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The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth


thilipsis

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Lyman Stewart, mobilizing a network of conservative evangelical writers into a movement in defense of the inspiration and authority of the Bible and the core doctrines of traditional Christian faith. The 12-volume series of book-length journals contained 90 essays commissioned from leading theologians and religious leaders broadly representing conservative and evangelical Protestantism. (The Untold Story of the Fundamentals, Biola University)

I saw a definition of, 'evangelical', once in a Websters Dictionary it said that evangelical is an attempt to have one's thoughts begin and end with the Scriptures. At the time I thought is was a pretty apt description of a Christian but over the years I've come to realize that Christian scholarship has drifted further and further from the Scriptures as the standard for doctrine, discipline and most importantly, redemptive history. To me evangelical theology is the idea that the gospel is more then a social theory but the collective prophetic and Apostolic witness regarding God's sovereign rule in the affairs of man since the beginning. I have spent a great deal of time dealing with Liberal Theology, Darwinism and the modern bias against anything remotely supernatural. What I have learned is that modern academics demeans and deprecates the Scriptures at every turn and the final straw for me was when I learned that most Christian seminaries are soaked with a naturalistic philosophy put in theological terminology.

What I intend to share here are my thoughts on the first essay in the series, 'The Fundamentals', (see BLB, Text Commentaries. R.A. Torrey). We hear all the time about Islamic Fundamentalists doing horrific things in the name of Allah and at times fundamentalist Christians can be colored in the same light. The truth is that a Fundamentalist Christian, an evangelical, treasures the testimony of Scripture and seeks the will of God. We are not suicide bombers and we are not interested in forcing people to submit to a religious code against their will. We are simply Bible believing Christians. The rise of Modernism, Liberal Theology, Post Modernism and this nebulous contrivance known as Emerging Theology has never had their roots in Biblical or traditional Christian theism. A hundred years ago there was a network of Bible believing scholars who exposed the bias behind, 'Higher Criticism', the famous JEPD theory. These are echos from that time when naturalistic philosophies were starting to pass themselves off as Christian. The strangest part for me as a Christian is that so much of our scholarship has defected to this profoundly worldly philosophy. 

The dominant men of the movement were men with a strong bias against the supernatural. This is not an ex-parte statement at all. It is simply a matter of fact, as we shall presently show. ( (The History of the Higher Criticism, Anti-supernaturalism)

What we think of as supernatural is perfectly natural for God. The Incarnation, Resurrection, miracles of the Bible and the epic panorama of redemptive history seems little more then myth and legend to the modern mind. So how does Christian theology get inundated at the dawn of the twentieth century with the naturalistic assumptions of modern academics? Apparently the trail leads back to the French rationalist Spinoza, who was an unapologetic pantheist. Pantheism is the idea that everything is God so what does that have to do with the rise of Higher Criticism? 

1670, Spinoza came out boldly and impugned the traditional date and Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and ascribed the origin of the Pentateuch to Ezra or to some other late compiler. (The Fundamentals, Torrey)

Ezra was the scribe who returned with thousands of Jews from Babylon, during that time the Temple and the walls of Jerusalem were rebuilt and complete under the authority of Nehemiah. The Old Testament canon was closed around that time, the last books of the Protestant Old Testament were composed including the Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah. Malachi would be the final installment but the modern scholar goes further then that. They believe that the entire Old Testament was somehow complied at that time. Thousands of years of redemptive history is dismissed as just so stories. This did not start with Christian or Hebrew scholarship, this began with the musings of a European rationalist who was really just a philosophical atheist. This goes through stages from the French-Dutch, German and then finally British American theologies that were becoming increasingly naturalistic in their orientation.

1. They were men who denied the validity of miracle, and the validity of any miraculous narrative...  
2. They were men who denied the reality of prophecy and the validity of any prophetical statement…
3. They were men who denied the reality of revelation…constructed on the assumption of the falsity of Scripture.

That's the gist of it and I can tell you from personal experience that it is alive and well and passing itself off as Christian on an epic scale. I've tried to make this concise and to the point in the hope of opening a discussion on the subject of Fundamentalist and Evangelical theology as it relates to Christian apologetics. This is just a sample intended to see if there is any interest in the subject matter.

Grace and peace,
Mark

Edited by thilipsis
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20 minutes ago, thilipsis said:

A hundred years ago there was a network of Bible believing scholars who exposed the bias behind, 'Higher Criticism', the famous JEPD theory.

The Bible came under attack almost immediately after the Reformation.  But beginning in the 19th century German philosophers and "theologians" began their attacks on the Bible within the Christian seminaries, and both Higher and Lower Criticism had just one goal -- to undermine the authority and veracity of the Bible.  

These efforts were successful in infecting the seminaries of Europe and North America and resulted in the replacement of sound, conservative Bible scholarship and theology with theological Liberalism.

Fundamentalism was a response to that and The Fundamentals were written to counter the skepticism and unbelief of theological Liberalism.  However, the Fundamentalists were not able to oust the unbelievers, and had to leave those institutions and set up Fundamentalist Bible schools and colleges.

Unfortunately, because of the worship of "scholarship" over faithfulness to Scripture, over time Neo-Evangelicalism (modified Fundamentalism) crept into those institutions, along with Neo-Orthodoxy, and today almost all the Fundamentalist institutions have been compromised.  This compromise is best seen in the Emergent Church Movement, which is essentially a return to theological Liberalism.

Emerging Church Characteristics

Following are some of the common traits I have discovered by reading through Emerging Church material.  But please understand that not all Emerging Churches adhere to all the points listed.

  1. An awareness of and attempt to reach those in the changing postmodern culture.
  2. An attempt to use technology, i.e., video, slide shows, internet.
  3. A broader approach to worship using candles, icons, images, sounds, smells, etc.
  4. An inclusive approach to various, sometimes contradictory belief systems.1
  5. An emphasis on experience and feelings over absolutes.
  6. Concentration on relationship-building over proclamation of the gospel.
  7. Shunning stale traditionalism in worship, church seating, music, etc.
  8. A de-emphasis on absolutes and doctrinal creeds
  9. A re-evaluation of the place of the Christian church in society.
  10. A re-examination of the Bible and its teachings.
  11. A re-evaluation of traditionally-held doctrines.
  12. A re-evaluation of the place of Christianity in the world.

https://carm.org/what-emerging-church

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