The Fundamentals and the Modernist Controversy

From about 1910 a publishing company in Chicago issued twelve volumes of essays under the title The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth (The Fundamentals, vol. 1, foreword and contents) (The Fundamentals, vol. 12, pp. 3–4). The foreword to the first says that two Christian laymen bore the cost because they believed the time had come for “a new statement of the fundamentals of Christianity”, and that the series would be sent to every pastor, missionary, theological teacher and student and Sunday school superintendent in the English-speaking world whose address could be found (The Fundamentals, vol. 1, foreword and contents). That volume contains essays on the virgin birth, the deity of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and a history of the higher criticism of the Bible (The Fundamentals, vol. 1, foreword and contents). R. A. Torrey belonged to the committee that supervised the series and edited its last two volumes; by then, the two laymen state, nearly three million copies had been printed (The Fundamentals, vol. 12, pp. 3–4).

On 21 May 1922 Harry Emerson Fosdick preached at the First Presbyterian Church in New York a sermon entitled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” (Fosdick, Shall the Fundamentalists Win? title page). People who called themselves Fundamentalists, he said, meant to drive men and women of liberal opinions out of the evangelical churches (Fosdick, Shall the Fundamentalists Win? pp. 4–5). He named the tests he saw them setting: belief in the virgin birth as historical fact, in Scriptures dictated without error, in an atonement by substitution, and in Christ’s return on the clouds to set up a millennium (Fosdick, Shall the Fundamentalists Win? pp. 4–5). He did not ask that these opinions be given up; he asked whether anyone had the right to deny the Christian name to those who differed about them (Fosdick, Shall the Fundamentalists Win? p. 6), and he called for tolerance from liberals as well (Fosdick, Shall the Fundamentalists Win? pp. 11–12).

J. Gresham Machen, who taught New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, published Christianity and Liberalism in February 1923 (Machen, Christianity and Liberalism title page, its verso and preface). He traced liberal religion in all its forms to naturalism, the denial that God’s creative power entered into the origin of Christianity (Machen, Christianity and Liberalism p. 2). Liberalism, he argued, “not only is a different religion from Christianity but belongs in a totally different class of religions” (Machen, Christianity and Liberalism p. 7), and he called a separation of the two parties in the church “the crying need of the hour” (Machen, Christianity and Liberalism p. 160).

Fosdick had said in 1922 that Fundamentalists had tried to put on the statute books of a whole state laws against the teaching of modern biology (Fosdick, Shall the Fundamentalists Win? p. 6). In 1925 Tennessee made it unlawful to teach in its public schools any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and John Scopes, a teacher at Dayton, Tennessee, was indicted under the act (Scopes trial transcript p. 309). On the seventh day of the trial Clarence Darrow, for the defence, examined William Jennings Bryan, who was acting with the prosecution, on his study of the Bible (Scopes trial transcript p. 284) (Scopes trial transcript table of contents). The jury found Scopes guilty and the judge fined him $100 (Scopes trial transcript p. 313).

The word “modernism” was already in use in the Catholic Church: in the encyclical Pascendi of 1907 Pius X had condemned under that name a body of opinions held by some Catholic clergy and laity (Pius X, Pascendi 2), called it “the synthesis of all heresies” (Pius X, Pascendi 39), and ordered a council of vigilance in every diocese to watch for it (Pius X, Pascendi 55).