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Time, History, and Tradition in the Fundamentalist Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 May 2016

Margaret Bendroth
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Abstract

Fundamentalists—those ministers, theologians, and laymen who joined forces against theological liberalism in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries—cared deeply about history. In this sense they were no different from other protestants of their age, confronted with a historicized Bible and a world falling into the strict sequential order required by modernity. But fundamentalists were different. They viewed time in categories inherited from American protestant thought, as a logical unfolding of a single beginning rather than as open-ended development. This principle of “first things” lay behind their objections to evolution and biblical criticism, but also their stand on social issues, their insistence that the role of women could and should not progress and change over time. Among evangelicals today, the fundamentalist sense of time as the extension of full and complete beginnings still resonates, in opposition to abortion and homosexuality and in their continuing reverence for the American founding fathers. History can be powerfully immediate. For evangelicals, the Bible is not an ancient text about long-dead people but fully contemporary, and thus read not “literally,” as if every word were true, but as if time did not exist. Ultimately, however, history has no depth or traction, or any theological meaning, a parenthesis between the God-ordained beginning and end of time.

Type
Articles
Information
Church History , Volume 85 , Issue 2 , June 2016 , pp. 328 - 342
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2016 

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References

1 Note that this essay is taking some liberties with the term “fundamentalist.” The term itself did not come into common use until the 1920s, and is attributed to a declaration by Baptist editor Curtis Lee Laws. See “Convention Side-Lights,” Watchman-Examiner (July 1, 1920): 834. Before that, the most precise term would be “proto-fundamentalist” or a lengthy description like “dispensational premillennialist” and/or “biblical inerrantist.” On fundamentalist nomenclature see David Harrington Watt, “Fundamentalists of the 1920s and 1930s,” in Fundamentalism: Perspectives on a Contested History, ed Simon A. Wood and David Harrington Watt (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2014), 18–35; George Marsden, “Fundamentalism and American Evangelicalism,” in The Variety of American Evangelicalism, ed. Donald W. Dayton and Robert K. Johnston (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1991), 22–35.

2 “God's Word Not Poetry,” Truth 3 (December 1876): 16, 17Google Scholar; Grant Stroh, “Practical and Perplexing Questions,” Moody Monthly (April 1921): 365. Also “Hyperbolical Language,” Truth 6 (July 1880): 346–349Google Scholar. On Brookes, see Carl E. Sanders II, The Premillennial Faith of James Brookes: Reexamining the Roots of American Dispensationalism (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2001).

3 I.M. Haldeman, Friday Night Papers: Second Coming, and Other Expositions (New York: Theodore Audel and Co., 1901), 140. On fundamentalist apocalypticism see Matthew Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University 2014); Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1992); Timothy Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism, 1875–1982 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1983).

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5 The best source for illustrations is Clarence Larkin, Dispensational Truth: or, God's Plan and Purpose in the Ages (Philadelphia: Clarence Larkin, 1920).

6 Brown, J.W., “Baptists and Rationalism,” Watchman-Examiner 18 (May 1922): 624Google Scholar; “From Baptist to Unitarian,” Watchman-Examiner 22 (January 1920): 101Google Scholar.

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11 On this general topic of fundamentalism and history, see also Appleby, R. Scott, “History in the Fundamentalist Imagination,” Journal of American History 89 (September 2002): 498–511Google Scholar, and analyses in Robbins, Joel, “Secrecy and the Sense of an Ending: Narrative, Time, and Everyday Millennialism in Papua New Guinea and in Christian Fundamentalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43 (July 2001): 525–551Google Scholar; Guyer, Jane I., “Prophecy and the Near Future: Thoughts on Macroeconomic, Evangelical, and Punctuated Time,” American Ethnologist 34 (August 2007): 409–421Google Scholar.

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13 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 2003), 13, 14. David Gross, Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 2000); Peter Fritsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 2004); Zachary Sayre Schiffman, The Birth of the Past (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University, 2011).

14 H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (London: William Heinemann, 1895); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, London, 1889.

15 Described in Kern, Culture of Time and Space, 65–67.

16 Brendan Pietsch Dispensational Modernism (New York: Oxford University, 2015), 146. On Dispensationalism see Ernest Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1970); George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University, 1980), 48–62. Not all fundamentalists accepted dispensationalism, however. See, for example, the discussion in John D. Hannah, An Uncommon Union: Dallas Theological Seminary and American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2009), 118–128.

17 Brookes, , “Coming and Appearing,” Truth 5 (February 1879): 100–101Google Scholar.

18 “The Revelation. Chapter II. The Seven Churches,” Truth 10 (Mar. 1884): 169–173Google Scholar; Dr. Bullinger, , “The Times of the Gentiles Almost Run Out,” Christian Alliance and Foreign Missionary Weekly 13 (April 1894): 397–399Google Scholar.

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25 Cited in Bendroth, Last Puritans: Mainline Protestants and the Power of the Past (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2015), 129, 130. See also Lofton, Kathryn, “The Methodology of the Modernists: Process in American Protestantism,” Church History 75, no. 2 (June 2006): 374–402Google Scholar.

26 The Book of the Pilgrimage: A Record of the Congregationalists’ Pilgrimage to England and Holland (Boston: Office of the Congregationalist, 1896).

27 Mark Noll, Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1994), 127; Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 62–66.

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29 Dixon quoted in Barras, Henry Watson, “Conference on Christian Fundamentals,” Watchman-Examiner 2 (March 1922): 227–228Google Scholar.

30 Michael J. Lee, The Erosion of Biblical Certainty: Battles over Authority and Interpretation in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 183, 184.

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35 Blackstone, Jesus is Coming (Chicago: Fleming H. Revell, 1878), 224.

36 Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 88.

37 Farr, F.W., “Some Objections to Pre-Millennial Truth Considered,” Christian Alliance and Foreign Missionary Weekly 12 (January 5, 1894): 15Google Scholar. See Joel Carpenter, “Contending for the Faith Once Delivered: Primitivist Impulses in American Fundamentalism,” in The American Quest for the Primitive Church, ed. Richard Hughes (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois, 1988), 99–120; and response by Mark Noll, 121–122; George Marsden, “By Primitivism Possessed: How Useful is the Concept ‘Primitivism’ for Understanding American Fundamentalism?” in The Primitive Church in the Modern, ed. Richard T. Hughes (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois, 1995), 34–48.

38 Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University 2001), 71. Also Wacker, “Playing for Keeps: The Primitivist Impulse in Early Pentecostalism,” in American Quest for the Primitive Church, 196–219.

39 William G.T. Shedd, Lectures Upon the Philosophy of History (Andover: W.F. Draper, 1856), 15, 23. The larger story is told in Elizabeth Clark, Founding the Fathers: Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2011).

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45 W.E. Boardman, Who Shall Publish the Glad Tidings? (Boston, Mass.: Henry Hoyt, 1875), 39.

46 Quoted in Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 45.

47 Tanya Luhrman, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 12, 86–95.

48 James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (New York: Oxford University), 16.