Category: History

Derek Cooper’s An Introduction to World Christian History overviews two thousand years not only at 30,000 feet but at 500 miles an hour. You better not blink or you will miss a century or two.
Continue reading “Around the World in 250 Pages”

We used to have fundamentalist Christians, but where are they now? I rarely hear anyone refer to themselves by that label. Do you?

When many of the main denominations in the U.S. began to be influenced by liberal theological ideas in the late nineteenth century, some conservative Protestants responded. They wanted to affirm the authority of Scripture, the virgin birth of Jesus, his bodily resurrection, and much more. This movement gained the name Fundamentalism in the early twentieth century after publication of a series of twelve volumes called The Fundamentals containing ninety essays by such leading lights as James Orr, B. B. Warfield, R. A. Torrey and many others. The name was adopted widely by conservative Christians.

The label took on decidedly negative connotations during the Scopes Monkey Trial on evolution in July 1925 when journalist H. L. Mencken heaped scorn on those defending a literal interpretation of Genesis. After that fundamentalists retreated from the public scene in a defensive posture against a dominant culture they saw as their enemy.

In the late 1940s, two important events altered the religious landscape in the U.S. Carl F. H. Henry published The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism in 1947, saying it was time for conservative Christians to not be separatists and instead engage the culture, seeking to influence it constructively.

Two years later Billy Graham was launched on the world stage with his first major evangelistic campaign in Los Angeles. He welcomed Catholics, Anglicans, Orthodox and Black Christian leaders to his stage–much to the consternation of Fundamentalists. Graham also took the label evangelical.

The two groups, evangelicals and fundamentalists, lived side by side for many years but of late, especially in the news media, we almost never hear about Christian fundamentalists, only about evangelicals, especially in relation to politics. Conservative Christians seem to have followed suit. They mostly call themselves evangelical, rarely fundamentalist. Even Bob Jones University, on its website, does not describe itself with the term.

But why? Did the more open, socially engaged evangelicals win and the more closed, insular fundamentalists diminish? Yes and no.

Conservative Protestants are now generally more socially active though usually on a narrow range of issues like abortion, pornography, evolution, and gay marriage as opposed to the comprehensive engagement Henry urged. And they have tended not to call themselves fundamentalists anymore, preferring evangelical.

Even so they often remain separatist in their inclinations. Usually they take a defensive rather than a generous posture toward culture. Rarely do they openly listen to or cooperate with those they differ with. They can be much like political conservatives and liberals generally who tend to follow likeminded news sources and only associate with those they agree with.

One other factor, I think, has contributed to the demise of evangelicalism as the kinder, gentler fundamentalism Henry imagined. Just as moderates seem to have disappeared from both political parties, moderate evangelicals have tended to leave the movement. They care about a wide range of issues, believing the Bible has having much of value to say about the environment, race, poverty, human rights, cooperation among nations, violence, modern slavery, war refugees, women, children, and more. But they have become disaffected from what they see as a narrow and strident form of Christianity that seems not to welcome people like them.

Why are there no more Christian fundamentalists? I wonder if it is because fundamentalists over the years have largely rebranded themselves and coopted the term evangelical, while many of the more moderate evangelicals have moved to mainline churches or none at all.

What do you think?

Photo credit: InterVarsity, Urbana 64

The dramatic pendulum swing from a President Obama to a President Trump has left analysts, both right and left, scrambling to understand what happened. In We Were Eight Years in Power, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has become the premier commentator from Black America, responds by collecting eight articles he published in The Atlantic, one per year, during the Obama administration. To each he adds an extended preface which reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of each piece, and which looks forward to implications the ideas in each essay might have.
Continue reading “We Were Eight Years in Power”

How do we know if our interpretation of Scripture is correct? One way is to weigh it against the general consensus of the church throughout its history. That is, by tradition. If we are coming up with a view that is at odds with the creeds or the historical views on the trinity, the full divinity and full humanity of Jesus, his bodily resurrection, or other core tenets of the faith, we should be very suspicious of ourselves. We may be right, but probably we are not.
Continue reading “Tradition, Scripture and Slavery”

I remember driving in the south and southwest during the late 1950s and early 1960s on family vacations. We’d see rows and rows of tall, narrow trees (many probably being tower poplar) planted between fields. “Why did they do that?” I asked my parents. They were windbreaks, they told me, used to stop the soil from blowing away like it did in the great black, rainless storms of twenty-five years before.
Continue reading “The Human Story of a Man-Made Disaster”

Generous Calvinism may seem like an oxymoron, but in Saving Calvinism Oliver Crisp helps file the rough edges off a narrow, ossified version of this venerable tradition. The result is a Calvinism that embraces the breadth of its own heritage.
Continue reading “A Generous Calvinism”

Do leaders make the church or do the people?

The story goes that a small group of radical, white, male leaders created social Christianity, supported by the middle classes. Heath Carter’s account of Chicago, labor and the churches offers a different tale.
Continue reading “Union Made”

Augustine, the great church father, has been such a giant on the theological landscape for so many centuries, he has become a huge, lifeless statue to some. In The Mestizo Augustine Justo González pumps life back into our view with a fresh and fascinating look at the humanity and the competing cultures at work within Augustine.
Continue reading “What Augustine Offers Our Multicultural World”

God is active in all cultures around the world, even before Christianity or the Bible reach them. That’s what William Dyrness contends in Insider Jesus (which I discussed here). If he is right, the implications go far beyond missionary efforts. They encompass how we should view our own faith.
Continue reading “Insider Jesus 2: Did the Reformation Make a Misstep?”

The epic life of Dmitri Schostakovich and his music offers a window into the terror of Stalin’s purges and the cruelty of the Nazi blockade of his beloved Leningrad (St. Petersburg) during World War II. In Symphony for the City of the Dead, M. T. Anderson begins with Schostakovich’s early life and development, taking us step by step to the climactic composition and performance of The Leningrad Symphony in the midst of the city’s starvation.
Continue reading “Music in the Ruins”