by Bruce Bawer
there will be nothing but blessedness. God will dwell with His people. He will wipe away all the tears of the ages past, and all things will be new. There will be no more death, or sorrow, or pain, or poverty. No sin will be there, no curse. The throne of God and the Lamb will be there. His saints will serve Him, beholding His face forever and ever.
If I have described the dispensationalist scenario of the End Times in exhaustive detail, it is because no real understanding of Protestant fundamentalism in twentieth-century America is possible without an awareness of the particulars of these beliefs. "The Scofield Bible," writes Charles Strozier, ";s the inerrant text of God in the minds of many unsophisticated fundamentalist believers." For such people, he adds, Scofield's notes are "canonical." Indeed, "most popular fundamentalist books are either slightly revised versions of the Scofield notes, or adapt his theory to contemporary events. It may well be that the Scofield Bible has touched the lives of more people than any other single book published in this century."
Yet nearly a century after the book's first appearance, most Catholics, Jews, Moslems, mainline Protestants, and secular people in the United States continue to know virtually nothing about the Scofield Bible, or about dispensational theology generally. When I mentioned Darby and Scofield to several Episcopal priests, they said they had never heard of either. Ditto dispensationalism. In the minds of most mainstream Christians and secular Americans, Protestant fundamentalism is just like nonfundamentalism, only more so. Yet English's book underlines the fact that Protestant fundamentalism is not a more "extreme" version of mainstream Christianity—it is a different creature entirely. Though many individual fundamentalists may be loving people, the theology to which they subscribe delights in a God who casts his children by the millions into eternal hellfire, and who has ordained a sequence of End Times events that amounts to a grotesque pageant of slaughter and bloodshed without any visible moral significance or spiritual dimension. English never explains, let alone asks, what the meaning of this End Times drama is, and why it should happen this way and not some other way. Nor does he ever show any hesitation in worshipping a God who in his savagery seems barely distinguishable from Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.
Nowhere does English cite the Great Commandment. Nowhere does he cite Paul's insistence that love is greater than faith and hope. Yet if English omits all words about love from his book, he emphasizes what he calls Jesus' "stern words." "Jesus did not hesitate to speak severely against hypocrisy and sin of every kind," English claims. "Furthermore, He declared unequivocally that eternal judgment will fall on those who reject Him. It would be difficult to find anywhere in literature stronger denunciation than Christ pronounced over the scribes and Pharisees . . . shortly before His trial and death. 'Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more a child of hell than yourselves.'" (English omits to acknowledge that what Jesus criticized the scribes and Pharisees for, as we shall see, is their fundamentalism—their subordination of love to law, dogma, and institutional hierarchy.) English also cites with enthusiasm another ambiguous line that John attributes to Jesus—"If you believe not that I am he, ye shall die in your sins"—which English interprets to mean, "If you believe not that I am the Son of God . . ." English's distortion of the gospel's real emphases is outrageous—yet it reflects very faithfully the horrible monster that twentieth-century legalistic Christians have made out of their God and Savior and the hateful institution that they have made out of his church.
It was in the midst of the tension between premillennialism and modernism that a series of pamphlets appeared that would give a name to the antimodern faction. Issued largely in response to the Social Gospel, The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth consisted of twelve volumes, each containing several essays by ministers, theology professors, and church historians. Appearing between 1910 and 1915, the pamphlets attacked evolution and the Higher Criticism and defended biblical inerrancy with well-nigh unprecedented stridency.
A foreword to The Fundamentals described the series as having been published through the generosity of "two Christian laymen" (a pair of rich brothers named Lyman and Milton Stewart) who "believe that the time has come when a new statement of the fundamentals of Christianity should be made." The foreword explained that the series would be "sent to every pastor, evangelist, missionary, theological professor, theological student, Sunday school superintendent, YMCA and YWCA secretary in the English speaking world, so far as the addresses of all these can be obtained." (This was a time when the Young Men's and Young Women's Christian Associations really were associations of young Christian men and women.) Printed in millions of copies, The Fundamentals sought to awaken people to the danger that "modernist" thinking posed to "traditional" religion, and to give them ammunition with which to fight back.
The thematic thrust and tone of the material collected in The Fundamentals are fairly represented by an essay in the third volume, "My Personal Experience with the Higher Criticism" by Professor J. J. Reeve of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Characterizing modern science as a threat to religion, Reeve argues that in a world where all experience was subject to scientific analysis,
there would be all science and no religion. In the array of scientific facts all religion would be evaporated. God, Christ, the Bible, and all else would be reduced to a mathematical or chemical formula. This is the ideal and goal of the evolutionary hypothesis. The rationalist would rejoice at it, but the Christian mind shrinks in horror from it. The Christian consciousness perceives that an hypothesis which leads to such results is one of its deadliest foes.
What is extraordinary here is the palpable fear, insecurity, and defensiveness—the horror, to use his own word—that Reeve feels at the thought of his religion's confrontation with science. It is as if Christianity were a fragile, defenseless creature and science a strapping new bully on the block. Reeve admits quite frankly that he is essentially closing his eyes to expanding knowledge out of fear that it will rob him of his faith. In a more sardonic tone, Reeve claims that in churches presided over by modernist Christians, "Jesus Christ is politely thanked for his services in the past, gallantly conducted to the confines of His world and bowed out as He is no longer needed and His presence might be very troublesome to some people. . . . Such a religion is the very negation of Christianity ... a distinct reversion to heathenism." This representation of modernist Christians is absolutely unfair: Far from dismissing Jesus, modernist ministers of those times come off in their writings as being far more surely in touch with Christ than do their fundamentalist detractors. Yet Reeve denies that such people's religious experiences are genuine. To them, he claims, "the Bible itself becomes a plaything for the intellect, a merry-go-round for the mind partially intoxicated with its theory." This characterization of thinking as a childish, potentially dangerous pastime has continued to be common among fundamentalist Christians such as Pat Robertson, who has complained that in a secular world, "the mind becomes a playground of ideas."
Apropos of the "core doctrines" of "traditional" Christianity, Reeve says, "If all these things are not true to fact or to life, then God has been an arch-deceiver." This peculiar theme—that if some of the miracles reported in the Bible are not literally true, then God is a liar and Jesus a madman—has run through legalistic Christian writings ever since. For example:
• A 1996 issue of In Touch, a legalistic Southern Baptist magazine, maintains that "To say Jesus did not rise again is to call Him a liar."
• "If He did not in fact rise," writes the theologian J. B. Phillips, "His claim was false, and He was a very dangerous personality indeed."
• In a 1996 book, The Empty Church, Thomas C. Reeves writes: "Christianity without miracles is dead, and its Founder and the Apostles madmen."
• A legalistic Christian Web site says of Jesus that "He was either telling the truth, He was crazy, or He was a liar. But since everyone agrees that Jesus was
a good man, how then could He be both good and crazy, or good and a liar? He had to be telling the truth. He is the only way."
There's a powerful emotion at the heart of such statements as these—an emotion that presumably lay latent in the minds of many legalistic Christians until they found their understanding of the faith challenged by science and scholarship. What kind of emotion? Well, such statements would certainly seem to affirm that beneath many legalists' insistence on their total belief in a totally inerrant Bible there lies a profound uncertainty, and with it a terror, either conscious or unconscious, that if they abandon what is essentially a self-deceiving pretense to belief, they will be left spiritually unmoored, emotionally helpless, intellectually spun off into chaos, without any psychological bearings whatsoever. Deep down, they know that the doctrines in which they claim to believe are indeed untrue, and for this reason, despite their vigorous protestations of faith, they do resent God and see him as an arch-deceiver—though they might never admit this resentment even to themselves.
J.J. Reeve acknowledges that Christianity "must and will be somewhat modified by the conception of a developing revelation and the application of the historical method." Yet he insists that Christianity "must prevail in all its essential features" because "it has a noble ancestry and a glorious history." It is surprising to see Reeve admitting the need for theological modification—but it is also rather odd to see him placing supreme value on Christianity's "noble ancestry" and "glorious history" Does Reeve even begin to understand the real value of Christianity? It's as if he's discussing some family with aristocratic pretensions rather than a faith that claims to offer the ultimate truth about the universe. Reeve's modernist contemporaries appear to have been much more certain about the genuine universality of Christ than does Reeve, whose concern seems less with preserving the essence of truth, goodness, and beauty for future generations than with not doing anything to upset adherents of "old-time religion."
The Fundamentals wasn't as rousing a success as the Stewart brothers had hoped. Yet it had a lasting impact in at least one respect. In 1920, Curtis Lee Laws, editor of a Baptist publication called The Watchman Examiner, was writing about a new antimodernist group in the Northern Baptist Convention when, seeking a catchy label for them, he recalled the title of the series of pamphlets the Stewart brothers had bankrolled some years before. Thus was born the term fundamentalist. Now both sides of the controversy had names: There were modernists and there were fundamentalists. And then there was the large mass of Protestants in between, not quite sure what to make of it all. Such was the state of American Christianity as the nation approached the 1920s—a decade that would prove to be crucial for the future of the struggle between the Church of Love and the Church of Law.
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6
"SHALL THE FUNDAMENTALISTS WIN"
Every year from my infancy to my mid-teens, I spent my summers at the house of my maternal grandmother in Florence, South Carolina. The most neglected room of that house was a small den whose walls were covered with shelves full of books that had belonged to my late grandfather. In addition to running his own small business, my grandfather had been a Methodist evangelical singer, traveling from church to church to warble hymns in his fine tenor voice. What scandalized many in that small conservative town was that he performed not only in white but in "colored" churches, and counted black people among his friends. He was also an intellectual, and a maverick one at that; he read not only the Bible and traditional theological works but also books about new scientific discoveries and political ideas. To examine the titles on his books was to see the library of an earnest, wide-ranging seeker.
Among those books were several by a man whose unusual name stuck in my mind long after: Harry Emerson Fosdick. My mother told me that Fosdick had been one of my grandfather's heroes; she recalled the familiar sight of Granddaddy sitting in his chair and leaning in toward the radio to hear Fosdick preaching far away in New York. I later discovered that Fosdick had, in fact, been a hero to many. Virtually forgotten today—like Rauschenbusch—Fosdick, a Baptist preacher who was born in 1878 and who occupied the pulpit successively at New York's First Presbyterian Church, Park Avenue Baptist Church, and Riverside Church, was in his own day, for both his allies and his enemies, the very personification of the modernist point of view. He was at the white-hot center of the modernist-fundamentalist clash; more than anybody else, it was he who explained to Americans how Christianity might be meaningfully reconciled with what he called "the new knowledge" provided by science, archaeology, and the Higher Criticism.
Fosdick is not alone in being virtually forgotten. Also essentially absent from American popular consciousness today is the fact that in the 1920s the growing tensions between modernism and fundamentalism came to a head in a dramatic way. To be sure, the conflict was not as fierce in some denominations as in others. As Sydney Ahlstrom notes, the controversy "was minor where liberalism was weak or nonexistent (Southern Baptist) or predominant (Congregational), or where doctrinal concerns had always been secondary (Methodist)." Yet for a few years, several Protestant denominations underwent an unprecedented culture war that for a time seemed destined to tear them apart. This conflict was, in many ways, strikingly similar to the current face-off between "traditional Christians" and "secular humanists"; the difference is that in the 1920s, the people on both sides of the struggle were Christians.
To follow that struggle in the pages of the New York Times is to get the impression that it began almost overnight. The Times index for October—December 1923 is the first to contain a subentry for "Religion: Fundamentalism vs. Modernism"; the list of articles under this heading is more than two columns long, by far the longest subentry under "Religion" in that index volume. In the indexes covering the next four years, the "Fundamentalism vs. Modernism" subentry fluctuates in length from one-fifth of a column long to two columns long, and includes many substantial front-page stories. By 1927 the category is reduced to a handful of minor entries, and in late 1928 it disappears altogether for the first time. Included in those several years' worth of coverage are news articles concerning developments all over the country and in a wide range of denominations. The headlines alone paint a vivid picture of cultural conflict: "Seventh-Day Adventists Plan National Campaign for Fundamentalism"; "Presbyterian Ministers at Stony Brook Assembly Plead for the Old Faith."
The name that appears most often in the "Fundamentalism vs. Modernism" category is Fosdick's. Though he had been ordained as a Baptist, and had spent eleven years as a preacher in a New Jersey Baptist church, in 1922 he was teaching practical theology at Union Theological Seminary and serving as a "special preacher" at New York's First Presbyterian Church, where he regularly delivered the sermon at the main Sunday service. Fosdick had been an influential figure for years; yet it was not until May 21, 1922, that he gave the sermon that placed him at the center of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy.
Entitled "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" this sermon came to be seen by his supporters as a seminal outline of the antifundamentalist case and by his opponents as (in the words of one of them) "an authoritative statement of the present opposition to the evangelical faith." In clear, vigorous prose, Fosdick noted that fundamentalists "insist that we must all believe in the historicity of certain special miracles, preeminently the virgin birth of our Lord; that we must believe in a special theory of inspiration—that the original documents of the Scripture, which of course we no longer possess, were inerrantly dictated to men a good deal as a man might dictate to a stenographer; that we must believe in a special theory of the atonement—that the blood of our Lord, shed in a substitutionary death, placates an alienated Deity and makes possible welcoming for the returning sinner; and that we must believe in the second coming of our Lord upon the clouds of heaven to set up a millennium here, as the only way in which God can bring history to a worthy denouement."
Fosdick examines three of these doctrines—the virgin birth, biblical inerrancy, and t
he Second Coming—and sets forth the fundamentalist and modernist perspectives on each. In the case of the virgin birth, he notes that it is common, indeed almost routine, for the founders of religions to be described by their followers as having been born of virgins; so Buddhists do with Buddha, Zoroastrians with Zoroaster, and Confucians with Lao-Tse. "When a personality arose so high that men adored him," Fosdick writes, "the ancient world attributed his superiority to some special divine influence in his generation, and they commonly phrased their faith in terms of miraculous birth." So it was with Jesus. Like us, he says, early Christians saw Jesus as having come "specially from God" and carrying with him "God's special influence and intention"; yet they expressed this specialness "in terms of a biological miracle that our modern minds cannot use."
In regard to the inerrancy of scripture, Fosdick notes that fundamentalists believe that "everything there [in the Bible]—scientific opinions, medical theories, historical judgments, as well as spiritual insight—is infallible." But he notes that when you actually read the Bible front to back, you find the idea of God constantly changing, so that statements in two different parts of scripture often contradict each other. Consequently modernist Christians view scripture not as an infallible historical account but as "the record of the progressive unfolding of the character of God to his people from early primitive days until the great unveiling in Christ."