Christian Fundamentalism - Fundamentalist Movement in The United States

Fundamentalist Movement in The United States

Fundamentalism had multiple roots in British and American theology of the 19th century. One root was Dispensationalism, a new interpretation of the Bible developed in the 1830s in England. It was a millenarian theory that divided all of time into seven different stages, called "dispensations," which were seen as stages of God's revelation. At the end of each stage, according to this theory, God punished humanity for having been found wanting in God's testing. Secularism, liberalism, and immorality in the 1920s were believed to be signs that humanity had again failed God's testing. This means that the world is on the verge of the last stage, where a final battle will take place at Armageddon, followed by Christ's return and 1,000 year reign. One important sign is the rebirth of Israel, support for which became the centerpiece of Fundamentalist foreign policy.

A second stream came from Princeton Theology in the mid-19th century, which developed the doctrine of inerrancy in response to higher criticism of the Bible. The work of Charles Hodge influenced fundamental insistence that the Bible was inerrant because it had been dictated by God and written by men who took that dictation. This meant that the Bible should be read differently from any other historical document, and also that modernism and liberalism were believed to lead people to hell just like non-Christian religions.

A third strand—and the name itself—came from a 12-volume study The Fundamentals, published 1910-1915. Sponsors subsidized the free distribution of over three million individual volumes to clergy, laymen and libraries. This version stressed several core beliefs, including:

• The inerrancy of the Bible
• The literal nature of the Biblical accounts, especially regarding Christ's miracles and the Creation account in Genesis.
• The Virgin Birth of Christ
• The bodily resurrection and physical return of Christ
• The substitutionary atonement of Christ on the cross

By the late 1920s the first two points had become central to Fundamentalism. A fourth strand was the growing concern among many evangelical Christians with modernism and the higher criticism of the Bible. This strand concentrated on opposition to Darwinism. A fifth strand was the strong sense of the need for public revivals, a common theme among many Evangelicals who did not become Fundamentalists. Numerous efforts to form coordinating bodies failed, and the most influential treatise came much later, in Systematic Theology (1947) by Lewis S. Chafer, who founded the Dallas Theological Seminary in 1924.

Martin E. Marty has written that within Catholicism, the movement has stressed "items that will 'stand out,' such as Mass in Latin, opposition to women priests, optional clerical celibacy, or support for dismissals of 'artificial birth control.'" The Society of St. Pius X, a product of Lefebvre, is stronghold for Catholic fundamentalism.

Much of the enthusiasm for mobilizing Fundamentalism came from "Bible Colleges", especially those modeled after the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Dwight Moody was influential in preaching the imminence of the Kingdom of God that was so important to dispensationalism. The Bible colleges prepared ministers who lacked college or seminary experience with intense study of the Bible, often using the Scofield Reference Bible of 1909, which was the King James version with detailed notes explaining how to interpret Dispensationalist passages.