Fundamentalisms & Scholarship?

Orr and Warfield did contribute articles to "The Fundamentals" , but I wouldn't call them Fundamentalists as such . Orr for instance did not agree with biblical inerrancy .
Machen pointedly delcined to be identified as a Fundamentalist . Allis doesn't fit the mold either .
Warfield , Machen and Allis were conservative , Reformed scholars . Men of that stamp were rare in the Fundamentalist movement which really started in the 1920's .
It would be interesting to see how many other men who contributed to "The Fundamentals" would have lined up with the distinctives of the Fundamentalists of the 20's-50's . I have a feeling the number would have been small . Most of the contributers had died by that time anyway .

 

Rippon, my point was not that these men were Fundamentalists, but that Fundamentalists respected them as scholars. My evidence was that they were included in the famous "Fundamentals" pamphlet series. That series, according to many historians and almost all informed Fundamentalists, was the inspiration for the name Fundamentalist and the foundation from which the movement sprung.

Since you bring it up, histories of the movement are universal in their inclusion of Machen, though as you say he himself did not like the term. Machen left Princeton because of modernism, was defrocked from the Presbyterian ministry because of his formation of an independent mission board in protest against the liberalism of his denomination, and wrote such books as Christianity and Liberalism, Modernism and the Board of Foeign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the united States of America, etc. (Who Was Who in Church History, Elgin Moyer, rev. ed., 263-264). Ernest Sandeen gives him 20 or more pages (The Roots of Fundamentalism),

I don't have time to discuss Warfield, but his book on inspiration defined the subject for Fundamentalists.

I have a feeling the number would be large. When I went to BJU in 1970-1972, when it was the premier Fundamentalist school in the country, over 60% of the students were not Baptist. I roomed with a Presbyterian and a Methodist, and had a Pentecostal in the next room.

 

Well , earlier you had stated that that "there were many noted scholars among the original Fundamentalists of the 1920's-1930's." I disagreed with your observation . In particular the men you advanced as being "among" them .

"The Fundamentals" may have been a springboard -- but many of the contributors would not have been aboard the ship 'Fundamentalism' had they survived until the 1930's .

 

I made specific mention here of the original men who contributed to "T.F.'s" , not groups of people from various denominations generations later who became affiliated with Fundamentalism .

 

After looking back at my post--point taken.

This is an assumption. The only way to prove it would be to read biographies of all the men one by one, note their activities and then make assumptions from those facts.

The truth is, the terms fundamentalist, evangelical and conservative were used interchangeably until the late 1940's. Vernon Grounds discussed evangelicalism as the "new name" for fundamentalism, in an article in Eternity Magazine in Feb., 1956: "The Nature of Evangelicalism." And I could give other references from the scholarly literature.

 

Well thought out and well said, Squire. This about sums things up. :thumbs:

 

I agree. Defining terms will be pointless because the next guy will define them differently. If I were to say I'm a Fundamentalist to someone in Hammond, Indiana, most would expect me to have no facial hair and have a KJV Bible in my hands. If I were to say I was a Fundamentalist to someone in Deerfield, Illinois, most would expect me to have a high view of expositional preaching and "traditional" church.

I believe we should deal with things case by case.