Certain differences do still exist between historic Fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals. Fundamentalists, in contrast to Conservative evangelicals, tend to align more with dispensationalism and cessationism.
Fundamentalists tend to react against contemporary popular culture, while many conservative evangelicals embrace it. Perhaps most importantly, Fundamentalists make a clean break with the leadership of anti-separatist evangelicals, while conservative evangelicals continue to accommodate or at least refuse to challenge their leadership.
Because of these differences, we do not believe that complete cooperation with conservative evangelicalism is desirable. Nevertheless, we find that we have much more in common with conservative evangelicals who are slightly to our Left than we do with hyper-Fundamentalists who are considerably to our Right , or even with revivalistic Fundamentalists who are often in our back yard. In conservative evangelicals we find allies who are willing to challenge not only the compromise of the gospel on the Left, but also the pragmatic approach to Christianity that typifies so many evangelicals and Fundamentalists.
For this reason, we believe that careful, limited forms of fellowship are possible. We wish to be used to restate, refine, and strengthen biblical Fundamentalism. The process of restatement includes not only defining what a thing is, but also saying what it is not. The only way to strengthen Fundamentalism is to speak out against some self-identified Fundamentalists.
On the other hand, while we may express disagreement with aspects of conservative evangelicalism just as we may express disagreement with one another , we wish to affirm and to strengthen the activity of conservative evangelicals in restoring the gospel to its rightful place.
These are features of an authentic Fundamentalism that we all feel is worth saving. His community saw evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit in their experience of speaking in tongues—as at the first Pentecost. Pentecostalism became a widespread phenomenon in the wake of an interracial revival in led by William J. Within a decade, Pentecostalism gave rise to two new denominations: the predominantly black Church of God in Christ and the predominantly white Assemblies of God.
By the s, the loose affiliation of Assemblies of God churches had become virtually a denomination, increasingly multiracial and with large Hispanic congregations. Pentecostalism experienced extraordinary growth in the middle of the 20th century with the building of mega-churches, the emergence of media evangelists, and the creation of a loose network of membership that is estimated in the tens of millions.
La Jolla Playhouse unveils first four shows of season. Dining and Drinking. Camino Riviera and The Waverly: Two new restaurants, two new cuisines, one chef. In the campaign for president, the candidate who publicly acknowledged Jesus Christ as lord and savior was Barack Obama, not John McCain.
Harry Emerson Fosdick was one of the titans of the 20th-century American pulpit. Fosdick and William Jennings Bryan were at the center of the great fundamentalist-modernist debate, which has long disappeared from the front pages of our newspapers, but it is still with us, as the number of fundamentalists is greater now than ever before.
What then is Christian fundamentalism? At its core, it argues the Bible is inerrant, without error; that every word and every verse of every chapter in every book of the Old and New Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation, is literally true. Hence, by that act of composition, the Bible is, they contend, without error.
To a non-Christian, a nonfaith, nonreligious person, why should it matter? Verbal inspiration, plenary inspiration, fundamentalist, evangelical, modernist, orthodox, who cares? So it gets complicated. So why is this even an important question?
Simply that, at least here in the good old U. The story has been told over and over again by scholars such as George Marsden, Mark Noll and Joel Carpenter to name just a few. Put another way, fundamentalists are evangelicals, but since the s, at least, there are many evangelicals who are not fundamentalists. I claim that my ethos is not essentially different from the evangelical ethos I learned and came to embrace in seminary North American Baptist Seminary in the s.
All of us, as evangelical Protestant Christians, believe in 1 the supreme authority of inspired Scripture for faith and practice, 2 basic Christian orthodoxy as embodied in the consensus of the church fathers and reformers about the deity and humanity of Jesus Christ, the Trinity, etc. Who were these post fundamentalists? Rice and the early Jerry Falwell. And many, many more. Most of them were non-Reformed, but there was a Reformed camp of fundamentalists who shared that ethos without premillennialism.
I would locate Cornelius Van Til there. How did the postfundamentalist evangelicals differ from them? Beginning in the s and increasingly throughout the s former self-identified fundamentalists began to shy away from that identity and ethos without embracing liberalism or neo-orthodoxy. In other words, the main difference between the new evangelicals and the fundamentalists was one of ethos—at least from the new evangelical point of view.
From the fundamentalist point of view, of course, the difference was more than one of ethos. It was often viewed as one of departure from the gospel.
The new evangelicalism was to be a broad tent that included everyone from conservative Presbyterians to Pentecostals to Advent Christians to Nazarenes to recently the Worldwide Church of God. Fundamentalists were invited to join but declined. Still, formally speaking, fundamentalists are evangelicals and, to liberals, anyway, all evangelicals are fundamentalists.
As an heir of and scholar working within the new evangelicalism movement I have found it necessary to warn fellow new evangelicals about a neo-fundamentalism taking shape and growing among us.
Why does it matter? Why do I and others bother to sound the warning alarm about this? Because much is at stake.
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