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II TIMOTHY 2:15 Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.

II TIMOTHY 1:13 Hold fast the form of sound words, which thou hast heard of me, in faith and love which is in Christ Jesus.

I THESSALONIANS 5:21 Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.

REVELATION 2:25 But that which ye have already hold fast till I come.

In these 4 verses of scripture, we have a very important truth that desperately needs to be understood in our day. In taking a view of the 4 verses, we find the commands to study, hold fast and prove all things hold what we already have.

One of the great themes of the New Testament is the importance of taking care to maintain truth in the face of attacks that come from every direction. It is a theme common to all of the scriptures but is emphasized in the “second” books like II Corinthians, II Thessalonians, II Timothy and II Peter. We are constantly warned that attacks on truth will often come from unexpected sources. Jude 4 “For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ.”

The Biblical antidote for apostasy is to diligently study the Word of God, not to find new truth but to solidify and under gird the understanding of that which we already have. It isn’t glamorous but the best way to avoid false teaching is to constantly review and remember that which we already know.

As things have played out in the New Testament era, the great enemies of the gospel have often been within more than from the outside and often they are not false teachers so much as they are well intentioned people who have not learned those things already known. I believe that we witnessed such a phenomena in the 20th Century that still continues today and because it does, it is time that we sound the alarm for the enemy within.

Why I am no longer and maybe never was, a Fundamentalist.

Now before you decide that I have become absolutely apostate and have left the faith, allow me to say that I still believe the “fundamentals.” I believe in the inspiration and authority of scripture (KJV). I believe in the virgin birth, sinless life, vicarious death, burial and resurrection of Christ. I believe in the Trinity, the blood atonement, the imminent return of Christ and that God is the creator and sustainer of the universe.

In short, I still hold to the fundamentals, but I am not a fundamentalist.

The first thing that we need clear up is that the term “fundamentalist” does not mean a person who holds to the historical Christian faith. Far from it. Fundamentalism was a movement that developed out of the turmoil of the late 19^th Century in which much of the historical Christian faith was deemed to be unimportant so long as a handful of “fundamentals” were kept. Fundamentalism began as a reactionary movement. What I hope to show is that “Fundamentalism” and Historical Christianity are not the same.

Then too, I need to point out that this statement has nothing to do with the principles that Billy Graham, Vernon Grounds and others used to establish what they called “Neo-evangelicalism” a few years ago. What they did was to establish an off shoot of fundamentalism denouncing what they perceived to be the “stigma” that came with fundamentalism while maintaining the basic position. To this observer, they only attempted to rename it and hope to get a better reaction from the lost.

No, I am not renaming anything. As I have studied fundamentalism in the light of Scripture and historical Christianity, I have determined that I not only am not now, but I may never have been a fundamentalist.

And this statement begs the question, “Why?” “How can a person say that he is not a fundamentalist when he believes in the fundamentals?”

That is a fair question and one I will attempt to answer.

By the turn of the 20^th Century, historical Christianity in America was under siege as perhaps it had never been before. The attacks were coming from every direction and every blow was devastating. After the War Between the States, the nation was “reconstructed” in a manner completely foreign to and in opposition to the religious principles upon which the nation had been founded. Beginning with Abraham Lincoln, we had 6 Republican presidents each seeming to try and outdo those who had gone before him in regards to the destruction of the Christian principles upon which the nation was founded. It seemed that every political doctrine founded on the Bible was attacked and eventually abandoned.

Even our foundational liberties were under attack. Things got so bad that preachers in some areas, were required to sign loyalty oaths and if a pastor refused to sign such, he was beaten or jailed. These abuses are not widely reported today but there are documented cases where they did take place and probably would have taken place more often had not so many Christians compromised with the tyrants rather than opposing them.

During this time we became an industrial nation with men like J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller amassing great fortunes. In fact, I have read that during this time 90% of the wealth of the nation came to be in the control of less than 2% of the people in the nation leaving 98% of the people to fight over 10% of the wealth. Whether or not these statistics are exactly true, the fact is that we went from being a nation without poverty and without extreme wealth to being a nation with both and Christianity was left to deal with the problems that attend both.

These things were serious and would have been devastating if they were the only attacks coming. However, these were only the catalyst for some far more sinister attacks. The devastation done in some of these other attacks was immeasurable, and although these attacks seemed to come as a series of unrelated issues, their cumulative effect was that of a set of carefully choreographed and sequenced attacks.

The first of the attacks I will mention, and I give these in no particular chronological order, was that of Charles Darwin with his theory of evolution. Although no reputable scientist holds to the Darwinian model today, his “Origin of the Species” was a bombshell when it came out. Christians had always assumed the Biblical account to be accurate and had paid little or no attention to the actual mechanic by which God had created the heavens and the earth. The only thing that mattered was that God did create out of nothing and because He did so, He was the sovereign God before whom all of us would someday stand. Now, that very foundational truth was under attack. Christians were “blindsided” by this attack and soon it seemed that the entire world of science embraced Darwin and mocked the Bible believer making him out to be an ignorant buffoon.

Then, Karl Marx wrote “The Communist Manifesto” and in it he outlined the premises of having government and economics without any accountability to God whatsoever. Our founding fathers, some who were not even believers, would not have considered forming a government without asking for the blessing of divine providence. Suddenly there was a political theory that presented the possibility of government, not only without asking for divine guidance, but capable of operating completely outside of any acknowledgement of the existence of God. The term “secular” was introduced into the political arena and both Republicans and Democrats seemed determined to add as many of these principles as they could to their respective platforms. Christians who would try to maintain the Biblical principles of government were ridiculed as relics of another age.

Sigmund Freud developed Psychology so that we could learn about the mind, find forgiveness for our transgressions and live happy lives without going thru God. No longer was man a sinner in need of salvation, he was basically good and it was society, especially that part of society that would detract from a positive self-image, that needed to be corrected.

In education, John Dewey developed a system that would make God irrelevant to the classroom. God could be left completely out and it would not make any difference so far as Dewey and his followers were concerned. Again the guise of secularism, was used and the public school system became a training ground for people who would do good without God.

In religion, Unitarianism whose denial of the deity of Christ had stirred up the nation into such a fury that they started a war that killed 650,000 people, gave way to liberalism which denied the existence of a God at all. They could have a Christianity without Christ and now they wanted a religion without a supreme being.

Each of these attacks appeared to be independent of one another but in reality they were totally and completely helpless to exist without one another. You can’t have communism without evolution. Psychology depends on education without God, etc. And so in time the aggregate attack on Biblical Christianity was something beyond anything Christians were prepared to deal with.

To be sure, it is easy to sit in the 21^st Century and criticize our forebears for the directions in which they took Christianity. After all, we have a real advantage in several areas. Men like Dr. Henry Morris and Dr. John Whitcomb have completely and totally blown Darwinianism out of the water. Jay Adams and the Nouthetic Counselors have shown that Biblical counseling is far more effective than Psychology. Christian schools and home schools have shown the humanistic education system to be completely and utterly failed in giving a quality education. Indeed, God has raised up men to take on some of the individual “tentacles” of this “octopus” that has attacked us making it easy for us to wonder how they could have ever been so fooled. But we need to be careful.

To say that there was an all out attack on historical Christianity would be the understatement of the century. The attacks were coming from every side and they did not have the Creation Scientists, the Nouthetic counselors or the Christian educators to help them along. The attacks of that day, no doubt, left many a Bible believer in a daze wondering and what would come next and if he was the only one who had not “bowed the knee to Baal.”

But if the attacks of the enemy from the “outside” were not enough, they also came from within. Biblical Christianity was under attack from the “Pietists.” These were people who “majored on minors” often ignoring the major tenants of Christianity only to go to seed on issues that had no real importance whatsoever.

One example of people with Pietist thought were the Abolitionists who believed that the abolishment of slavery and the doing away of alcohol would bring in the Kingdom of God. Another was the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, who believed that all of the ills of our nation could be traced to alcohol and if we were to abolish the manufacture and sale of alcohol all of our problems would be solved.

It is important that we emphasize the difficulty of the day because otherwise it would be easy to sit back with a critical spirit, one that would say, “Had I been there, I would never have done what they did.” I don’t think that there is any question that the majority of Bible believers in that day did what they did believing that they were doing the best thing. However, hindsight, being what it is, will show that what they did in response to all of the attacks was not the Biblical thing to do.

At any rate, it was out of all of this that Fundamentalism was born. It is difficult to know just when Fundamentalism started but for sake of our discussion we will use the books by the Stewart Brothers entitled “The Fundamentals” as our starting point. When Lyman and Milton Stewart sent out their series of books to every pastor, Sunday school teacher and Christian worker they could find, they at least gave a name to a new movement. The premise of this movement was to marginalize every issue except the very most basic issues of Christianity.

To give you an idea of how much the Fundamentalists tried to cut down on the issues of Christianity, we can compare the “fundamentals” with the London Baptist Confession of 1689. In that year, the Baptists of England got together and established some 31 planks, each with several sub points, as the issues that they agreed upon. The Presbyterians had a similar document, “The Westminster Confession of Faith.” These “confessional groups” chose a very broad basis for fellowship.

In contrast, the Fundamentalists chose to take all of these issues and narrowed them down to about 5 or 6 issues and basically said that the rest were not worth making any fuss over. They narrowed Christianity to the lowest common denominator. In essence, the Fundamentalists established the “minimum standards” for Christianity in an attempt to become as inclusive as they could.

Fundamentalism changed the emphasis of Christianity from revival to evangelism. To see the difference, one needs to look at the difference between the results of the preaching during the Great Awakening and that of the early Fundamentalists. When Edwards, Whitfield and the great preachers of the Great Awakening preached, in time the Colonies were turned to a Biblical basis for government, economics, education and every area of life. The early Fundamentalists were only interested in “nickels and noses.” They cared not a whit for government, or economics so long as souls were being saved and Christians ceased to drink and smoke. Christian colleges and Bible Institutes were built but many included Psychology departments and taught The Gap Theory or other compromises in their science departments. Calling the world a “sinking ship” they were, in many cases, content to turn everything over to the devil so long as souls were being saved..

You will see more clearly how this compromise was so devastating as we look into some of the things that Fundamentalism marginalized. Several years ago, when I first began to think about this issue, I realized that they left out, counted as unimportant. the Baptist Distinctives.

BAPTISM BY IMMERSION FOR ADULTS

A REGENERATE CHURCH MEMBERSHIP

THE LORD’S SUPPER AN ORDINANCE NOT A SACRAMENT

SOUL LIBERTY

THE AUTONOMY OF THE LOCAL CHURCH

I am a Baptist!

Down through the centuries Baptists have suffered and even died because they held to these doctrines. You would be hard pressed to find anyone in history who died for any of the “fundamentals,” but history stands replete with the testimonies of those who suffered and died because they held to adult baptism, the autonomy of the local Church etc.

I would not want to ascribe any sinister motive to the founders of fundamentalism, but in truth, they were saying that our Baptist forebears suffered and died for unimportant “peripheral” issues. The things that they died for were not worth dying for!

You will pardon me, but I have a problem with that. I am not prepared to tell the Pilgrims who suffered great deprivations and even death because they believed in the Autonomy of the Local Church. I am not prepared to try to explain to John Bunyan that he was wrong in spending 12 years in Bedford jail because he believed in the Priesthood of the Believer. And I could spend a lot more time on this point, but I don’t want to belabor it.

Over the years I have watched as the name “Baptist” has fallen into disrespect by many both within and without. There are many who call themselves “Baptist” who know nothing of the distinctives or the history of the Baptists and so it is easy for them to discount the importance of these issues. But I still hold to the historical Baptist positions that Fundamentalism leaves out.

But it is not only the Baptist Distinctives that were left out. Fundamentalism determined that the purpose for man being on the earth was unimportant. The Baptist Catechism began with the question, “What is the chief end of man?” The answer is, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.” By saying that this was not important, Fundamentalism opened the door to those who believe that “soulwinning” is the chief end of man and that has opened the door to unbelievable compromises to the point where Contemporary Christian Music is as sensual as anything in the nightclub.

There are many other doctrines that we could and perhaps should deal with but I hope that my point that there are and were some major doctrines left out by Fundamentalism has been sufficiently substantiated.

At the same time, the narrowing of Fundamentalism opened the doors to some groups who would never have been known as Orthodox in historical circles. For example, Pentecostalism. The Pentecostals qualify as “Fundamentalists” and have been embraced by Fundamentalism. However, their doctrine of Salvation where it is a mixture of grace and works, saved by grace, kept by works, has no basis in historical Christianity. Their “God on a leash” position that our actions manipulate God and what He does is equally contrary to historical teachings. Their Pharisaical attention to dress and hair would qualify them as pietists but not as historical Christians. And of course, women preachers, which are today, the mark of liberalism and feminism, have their roots in Fundamentalism because of this movement.

But I suppose that nowhere did Fundamentalism do a better job of straining at gnats and swallowing camels than it did in the matter of alcohol. Now remember, this is a day when Liberalism, Evolution, Psychology, Communism, etc, were pushing God out of every area of life, but the great preachers of Fundamentalism like Billy Sunday could find nothing more to preach on than booze. Even if you believe in total abstinence and that there is not even a medicinal purpose for alcohol, the alcohol problem is a minor one compared to the other problems that went unchallenged in that day.

Fundamentalists piously removed themselves from music, art and culture. These things were declared to be “worldly” and “secular” and as such beneath any possibility of Fundamentalist involvement. Fundamentalists now bewail the fact that music, art and culture have become almost completely pagan, base and corrupt, blaming the ungodly without recognizing that at least part of the cause for our demise in these areas is because we refused to take part in the them. Because Fundamentalists refused to be “salty” they wicked have been able to take over with little resistance.

Another reason why I no longer want to be called “Fundamentalist” is because of the political agenda that Fundamentalism has embraced. Although many would deny it, there has, from the beginning, been a political agenda for Fundamentalists and it has not been a Biblical agenda.

The father of the Fundamentalist political agenda would have to be William Jennings Bryan. I intend to write a more complete account of his political agenda in the near future but for sake of the present discussion, I will limit my comments to just the Constitutional amendments that began as his ideas.

According to his autobiography which he was working on when he died, Bryan was the originator of the ideas behind the 16^th, 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th Amendments to the Constitution of the United States. These amendments would be for Income Tax, Popular Election of Senators, Prohibition and Women’s Suffrage. Even a cursory understanding of these amendments would leave historical Christianity wondering how a Christian could ever embrace such wickedness.

Yes even the 18^th amendment was wicked as clearly yet briefly seen by the following.

When the Constitution was written is was the law for the government and there was no provision in it that the common citizen could violate. This changed with the 18^th Amendment as anyone involved in the manufacture or sale of alcohol was considered to be outside of the law. The sinister nature of this is the fact that a police force had to be created in order to enforce this new “law.” I am not a lawyer, but as I understand the issue, the BATF, IRS, CIA and all of the other alphabet soup federal police forces find their legal basis in the 18^th Amendment.

At the very least, one has to admit that the political agenda of Bryan was clearly no longer the political agenda that our Christian forebears had fought so hard to bring about. As the enemy swept in like a flood, the Fundamentalist reaction was not to go back to Biblical patterns of government but to try and “Christianize” the various non-Christian political agendas that were taking over. Remember once again, our nation was reeling from the attacks of the various “godless” groups who were taking over but Fundamentalism did not answer with historically Biblical political philosophy, but with attempts to “Christianize” Marxism,

After Bryan, Fundamentalism seemed to withdraw from the political arena, declaring it to be “secular” and purposing to have nothing to do with it. And then, in the late 70’s and early 80’s we had the birth of the Moral Majority. Here was Fundamentalism attempting to impact the political process. However, as in so many other ways, the Fundamentalist solution was no more Biblical than the humanistic problem it was trying to fix.

The Moral Majority:

Elected first divorced President

Elected second President who governed thru a medium

Elected first President to bring Sodomites into White House

Elected three “tax and spend” Presidents

Elected first President to padlock a Church

Elected first President to bow to a Shinto Shrine

Not one of the “Moral Presidents” has turned a hand to stop abortion or do anything else to turn America back to righteousness and even when legislation has been proposed on such issues, it has usually been unbiblical and foreign to what our forebears gave us. In short, the political agenda of Fundamentalism has been unbiblical and has created infinitely more problems that it has solved. And the amazing thing to me is that even after 100 years of failure, most Fundamentalists have not a hare’s notion of the contradictions they have created

I often wonder how people who name the name of Christ could be so ignorant and then I am reminded that for many Fundamentalists, “Ignorance is next to Godliness.” I have heard men who seem to believe that it is a sin to ever study, especially if that study involves the reading of a book other than the Bible. Pastors are sent to preach with little or no formal training

When you look at historical Christianity, you find that education was of primary importance, especially in the leadership. It was recently pointed out that perhaps the reason the Ana-Baptists got into such false teachings and practices was that the educated leadership was martyred very early leaving the movement open to false teachings and practices that eventually destroyed its effectiveness.

The enemy has not had to martyr the leadership of much of Fundamentalism. With a few notable exceptions, Fundamentalism has been very proud of its ignorance, fearing education and choosing to enter the battle of wits only half armed. And even where there has been the attempt to educate, it has often not been a Biblically based education. For example, most Bible Colleges and Institutes have Psychology departments and often the social worker who is working so hard against the home is a graduate of a Fundamentalists school. Some will teach the economics of the sodomite, Lord John Maynard Keynes rather than a Biblical economic system. The science departments teach the gap theory or other compromises, the history departments teach from an Abolitionist point of view.

Because of this unbiblical teaching or no teaching at all, the average Fundamentalist winds up being a “knee jerk reactionary” being easily maneuvered from one position to another. I recently heard a man speak at a home school convention from Bryan University who presented a world view quite different from that of William Jennings Bryan. I talked to the man in the hallway after his speech and to remind him how different his positions were from those of Bryan. He answered me by telling me that there would only be about 3 professors at that University who would vote for Bryan if were running for office today!

Finally, I suppose that the greatest problem with Fundamentalism is in the fact that it has accomplished just the opposite of what it set out to do in the beginning. Remember, the purpose of marginalizing so many historical beliefs was to limit differences and allow for unity in facing the enemy. In reality however, just the opposite has happened. The lack of broad based teaching has opened the door to ignorance and false teachings and practices have entered like a flood. Fundamentalism has been the “dumbing down” of Christianity. The result of this “dumbing down” has been the splintering of Christianity rather than the unifying of it.

Whether it be eschatology, ecclesiology or whatever “ology” you can imagine, Christianity has splintered a thousand ways. Crazy notions and silly ideas are held to with maniacal fervor while historical beliefs are marginalized. If you think the Medieval Monks were silly for arguing the number of angles who could stand on the head of a pin, what do you do with the Fundamentalists who devise creative formulas to determine the number of people who will be taken in The Rapture or those who argue if and when it will take place. There are those who argue that Christians will have to spend time in Hell before getting to heaven, or declaring Sadaam Hussein to been the anti-Christ and on and on.

Historically, Christians have always had their differences, and sometimes those differences have been over things that weren’t really big. From the vantage point of the 21^st Century, it is hard, for example, to imagine people killing others if they wanted to be re-baptized. It is even harder to imagine people willing to die to be re-baptized.

Those who first developed the concept of Fundamentalism did so because they wanted to be able to present a unified front against a unified enemy but it is hard to imagine a time when the differences were sharper or more serious among Christians than today. The attempt to unite by limiting important doctrines has created division beyond belief. We are splintered into a thousand points of darkness, each claiming to be light but only adding to the darkness.

Allow me to say then, that in light of these things, “I am not, (and maybe never was) a Fundamentalist.”