Liberalism and fundamentalism

A new century's question and the social gospel

Around 1900 the churches of America and Britain faced a new world. Factories swelled the cities, and families arriving from Europe and the countryside crowded into tenements, worked long hours for little pay, and sent their children into the mills. In the universities, Darwin's theory of evolution and the historical criticism of the Bible, whose roots are traced in The Enlightenment and modern theology, were changing how educated people read Scripture. Every pulpit felt the question: should the church restate its faith so that modern people could hear it, or should it above all keep the faith it had received?

Those who took the first path came to be called liberals or modernists. Like Ritschl and Harnack before them, they found the heart of Christianity less in doctrines than in the life and teaching of Jesus: trusting God as Father and loving one's neighbour. God, they said, works within nature and history, so faith need not fear what science discovers. Grieved to see thoughtful people drifting from the church, they wanted to show that one could accept honest scholarship and still follow Christ.

The warmest fruit of the movement was the social gospel. Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918), son of a German-born Baptist professor at Rochester Theological Seminary in New York State, became pastor in 1886 of a small German Baptist church on the edge of Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen slum. He had gone to save souls; but meeting men who could find no work and burying children who died of poverty, he came to see, as he later recalled, that the conditions crushing his people were also the gospel's business. Eleven years later he returned to Rochester to teach, and Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) made his name.

A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917), given first as lectures at Yale, gathered his thought into a theology Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel. Sin, he argued, lives not only in single hearts: greed and exploitation settle into institutions and customs, are handed down, and form what he called a kingdom of evil. Salvation must therefore reach the social order as well as the soul, and the kingdom of God is the whole of human life ordered by God's will, a society ruled by justice and love. Yet he insisted that the social gospel did not discard the old message of salvation; it widened and deepened it.

He began from the Hebrew prophets' cry for justice and from the prayer Jesus taught: "Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 6:10). Ministers who shared his vision worked against child labour and for shorter hours and a living wage. He was himself a man of prayer who published a book of prayers in 1910, and he died in 1918 while the land of his birth and the land of his fathers were at war.

The Fundamentals

Other Protestants were convinced that the old faith itself was being given away. Between 1910 and 1915 twelve slim volumes called The Fundamentals gave their answer Dixon and Torrey (eds.), The Fundamentals. Two Californian oilmen, the brothers Lyman and Milton Stewart, paid for them; A. C. Dixon, R. A. Torrey and others edited them; and some three million copies are said to have gone free to pastors, missionaries and students across the English-speaking world. Their ninety essays defended the inspiration and authority of Scripture, the virgin birth and deity of Christ, his atoning death for sinners, his bodily resurrection and his return, and answered the higher criticism. The writers, British and American, included scholars such as B. B. Warfield of Princeton and the Scot James Orr, and many historians find the tone largely calm and measured.

In 1920 Curtis Lee Laws, editor of the Baptist weekly the Watchman-Examiner, proposed calling those ready to fight for these fundamentals ‘fundamentalists’, and many conservatives took up the name gladly. Fundamentalism was a movement across the denominations, not a church of its own, and many within it awaited Christ's return in the framework of dispensationalism. In Britain the conflict was quieter, but it was there: in 1910 the Christian Union at Cambridge broke from the Student Christian Movement, judging that it had drifted from the centre of the gospel.

In May 1922 the Baptist preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, from the pulpit of New York's First Presbyterian Church, asked ‘Shall the Fundamentalists Win?’ He pleaded for a tolerant church with room for Christians who could not affirm the virgin birth or the inerrancy of Scripture.

Machen: no other gospel

The most searching voice in the controversy belonged to J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937), who taught the New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. As a young man studying in Germany he had been deeply drawn by the warm piety of the liberal theologian Wilhelm Herrmann, and for a time he wrestled with doubt; he knew liberalism at its best, from the inside. In Christianity and Liberalism (1923) he argued that liberalism keeps Christian words while filling them with other meanings, and so is not a variety of Christianity but a different religion Machen, Christianity and Liberalism.

He turned to Galatians. The teachers unsettling the Galatian churches confessed Jesus as Messiah, but they added the works of the law to faith. Paul answered:

I am amazed how quickly you are deserting the One who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel — which is not even a gospel. Evidently some people are troubling you and trying to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be under a curse! As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be under a curse!

Galatians 1:6-9

Paul spoke so sharply, Machen argued, because the gospel is not advice about what we must do but news of what God has done. What Paul handed on was this: "Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). That Christ died is history; that he died for our sins is doctrine, the meaning God gives the event; take away either and there is no gospel. In Machen's own words, "liberalism is altogether in the imperative mood, while Christianity begins with a triumphant indicative" Machen.

Wesley had said of the Galatian error that it was "not glad, but heavy, tidings, as setting your acceptance with God upon terms impossible to be performed" Wesley. Matthew Henry, on Paul's summary of the gospel, wrote: "The doctrine of Christ's death and resurrection, is the foundation of Christianity" Matthew Henry. And Machen received the Bible that carries this news not as a record of human religious experience but as God's word. With the Princeton theologians before him he leaned on Paul's "All Scripture is God-breathed" (2 Timothy 3:16) and taught that Scripture is without error; the doctrine is taught in The inspiration and authority of Scripture and the Reformed Faith course's Scripture alone.

Yet Machen never liked being called a fundamentalist. He was no dispensationalist but a Presbyterian of the Westminster Confession, and he warned the church against retreating from learning. Meanwhile, in 1925, John Scopes, a teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, was convicted of teaching evolution in a public school, yet the press coverage of his trial painted fundamentalists as backward country people afraid of learning, and that picture long outlived the verdict.

In 1929 the General Assembly reorganised the governing boards of Princeton Seminary so that the school would reflect the range of views within the denomination. Machen and several colleagues saw this as the end of the old Princeton, and that autumn they founded Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. After he was disciplined for refusing the church's order to leave an independent mission board he had helped to found, Machen and those who stood with him formed a new Presbyterian church in 1936, later named the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He died on the first day of 1937.

Weighed by Scripture

The liberals and the social gospel held on to things Scripture holds dear. Care for the poor is no modern invention: "If anyone with earthly possessions sees his brother in need, but withholds his compassion from him, how can the love of God abide in him?" (1 John 3:17). Rauschenbusch saw that sin can be built into institutions as well as lodged in hearts, and the liberals did not run from hard questions.

Yet evangelicals judged that the price was too high. The gospel turned from news of what God has done into an ethic of what we must do, and for many the virgin birth, the atonement and the resurrection became optional. The hope that humanity was steadily building the kingdom on earth broke on the battlefields of 1914, as the next lesson, Barth and neo-orthodoxy, tells.

The fundamentalists rightly kept the historical facts of the gospel and the authority of Scripture, and the Bible schools, mission agencies and radio broadcasts they built handed that faith to a new generation. But long conflict narrowed them. Many came to require separation not only from denominations they judged unfaithful but also from believers who stayed in them, and they divided again and again; the church Machen helped to found split the very next year. Reacting against the social gospel, some grew suspicious of social concern itself, and many withdrew from scholarship and public life.

After 1940 younger evangelicals kept the fundamentalists' confession but set out to leave this narrowing behind, a story that continues in Evangelicalism and world mission. The same questions reached the Korean churches too (The Korean church in the twentieth century).

What this history leaves us is not a choice between the gospel and the poor. The gospel is first the news of what God has done in Christ, and the faith that receives it is "faith expressing itself through love" (Galatians 5:6). Holding fast to the gospel's facts and caring for a brother in need do not compete. Today ‘fundamentalism’ is often used of militant movements in many religions, but it began as a name Protestants chose for themselves, meaning to keep the fundamentals of the gospel.

Practice