GET THEM INTO THE LIFE BOATS

– The Pathos of Fundamentalism  -

Chapter 10 - 146-149

An Irish Anglican, John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), invented a particularly precise version of this (“signs of the end time”) scheduling called "dispensationalism," which held that all history was divided into seven dispensations, of which the present one was the last. He and his followers also added that true believers need not fear the awful times of tribulation that were coming because, before the worst of it, they would be "raptured," taken to heaven without dying. The Left Behind series of novels, with their horrific descriptions of the "rapture," the "great tribulation," and the bloody battle of Armageddon, are based on this dubious theological scheme.

One of the worst features of dispensational fundamentalism is the foreshortened time it assigns the earth before the end comes, which makes any concern for the health of the planet's oceans and air and forests superfluous. Another is the belief that Christ will not come until a titanic battle is fought in Palestine between Christ and the Antichrist. This fatalistic conviction undercuts efforts to arrive at a peaceful solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Fortunately, not all fundamentalists hold these extreme views, but enough do to jeopardize the ecological and peace-making efforts of other Christians and other concerned people.

Fundamentalism had roots elsewhere, but it was born in America. When it first appeared in the early decades of the twentieth century, it was generated by people who believed both the church and the society were heading for catastrophe, because Christians were losing, indeed squandering, their faith. Their fears were not entirely groundless. In 1910 Charles Eliot (1834-1926), then a professor emeritus at Harvard, delivered an address entitled "The Future of Religion." He advocated a new version of Christianity that would have only one commandment. It would require simply the love of God expressed in service to others. There was no further need for theology, churches, scriptures, or worship. Eliot's ideas— and he was not alone in propounding them—horrified almost all Christians, but the fundamentalists fought back in a particularly forceful and organized way.

Starting in 1910, they opposed this "modernism" by publishing a series of twelve widely circulated booklets called The Fundamentals, which asserted that many people who called themselves Christians had slipped so far into accommodating Christianity to modern culture that they had lost its essentials. These core "fundamentals" constituted the nonnegotiable beliefs one must absolutely hold to in order to be a Christian. There were five. 

1) The first and most prominent "fundamental" was the divine inspiration and total inerrancy of the Bible. This conviction was the cornerstone on which everything else was built.

2) Second, they listed the Virgin Birth of Christ as a testimony to his divinity.

3 & 4) Next, they included the "substitutionary atonement" of Christ on the cross for the sins of the world, and his bodily resurrection from the dead.

5) Finally, they asserted that belief in the imminent second coming of Christ "in glory" was in no way optional, but just as "fundamental" as the other beliefs in their creed.

At first glance the choice of these five beliefs seems arbitrary, even peculiar. Notice that there is no reference to the life of Jesus. His feeding the hungry and healing the sick are not mentioned. The parables and the Sermon on the Mount are missing. His opposition to the political and religious elites of the day—undoubtedly the reason for his arrest and crucifixion—does not appear. Why did the fundamentalists pick out the five doctrines they did as the indispensable nucleus of Christianity and not others?

Given the cultural and religious atmosphere of America in the early twentieth century, however, it is not hard to see why they chose these five "fundamentals." Inflexibility on the inerrancy of the Bible was intended to counteract the growing application of historical methods to the study of scripture, which had already resulted in doubts about whether Moses had really written the Pentateuch and the authorship of some of the letters attributed to Paul. Emphasizing the Virgin Birth and the atonement was directed against understanding Jesus simply as a great spiritual teacher or an ethical exemplar. Highlighting the imminent Second Coming, to be initiated according to this view by plagues, famines, and a steep degeneration of conditions around the world, was intended to undercut any idea of progress, however gradual, toward the Kingdom of God. Things would get worse, much worse, before the end.

Financed by conservative businessmen, the Fundamentals pamphlets were widely distributed free to Protestant ministers and lay leaders across the country. In 1920, an article in the Baptist Standard suggested that the courageous Christians who defended these focal principles should be called "fundamentals." The label stuck. Even though it is now widely and loosely applied to radically conservative movements in many different religious groupings, including Islam and Judaism, and often carries a pejorative overtone, it was American Protestants who invented it and proudly applied it to themselves.

Fundamentalists have always regarded their beliefs as under attack, and therefore have engaged in counterattack, on two fronts. First, they believed the whole world, but America in particular, was caught in a downward spiral of decadence, depravity, and heterodoxy. They ridiculed the idea of any "social gospel" as a futile effort to refurbish a fatally punctured liner that was already sinking. As the great revivalist Dwight Moody (1837-99) put it, "The Lord told me, 'Moody, just get as many into the lifeboat as you can."'4 But they also fought against an even more dangerous enemy within, namely, those current theological trends that seemed to them a rank betrayal of Christianity by "modernists" in their vain effort to adjust a timeless message to the shifting sands of a fallen world. Leading fundamentalist preachers often lashed out against the loose morals of the Babylon around them, but they reserved their most vivid polemics for other preachers who were selling the faith for a “mess of pottage”.