Expert: John of AllFaith - 2/17/2010

Question
I have to do a project for sociology class about the fundamentals of Christianity. I know basically the jist of what it is. And what I'm finding is that it's more of a movement than an actual religion, so I'm finding a hard way to research things like, rituals, traditions, etcetera, because those vary among denominations. I figured my best bet was to find the books the movement was named after, "the fundamentals" written in 1910, but I'm not sure. How do you think I should go about researching it and what can you yourself tell me about it?

Answer
Hi Mitchell,

The "textbook" of Fundamentalist Christians is the Authorized King James Version (KJV) of the Bible (some use the New King James now but most revere the KJV as the Pure Word of God). Such Christians usually refer to themselves not as "Fundamentalists" but as "Bible Believing Christians."

Towards the end of the 1800 Christianity began undergoing a rather major revision (sometimes known as the Third Great Awakening as I discuss here: http://allfaith.com/Religions/awake.html). This was spawned by two contrary movements:

1. Versions of Humanism and the new sciences ("Liberal Christianity," the growing popularity of Universalism, "New Thought," Interfaith/Ecumenism, Darwinism -- a bit later -- and so on).

And

2. The rise of new sects like the Russellites (ie the Bible Students Association, Jehovah's Witnesses, International Bible Students etc), the Millerites (Adventism etc), the LDS (the Later Day Saints or Mormons), a resurgence of Catholicism, the 312 Azusa Street Revival of 1906 (including Pentecostalism and the Charismatic Movement) and other factors.

Many traditional Protestants (correctly) felt their beliefs were being threatened by such new movements and sought to reinvigorate their belief systems.

The Presbyterian conference of 1910 established "the five fundamentals" and determined that any teaching that that did not include all five of these essential doctrines had erred from the traditional Protestant faith and were guilty (to some degree) of heresy.

  1. Biblical inerrancy
  2. The divinity of Jesus
  3. The Virgin Birth
  4. The belief that Jesus died to redeem humankind
  5. An expectation of the Second Coming, or physical return, of Jesus Christ to initiate his thousand-year rule of the Earth, which came to be known as the Millennium.

Those who accepted "the five fundamentals" were accepted as being "fundamentalist" in their beliefs. As other Christians joined the movement to "restore the fundamentals of the faith" the list was expanded and developed, in part to exclude ever more groups the Fundamentalists did not agree with doctrinally.

"The Fundamentals" (or "The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth") was edited by A. C. Dixon and later by Reuben Archer Torrey and consists of 90 essays in 12 volumes. They were published between 1910 to 1915 by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles.

These essays form the basis of what today is considered the Fundamentalist Movement and are embraced to various degrees by several Protestant Christian denominations.

You can learn more about this here:
http://recollections.liblog.wheaton.edu/2009/05/29/fundamentals

Hope this helps,
~ John of AllFaith