone asks me, oh, are you a fundamentalist?

01:05:55

I have to ask them what they mean by that. On the basic level of what the fundamentals of the faith were, yes,

01:06:05

I am. But then again, so was Peter and Paul and Jesus and Martin Luther.

01:06:16

If you want to turn a Presbyterian's hair gray, especially if they're liberal Presbyterians, say John Calvin was a fundamentalist.

01:06:23

And those may be fighting words. You may need to be prepared to do a little ducking when you say that because that could be taken to be very, very offensive.

01:06:31

But in reality, if you put that list of things up in front of John Calvin and said, do you believe that the

01:06:38

Bible is the inspired word of God is inerrant? Oh, yes, of course. Do you believe in the existence of the supernatural?

01:06:43

Oh, yes, of course. Do you believe in the substitutionary atonement of Christ? Do you believe in the physical resurrection? Yes, yes, yes, yes, all the way down the line.

01:06:49

And in fact, what most liberals don't want you to think about is that if you ask that same question of nearly all

01:06:58

Christians previous to the beginning of, say, the 1800s, with the exception of some small universalist groups, they all would have answered yes.

01:07:10

And the Christocentric liberals who run, for example, the Presbyterian Church of USA would shudder if you were to say that and point out to them, hey, your own founding fathers were fundamentalists in that sense.

01:07:27

But it's true. If they're honest, they'll admit it. J. Gresham Machen, for example, had to leave

01:07:32

Princeton in 1929 and went and founded Westminster Seminary because of the incredible amount of liberalism that was coming in.

01:07:39

And it was only in 1980, here in Phoenix, that the PCUSA, Presbyterian Church of the United States of America, had their convention here in Phoenix.

01:07:49

And it was at that convention in 1980 that they voted to install homosexual elders and pastors in the churches.

01:07:57

Now I know of at least two or three churches that have pulled out since and have nothing to do with them. But those churches, by and large, are very wealthy churches.

01:08:06

Why? Because they live on endowments and grants and trusts that were created by fundamentalists a hundred years ago.

01:08:14

Well -endowed churches that are now using the funds that were given to those churches by people who believed in all ten of those things to preach against them.

01:08:25

It's a tragedy. But it's true. And it's not just the Presbyterians. Not just the Presbyterians. United Methodist denomination as a whole has been so crippled by liberalism that there's hardly anything left of it.

01:08:37

If you look at it, go to Claremont Graduate School. Sit down in a theology class and listen.

01:08:46

And you'll be shocked. It's all over the place. And so, the contest is still there, but unfortunately, the fundamentalist movement is so fractured and split and has so much differentiation within it that it's no longer really possible to identify exactly where anyone's going.

01:09:13

I mean, technically, historically, Charismatics and Pentecostals are fundamentalists. But they're not going in the same direction as someone who's

01:09:22

Reformed or someone who is just a mainline Baptist or something like that, for example.

01:09:28

They're all going in different directions. All going in different directions. But the issues haven't changed. The issues haven't changed.

01:09:36

Some of those who would agree to the fundamentals of faith don't really think they're all that important anymore. And their emphasis has totally gotten on to other areas.

01:09:45

So they're not really involved in the whole debate. Not really involved in the whole debate. So when someone asks me, oh, you're a fundamentalist,

01:09:51

I say, in the historical sense of the word, if what you mean by that is that I accept the fundamentals of the faith as found all through the

01:10:00

Bible, if I believe in biblically -based Christianity, yes,

01:10:06

I am. If you mean by that that I like to be identified with a particular political persuasion because of my religious beliefs, if you mean by that that I'm a person who does not take the time to understand, for example, the evolutionary theory, which some of you know

01:10:25

I have taken the time to understand the evolutionary theory, if you think

01:10:31

I'm a person who's not open -minded enough to listen and to dialogue with you, if that's what you mean a fundamentalist is, then no,

01:10:38

I'm not. I'm not. Not at all. So you have to ask for a definition as to what someone is talking about when they talk about what it is to be a fundamentalist.

01:10:52

Now you're all sort of looking at me with a strange look in your eye, maybe that means there are some questions, maybe you heard something you didn't expect this evening, but I know there were questions that people had at the break, and I'd be glad to take questions now.

01:11:09

Who's going to be the first one? I know there's got to be some questions left. I could not have possibly covered them all. Yeah?

01:11:15

What denominations are identified today, I mean the world's strongest are identified today with today's fundamentalist definition?

01:11:26

Well, primarily you'd have Southern Baptists, there are some real liberal

01:11:34

Baptist churches too, but Baptists, Assemblies of God, most of your charismatic groups, some of your

01:11:47

Mennonites, Nazarenes, Church of God, some of the

01:11:53

Church of God groups. I'm sorry? Yeah, they're not assigned as a denomination, but some of your

01:12:00

Bible churches are extremely liberal, you can't really identify anything there. It's almost easier to identify the liberals.

01:12:08

Well, okay, Presbyterian Church of America, PCA, very conservative. For example, within your

01:12:14

Lutherans, your Wisconsin and Missouri Synods are predominantly conservative.

01:12:21

Missouri used to be very conservative, it's swinging a little bit. Almost all the rest of your Lutherans have gone very liberal.

01:12:28

PC USA, Presbyterian Church USA, very liberal. PC America, very conservative. United Methodists, there's hardly any conservatives left.

01:12:36

Episcopalians, forget that. I mean just as a denomination, by and large, I've just totally jettisoned their heritage.

01:12:46

If you think I'm being nasty or something, hey, I'm just telling you the truth. This is one advantage I have, I went to Fuller.

01:12:52

And at Fuller, you had everybody. Everybody. And I had quite some interesting discussions with an

01:13:00

Episcopalian lady who was studying for the pastorate in the ethics class. We clashed on everything.

01:13:06

You name it, abortion, ordination of women, everything. So, anyways, most of your mainline denominations, sad to say it, have abandoned the authority of Scripture.

01:13:20

And I can tell you one thing without any second of hesitation. Historically, you can trace this to yourself, historically, find a denomination that is willing to abandon their belief in the inspiration, authority, and inerrancy of Scripture.

01:13:36

And that denomination within one century will no longer be preaching the gospel of Christ.

01:13:45

It's just a historical fact. It's just what's happened. And normally what you have preceding the total abandonment of the

01:13:52

Bible is the willingness to abandon particular things within the Bible. For example, one of the first things that goes, original sin.

01:14:03

Trace it historically. Original sin. The sin nature of man. You've got to get rid of that.

01:14:09

It's one of the first things that goes. And as soon as you're willing to start taking this part of the Bible, take it out, take this part, take this part, eventually there's not enough left to worry about anyways to jettison that.

01:14:18

And there are entire churches today that, there's a building, there are religious things around, but you couldn't tell much difference between that and a social club because there's not any, there isn't any difference.

01:14:31

Nothing else is being said. The, uh, now also, I was kind of afraid about this, uh, ahead of time, the evangelical is kind of split off in the mid -forties.

01:14:45

And it's supposedly over the, uh, authority of the Scriptures. But did the fundamental, uh, groups just, uh, start breaking away from that authority?

01:14:56

Where evangelicals picked it up? No. The term evangelical is normally used today sort of for very moderate fundamentalists.

01:15:08

The term has such a wide meaning, again, it's hard, you have to ask the person, what do you mean by that?

01:15:14

For example, Fuller has sort of been identified as the center of what's called the New Evangelicalism.

01:15:20

In fact, uh, I have a book up here, uh, by George Marston called Reforming Fundamentalism, Fuller Seminary and the

01:15:27

New Evangelicalism. And what you have at Fuller would be conservative liberals.

01:15:35

Let's put it that way. Uh, conservative liberals. How do you describe this? I would say that the

01:15:42

New Evangelical like at Fuller, who knows who Karl Barth is? One, two, three, four.

01:15:50

Karl Barth, uh, one of the most, well, probably the single most influential theologian of this century, uh, was a

01:15:57

German liberal who reacted against liberalism and said, hey, look, uh, us liberals, we're not saying anything to the world anymore.

01:16:07

We're not talking about sin. We're not talking about repentance. We're not talking about the cross. We're not talking about who

01:16:13

Jesus was. And so we've obviously missed it somewhere. And so when his commentary on Romans came out, it was a real radical thing because it talked about how you need to repent, how you need to believe in Jesus.

01:16:25

And from someone who accepted, and see what, what the problem with Barth was, his foundations weren't there.

01:16:30

Because Barth continued to accept the liberal view of scripture. Barth continued to accept the higher critical theories of the

01:16:39

Bible. Uh, Barth's theory of scripture was it becomes the word of God as you encounter it.

01:16:47

So you may read a passage of scripture and one day it just doesn't say anything to you, but you may come back to it a couple of days later and you read it and it really speaks to you.

01:16:54

And that's when it becomes the word of God. It's not the word of God in and of itself. It's the word of God as we experience it.

01:17:02

And what Barth's theology has allowed has been the development of a middle group of people who are not full liberals.

01:17:11

They, they attempt to say that there is a truth, but they're almost more dangerous because without the foundation of scripture, they sound like they're saying the same thing conservatives are saying, but they're actually in the middle of some place.

01:17:28

And we're in the middle of this, the development of this still today, and so we won't know for another 20 or 30 years how long it'll last.

01:17:37

My opinion is it can't last. It can't last. It won't. You'll see it splitting off either back, people either going back toward conservatism or just falling into liberalism because it's primarily liberally based.

01:17:53

It's very naturalistic in its assumptions. you know, I don't know where it's going to go.

01:18:00

What is happening in the Southern Baptist realm then? Is this moderate group going to end up as you say?

01:18:12

Well, what you have in the SBC is the same controversies going on.

01:18:20

You have professors within the Southern Baptist seminaries accepting the higher biblical scholarship, critical scholarship concept and beginning to present them.

01:18:32

Then you have other people saying, wait a minute, time out. That's not what we are supporting. Southern Baptist seminaries to teach our men.

01:18:40

And so, the fundamentalists, the conservatives, have waged a war and I would say that at times they didn't use exactly

01:18:48

Christian methodology to do it, but they have waged a war to gain control of the boards of the seminaries.

01:18:57

And you gain control of that through the presidency. Because it's the president who assigns people to the boards.

01:19:04

And so, you have a struggle going on there and of course those who call themselves moderates would not want to be called liberals.

01:19:15

The funny thing you end up with in this fight is you have conservatives and moderates and no liberals. Now, wait a minute, how can you have conservatives, moderates, and no liberals?

01:19:23

I mean, when you think about it, that really doesn't make any sense. Because if you've got two points to a question, this is the conservative side and this is the other side, the other side isn't the moderates because the moderates are supposed to be in between.

01:19:33

But it's obviously a recognition on the moderates part that to be called a liberal is death amongst fundamentalists primarily and that's what fundamentalism after 1925 moved primarily south.

01:19:45

And so amongst southern Baptists it would be obviously a majority position. So, they've been waging war to regain control of the seminaries and control the curriculum that is presented there.

01:19:57

Now, I find myself in an interesting position because I agree with them in the sense that I don't think that the sole perspective that should be presented or even a valid perspective that should be presented as the position of the seminary should be a naturalistically based humanistic philosophy of redaction criticism or something.

01:20:19

And I agree with them at that point. What I don't agree with has been some of the cutthroat tactics that have been utilized to do this.

01:20:26

The mechanisms were there. It required just a little more patience to get it done. Of course, the moderates like to run around waving the flag of scholarly freedom and academic freedom and all the rest of this stuff.

01:20:38

And hey, if the people in the pew are paying your salary, then you need to listen to what they're saying. Don't give me all this scholarly freedom garbage.

01:20:45

They're paying your salary and so if you want to teach that, hey, there are a lot of other seminaries in the world you can go teach at.

01:20:51

If you don't want to believe that, fine. Go teach some place where they like that. Union Theological Seminary, it's right up the road.

01:20:58

They'll let you teach anything you want there. Bahai, whatever, be a Muslim, they don't care. It seems as though the

01:21:06

Darwinian Freudian mindset seemed to be somewhat of an instigator to the splintering off and the multiplication of denominations.

01:21:16

When the Christians started to take that and incorporate those ideas, there seemed to have been a multiplicity of foreign denominations splitting off.

01:21:26

One of the criticisms we receive as Protestant is that they took off the denomination and split it and now we see this naturalism, as we may call it, seems to be the main contributor to that.

01:21:40

It's a catalyst in the sense that people, if you're in a denomination, this is what you're faced with.

01:21:46

Here's what you're faced with. If you're in a denomination, you're a PCUSA pastor. You believe in the inspiration and authority of scripture.

01:21:54

You believe that's true. You read the words of Jesus and there is no question. Jesus certainly believed that.

01:22:00

But your denomination is going that direction. What do you do? What do you do?

01:22:05

Do you try to stay in the denomination and fight and reverse the tide? Or does it eventually get to the point where you say,

01:22:14

I'm sorry, you have abandoned the proper faith. I can no longer have fellowship with that.

01:22:21

I'm going my own direction and do what J. Gresham Machen did. Liberalism came in like a flood into Princeton.

01:22:28

Princeton had been the bulwark of old line Calvinistic thinking. The bulwark of fundamentalism.

01:22:35

And then the liberals in the denomination got hold of the board. They started putting in all sorts of liberal professors and just came in like a flood.

01:22:42

And about the only person left was Machen. And he tried to fight it as long as he could, but he couldn't.

01:22:48

He eventually had to just pull out and start his own denomination, Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Right or wrong?

01:22:55

Well, it depends on whether you believe the truth is important enough to take a stand for. And if a denomination that was founded on the truth eventually denies that, then the question you have is how long do you stick around?

01:23:10

Do you try to reverse the trend? Or is there simply a point where you have to say, hey, it's gone too far?

01:23:18

And go on your direction. Do you feel like there are individuals that would be labeled as liberals today who have not really been presented the fundamentalist position, the historic fundamentalist position, who have not been challenged to think out their own beliefs and they're just basically there and they just kind of thought it out and they work with them and they basically say, hey, it's a historical challenge.

01:23:43

Well, yeah, but there's no question. In dealing with, for example, Christocentric Liberal, there's very little difference between dealing with him and dealing with an agnostic.

01:23:51

You're dealing on the exact same basis. You're not dealing with a person who has religious bases that you can actually deal with, but as far as that's concerned, yeah, of course.

01:24:01

I remember one of my professors, Dr. Ed Nelson, is the one who mentioned something I mentioned briefly before, and that is, liberals are supposed to be people who are open and willing to examine anything and conservatives are supposed to be those who are more closed -minded and not willing to examine anything else.

01:24:22

He says one of the biggest anomalies of seminaries in the United States is that in conservative seminaries, all the perspectives will be examined.

01:24:33

Bultmann and Barth and Wellhausen and Friedrich Schleiermacher and all these others who are raving liberals, their books will be read, their commentaries will be examined, their theories will be discussed.

01:24:49

The student in a conservative seminary will know about those things with the possible exception of a few very conservative seminaries like maybe

01:24:57

Bob Jones or something like that where if you say Friedrich Schleiermacher you will be disfellowshipped forever.

01:25:04

But in most conservative seminaries you know what those theories are.

01:25:10

But you walk into Union Theological Seminary tomorrow and you will never hear about B .B.

01:25:18

Warfield being discussed in his views The Inspiration of Scripture. The fundamentalist perspective is viewed as being so backwards, so silly, so unscholarly as to not even be presented, not even discussed.

01:25:32

It's just, it's disgusted. It's treated with disgust. It's not discussed, it's treated with disgust.