May 4 – Fundamentals
Charles Darwin really sent Christians into a tailspin with his theory of evolution. Up until this point, science and religion had played well together, the assumption being that science would always be compatible with religious truth. Now, Darwin stated categorically that the origin of humanity really was at odds with the teachings of the Bible.
While he was upsetting the church with these writings, philosophers and theologians were questioning the authority of the Bible and the absolute teachings of the church that had been in place for centuries.
Between 1910 and 1915, two brothers, one of whom was the president of Union Oil Company spent a lot of their money to combat this ‘modernism’ in thought. They created a publishing company and some of the leading Bible teachers, several from Chicago’s Moody Church, published a series of booklets on basic doctrinal subjects. These twelve booklets were called “The Fundamentals” and nearly 3 million copies were published and handed out to every person in a church, seminary, YMCA, YWCA that they could find.
The fundamentalist movement came up in direct opposition to the social and liberal ideas that were being promoted.
The fundamentalists stayed under the radar until World War I. Most Christians at this time were fairly pacifistic, but were accused of being unpatriotic. The fundamentalists honed in on the fact that many of the ‘modernistic’ thinkers were Germans – and before you knew it the world’s future was a stake and Christians leapt into action.
After the war, preachers such as Billy Sunday and John Roach Straton railed against the troubles in the United States claiming that we would slide into barbarism unless we turned back to God’s truth.
But, they lost ground in the famous Scopes trial, when William Jennings Bryan argued for the fundamentalists and Clarence Darrow argued for Scopes who wanted to teach evolution in his classroom. Scopes was found guilty, but Clarence Darrow had made Bryan look bad. Fundamentalists now looked as if they were backward and ignorant.
Charles Darwin really sent Christians into a tailspin with his theory of evolution. Up until this point, science and religion had played well together, the assumption being that science would always be compatible with religious truth. Now, Darwin stated categorically that the origin of humanity really was at odds with the teachings of the Bible.
While he was upsetting the church with these writings, philosophers and theologians were questioning the authority of the Bible and the absolute teachings of the church that had been in place for centuries.
Between 1910 and 1915, two brothers, one of whom was the president of Union Oil Company spent a lot of their money to combat this ‘modernism’ in thought. They created a publishing company and some of the leading Bible teachers, several from Chicago’s Moody Church, published a series of booklets on basic doctrinal subjects. These twelve booklets were called “The Fundamentals” and nearly 3 million copies were published and handed out to every person in a church, seminary, YMCA, YWCA that they could find.
The fundamentalist movement came up in direct opposition to the social and liberal ideas that were being promoted.
The fundamentalists stayed under the radar until World War I. Most Christians at this time were fairly pacifistic, but were accused of being unpatriotic. The fundamentalists honed in on the fact that many of the ‘modernistic’ thinkers were Germans – and before you knew it the world’s future was a stake and Christians leapt into action.
After the war, preachers such as Billy Sunday and John Roach Straton railed against the troubles in the United States claiming that we would slide into barbarism unless we turned back to God’s truth.
But, they lost ground in the famous Scopes trial, when William Jennings Bryan argued for the fundamentalists and Clarence Darrow argued for Scopes who wanted to teach evolution in his classroom. Scopes was found guilty, but Clarence Darrow had made Bryan look bad. Fundamentalists now looked as if they were backward and ignorant.
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