(BA) Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy

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23 July 2022 - 29 July 2022

The Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy was a battle within Protestantism in the 1920's and '30's that has in many ways set the stage for the "culture wars" that rage in the United States and elsewhere to the present day. In 1859, Darwin published his Origin of Species, effectively making the creationist reading of Genesis intellectually impossible. That is not to say that he was the inspiration for modern biblical studies, as modern biblical studies was already gaining speed before Darwin. Gesenius, for example, had already died a year before the Origin of Species was published, and Essays and Reviews was published the year following.

Evolution was only one of a number of intellectual currents which converged to convince the intellectuals of the major denominations, with the exception of the Southern Baptists and the Missouri Synod Lutherans, that a rigid adherence to old ways of thinking was untenable. This did not happen overnight. New discoveries and shifts in paradigms percolated through the clergy over the next sixty years.

In the early 1920's, in the Presbyterian Church, the cultural divisions between the conservatives and the liberals erupted into a more general conflict that began to dominate the annual meetings of the denomination. Their Princeton Theological Seminary was captured by the modernists, and in 1929, a conservative faction, led by John Gresham Machen, left to found Westminster Theological Seminary.

This conflict was by no means limited to Presbyterians, nor was Princeton the only college involved. Throughout the major denominations, similar splits occurred. Generally speaking, the liberals gained control of the large existing denominations, and the conservatives exited to form new institutions.

The conservative side of these early culture wars was composed of people who often self-described as fundamentalist. Originally intended as a positive self-description, the fundamentalist saw himself as a loyal defender of the fundamentals of his faith. Over time, the term acquired negative connotations, and the term is mostly used pejoratively. The heirs of the original fundamentalists tend to use other terms like traditional, conservative, evangelical, Bible-believing, inerrantist, or combinations thereof. This website will likely appeal mostly to liberal/progressive or secular types, but any self-identified fundamentalists, evangelicals, or traditionalists are certainly welcome to come along for the ride. Bible translations associated with this conservative branch of Christianity include the NIV, NLT, KJV, and ESV.

The mainstream Protestants have since continued to accept the results of biblical scholarship, while those who exited, first known as fundamentalists, and now rebranded as conservative evangelicals, have engaged in a long defense of the inerrancy of Scripture. For decades, the conservative evangelicals continued to grow while attendance dropped in the mainstream churches, but more recently the conservative churches have entered a period of decline as well.