The Fundamentalist/Modernist Controversy

1
The Fundamentalist/Modernist Controversy

• Dr. Glenn Jonas
• Campbell University

2
Introduction

• Middle of the 19th Century Major Changes in
  America
• Immigration
• Industrialization
• Urbanization

3

• Intellectual Revolution
• Freud
• Marx
• Darwin

4

• Controversy Associated With Change
• Divisions
• Modernists
• Denied Biblical Literalism
• Denied Biblical Inerrancy
• Denied Biblical Infallibility
• Accepted Evolution
• Attempted to Accommodate Theology to Modern
  Culture

5

• Conservatives
• Not necessarily unfriendly to change but tended
  to be much less open than Modernists
• Fundamentalists
• The Fundamentals
• inspired and inerrant scriptures
• Deity of Christ and virgin birth
• Substitutionary atonement
• Christs bodily resurrection
• Christs personal, premillennial and imminent
  second coming
• Worlds Christian Fundamentals Association
• Scopes Monkey Trial

6
Baptists and the Fundamentalist/Modernist
Controversy

• Numerous Baptist Groups Involved
• The 2 Common Issues
• Evolution
• Biblical Interpretation

7
English Baptists

• Downgrade Controversy
• Charles H. Spurgeon vs. John Clifford

8
Northern Baptists

• William Bell Riley vs. Harry Emerson Fosdick
• Fundamentalist Efforts Among Northern Baptists
• Investigation of colleges and seminaries (1921)
• Attempts to adopt a creed (1922)
• Failure and Fundamentalist withdrawal

9
Canadian Baptists

• T. T. Shields (Toronto)
• McMaster University
• 1927 Shields and his church expelled from the
  Ontario-Quebec Baptist Convention.

10
Southern Baptists

• Very few Modernists in South
• Conservatives vs. Fundamentalists
• J. Frank Norris
• Along with T. T. Shields and William Bell Riley,
  Norris formed the Worlds Christian Fundamentals
  Association giving birth to a Pan-American
  Fundamentalist Organization.

11

• Evolution in the SBC
• 1925 Baptist Faith and Message statement

12

• Source
• Walter B. Shurden, The What Must Baptists
  Believe Controversy, in Not a Silent People
  Controversies that Have Shaped Southern Baptists,
  Macon Smyth and Helwys, 1995.