The Fundamental Weakness of Fundamentalism - Glenn Conjurske

The Fundamental Weakness of Fundamentalism

by Glenn Conjurske

That there are many weaknesses in the Fundamentalism of the present day I have no doubt. It is shallow. It is worldly. It is drifting. All of this no doubt. But I do not here speak of such weaknesses, nor of any weaknesses which the movement may have acquired over the years. I speak of the defect in the foundation of Fundamentalism, the weakness which has always belonged to the movement.

The weakness of Fundamentalism appears in its very name. What is Fundamentalism? It is a stand for the Fundamentals of the faith, and a stand which from the beginning has been a response and a reaction to a denial of those Fundamentals. That stand, of course, is altogether proper and necessary, but in the nature of the case it has always come a generation too late. The Fundamentalist movement may be best likened to a fire department. It never responds till the alarm is sounded, and the alarm is never sounded until the house is on fire. It takes no steps to prevent fires. The children playing with matches are ignored. They do not constitute a denial of the Fundamentals. The open containers of gasoline are ignored. They are consistent with orthodoxy. The fuel oil dripping from the leak in the line is ignored. It is a good pipe-line, and Professor So-and-so is a good man. The tinder piled against the stove may meet a mild protest from certain “heresy-hunters,” but still it is generally ignored. The house is not on fire yet, and the protester is likely to meet with harder fare than the men who piled the tinder against the stove. The fire department has nothing to do with any of this. The fire fighters sit at rest in their citadel, playing cards and smoking their pipes, in blissful ignorance of the causes of fire which prevail in the town. They have nothing to do until the smoke is smelled and the flames are seen. Then we shall hear bells and sirens and cries of “Fire,” and we shall all commend each other as good whistle-blowers, good fire fighters, good Fundamentalists.

Thus it was with Fundamentalism from the beginning. The movement did not exist until the Fundamentals were denied. And denied by whom? Denied by the preachers and teachers with whom the Fundamentalists had been, till that moment, working together in happy concord. For those who fail to see the significance of this, allow me to explain:

The denial of the Fundamentals of the faith is not the first step in the ladder of spiritual decline. It is one of the last steps. A man who denies the Fundamentals of the faith is near the bottom of the ladder. The denial of the Fundamentals comes only as the result of a long course of spiritual decline. It is not men who are spiritual one day, who deny the Fundamentals the next day. Nothing of the sort. The Fundamentals are denied by men who have taken a long course of spiritual decline, a long departure from zeal and devotedness to Christ, a long farewell to spiritual Christianity—-or at any rate by men who never had any spirituality to start with. The Fundamentals are denied by men who have long embraced worldliness in one form or another, whether its scholarship, its honors, its wealth, or its approval. And all this while the Fundamentalists have worked hand in hand with these men, and never perceived their decline, for they were orthodox. They were Fundamentalists.

I have previously rehearsed an illustration of this, in the case of John Murdock MacInnis.1 Here was a man whose doctrine and spirit were so obviously dictated by the world—-so absolutely unspiritual—-that we must really stretch the imagination to suppose that he was a Christian at all. Yet he was engaged in teaching the young Fundamentalists at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles—-which till very lately had been under the superintendance of R. A. Torrey—-and apparently under no suspicion of anything. When at length he published a book in which he touched the foundations—-very gingerly, of course—-he was immediately called to account, and eventually dismissed. His modernism they would not brook, but apparently no one so much as noticed his reeking worldliness and unspirituality.

Here is the fundamental weakness of Fundamentalism. The movement is not and never has been a stand for spirituality, but only for orthodoxy. It is, and always has been, a stand for the bare bones of Christianity. Understand, the term “fundamentals” designates the foundations of Christianity. It designates those things without which Christianity itself cannot exist. Fundamentalism did not come into being to keep the church healthy, but only to keep it alive. When the church has descended so low that it can sink no lower without ceasing to be Christian at all, then Fundamentalism has aroused itself from its slumber, raised its voice, and cried “Fire.” Everything else was gone already. The roof was gone long ago. The doors were taken from the hinges and carried away. The windows were broken out. The walls were dismantled before their eyes, and Fundamentalists raised no alarm at any of this. Ah! but when the foundation was touched, the sleeping giant stood up and fought. The protests were long and loud and vigorous—-but they were a generation too late.

The protests ought to have come when the first shingle of the roof was touched—-when spirituality declined, when zeal was cooled, when fervor was replaced with sophistication, when materialism made its first inroads into the church, when intellectual college professors were admired above warm-hearted evangelists, when kites and bubble gum and bus routes were brought in to replace the departed power of the Holy Ghost, when standards of personal righteousness were lowered, when the approval of the world was courted with degrees and accreditation, when evolution was toyed with, when the music of the church was patterned after that of the world, when worldly fashions were followed in dress, when the prayer-meeting attendance declined, when the novel and the newspaper replaced spiritual literature. But Fundamentalism has always been a stop-gap movement. It took no decisive action till the foundations were attacked. The dismantling of the house ought to have been a major concern, but it was scarcely perceived, or at any rate little regarded.

Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean to say that there have been no protests over such things. There have been, and some of them noble and spiritual, but those protests never belonged to the essence of Fundamentalism, nor have they ever been anything other than spasmodic and inconsistent. The man who questions “eternal security” or Scofield dispensationalism will receive more censure than the man who watches soap operas—-if the latter receives any censure at all. Meanwhile, the dry-eyed intellectual is as much a Fundamentalist as the weeping prophet. The dead church is as Fundamental as the living one. The worldly church is as Fundamental as the spiritual one. The man who pursues an education at the hands of ungodly or unspiritual men is as much a Fundamentalist as the man who is taught of God in the back side of the desert. The preacher who plays golf and watches television is as much a Fundamentalist as the one who prays and knocks on doors to win souls. The man who reads Karl Barth is as much a Fundamentalist as the man who reads John Wesley, so long as he does not deny the Fundamentals. The man who will deny the Fundamentals tomorrow is as much a Fundamentalist today as the man who will die for them. In principle Fundamentalism is nothing more than a defense of the foundations of Christianity, and in fact Fundamentalism did not come into existence until the foundations were denied.

Suppose now that the protests of the Fundamentalists were always entirely successful. Suppose that they always resulted in the purging out of every trace of modernism, from the church, the school, or the denomination in which it had been entrenched. What would be the worth of such success? What would actually be accomplished by it? It would raise the movement back to the next highest rung on the ladder—-raise it one step above the denial of the foundations of Christianity. When that is done, the Fundamentalists rest content, assuring themselves that all is well, and this institution is now solidly Fundamental. And perhaps it is so, but what is such a victory actually worth? The institution is now Fundamental, but the worldliness is not purged out, the lukewarmness is not purged out, those who are enamored with worldly scholarship are not purged out, those who shun the reproach of Christ are not purged out. In short, none of those things which for a generation paved the way and created the atmosphere for the denial of the Fundamentals are purged out, but all remain entrenched just as they were.

Now as a matter of fact Fundamentalist victories have been extremely rare. In spite of all the hard fighting of the most determined Fundamentalists, all the major denominations have fallen away to modernism. In the present day certain Fundamentalists have claimed some victories in the Southern Baptist Convention, but even if we could grant that those victories are real, what are they worth? Is the Southern Baptist Convention now spiritual? Are there no longer any forces at work which will abandon the Fundamentals tomorrow? The prairie fire is out, yes, but is the grass green? Have those institutions, boards, or state conventions which have been “recaptured” by the Fundamentalists purged out worldliness? Are they now heavenly-minded? Have they repudiated the world’s psychology and philosophy? Have they renounced the world’s education? Have they embraced the reproach of Christ? Have they put away the love of pleasure and of riches? Have they broken their unequal yokes? If not, they have done almost nothing. They have saved the bare bones of Christianity. They have acted as a stop-gap. They have gained a little time—-perhaps a decade, or half a decade. Not that spiritual Christianity will thrive during that little time, but the bare bones of Christianity will not yet be cast away.

We will not say that this is nothing, but it is surely not enough. Yet it is all that is embraced in “the fight for the Fundamentals.” We do not, of course, contend that all Fundamentalists have lived on that low spiritual plane which is embraced in the meaning of the term “Fundamentalism.” Not at all. There has been much spirituality in the movement, much zeal and fervor, much indeed of all that is good—-but at the same time apparently little perception of what was lacking. The standard was too low. The principle on which the movement was founded embraced too little of real Christianity. The movement sought to restore the church to the level at which she stood before the Fundamentals were given up, and that was a low level indeed, or the Fundamentals would never have been questioned.

Certain Fundamentalists, in tracing the history of the church in the epistles to the seven churches in Revelation 2 & 3, have found in Philadelphia “the Fundamental church,” while (of course) applying Sardis to “Protestantism.” Yet they would be very hard pressed to find any substantial difference between Fundamentalism and Protestantism. The former is indeed but the salvaging of the latter, when the latter was departing from the foundations of Christianity. No doubt there has been some advance in doctrine. For example, most Fundamentalists today reject infant baptism. This, however, is as much an advance over the original Fundamentalism as it is over Protestantism. Most of the original Fundamentalists were not Baptists, nor were most of the writers of the famous volumes of The Fundamentals. The movement stands in general on a sounder footing today, and corresponding with the present prevalence of baptistic principles, most Fundamentalists today reject in principle a church membership containing any but converted persons—-a very great advance, truly. Yet this advance does not belong to the foundation or essence of the movement, and in practice—-due to low standards, lax discipline, and an unsound gospel—-many Fundamental churches today are as full of unconverted members as ever the Protestant churches of the Reformation were. Fundamentalists have often pointed out, with great force of reason, that God must say to Protestantism in its best and pristine condition, “I have not found thy works perfect before God.” It contained much that was spiritual and most precious, but it stopped short of the Christianity of the New Testament. But the very same must be said of Fundamentalism. For all of its preaching of separation, to take one example, it has never been separate from the world, but has been deeply involved from the beginning in the world’s politics, the world’s education, and the world’s social and civic programs of every sort. Its separation has extended only to a few moral evils, such as dancing, smoking, and playing cards. Beyond that its separation has been purely ecclesiastical. The movement has never walked as a pilgrim and a stranger on the earth, and to this day there are Fundamentalists who stand upon the principle that they may join hands with the ungodly at a political meeting, but not at a religious meeting. I do not speak here of its practical state, which has varied much from time to time, but of its principles. These have never risen to the level of New Testament Christianity, any more than its practice has. The practice of many of its best men has been far in advance of its principles, but the principles themselves have always been defective. In its nature and essence it is a stand for the foundations of Christianity, and not for the Christianity which ought to be built upon those foundations.

The advent of Neo-evangelicalism, fifty years ago, somewhat altered the face of Fundamentalism in this respect. The more spiritual segment of the movement has stood solidly against Neo-evangelicalism, and some have endeavored to incorporate ecclesiastical separation into the definition of “Fundamentalism”—-not that they dreamed of any other sort of separation. Yet this has been opposed by many, who wish to make the term “Fundamental” synonymous with “Evangelical,” and extend it to all who hold to the Fundamentals of the faith, whatever their doctrinal position or practical condition may be on other matters. And this in fact has been the actual meaning of “Fundamentalist” since the inception of the movement. To define it any other way would be to exclude almost all of its founders and most prominent men. George Dollar, indeed, in his History of Fundamentalism, distinguishes from the beginning of the movement between the Orthodox and the Fundamentalists, on the basis of prophetic truth, separation, etc., but there is no basis in history for such a distinction. Orthodoxy is Fundamentalism. It is a stand for the skeleton of Christianity, and no more. This is its fundamental weakness.

Glenn Conjurske