The reason I wanted to bring this article to your attention, Inside the Fundamentalist Christian Movement: A Response Statement by Joe Boot, the founder of the Ezra Institute, is because of my last post about how much the secular culture despises Christians and brands us as bigots and haters. I’ll explain below, but you’ll see if you read the piece what faithful, orthodox Christians are up against, specifically those who are obedient to Christ and apply Scripture to every single area of life, including the public life of government and law. Secularists are fine with Christianity as long as those who practice it leave their faith in their private lives. They will tolerate us then, but if we claim that Jesus is Lord over all creation, including the state, including rulers and authorities, and that God’s law applies to how societies are run, then Caeser will have none of it. I make this argument extensively in my next book which I’m trying to finish, but all of reality on this earth from a biblical perspective comes down to paganism versus Christianity, and their respective followers. When the Christians in the early centuries of the church declared, “Jesus is Lord!” it was a political statement. Many paid with their lives because of it. The secular state is a jealous God and will have no other gods before it. Boot’s piece explains it well.
As for fundamentalism, when I became a Christian in the fall of 1978, I was born-again into a type of fundamentalist Christianity. The term has a specific historical meaning going back to the early twentieth century, but it’s used today as a pejorative term to one degree or another. The secularists use it to brand us as no better than Muslim Jihadists bent on domination and willing to use violence to that end. All the political violence, however, every single bit of it, comes from the secular Marxist left. When I was introduced to Reformed theology at 24, I began to see how the fundamentalist type of faith I practiced was a truncated, narrow, and privatized faith. Coming across Francis Schaeffer early in those years helped me a lot, but Reformed theology was eye-opening on many levels except at the eschatological level for most of my adult life. It wasn’t until I embraced post-millennialism last summer that I began to learn of the different eschatological positions in the Reformed camp. I knew absolutely nothing about the post-mill position but what I thought I knew about it, and rejected it as unworthy of my attention. Oh how wrong I was!
Joe Boot has been an invaluable learning resource in this almost year-long learning process. It is amazing how over 44 years into this Christian journey how little I know and how much I have to learn. It is thrilling! And we get to do this for eternity, literally. Most Christians, understandably, complain about everything in the current state of our decaying civilization, but when it comes to doing something about it feel helpless. Most default to a defeatist eschatology seeing things are inevitably going to get worse and worse, believing that’s what the Bible predicts, and are just waiting for Jesus to return and save the day. They have no theological category for victory because premillennialism, which influences their thinking knowingly or not, predicts losing in this fallen world. The few that embrace amillennialism like I used to have a similar view that pushes out victory to only when Christ returns.
I used to mock the idea that we could somehow “change the world.” This fallen world, I thought, was unchangeable from it’s sinful dysfunction no matter what we did. We could plug holes in the dyke here and there, but to mix metaphors, Titanic hit the iceberg long ago and it was going to sink no matter what we do. It saddens me to think I ever thought such a thing, and now believe it is profoundly unbiblical. I have become convinced of the exegetical case (i.e., taken “out of” Scripture) for Christ’s victory in history in this fallen world. I’m hoping my book makes the case adequately enough so Christians will at least consider it.
The reason for this post, though, is Boot’s description of fundamentalism, which is one of the best I’ve come across. When I was introduced to Reformed theology I learned there was a word for the type of Christianity I was practicing, Pietism. The word doesn’t mean piety or pious, but historically comes out of German Lutheranism of the seventeenth century, and means a faith that is primarily personal and focused on so-called spiritual things, like prayer, Bible reading, church, evangelism, etc. Christianity, however, is not primarily personal at all! If it was, the Christians of the early church would have never paid for their profession of Christ’s lordship with their blood. As I said above, Caesar then, and the totalitarian secular state now, will have none of it. It’s bow down and worship it and its dictates, or you will be made to pay. Notice the “Great Reversal”:
Yet Fundamentalism as a movement in the USA quickly became associated with a rejection of the social implications of evangelical faith, an abandonment of efforts at cultural transformation, and a withdrawal from distinctly Christian political engagement in terms of biblical principles. In what missiologists call ‘The Great Reversal’, evangelical fundamentalists (with notable exceptions) largely rejected the historic reformed Protestant vision for national moral reformation found in men like William Wilberforce and the optimistic eschatology of late nineteenth-century Princetonians like Benjamin Warfield and Charles Hodge, and so evacuated the public space to focus on personal piety and winning ‘souls,’ with an increased fixation on end-times prophecy within Dispensational theology. In this respect, the vision and work of the Ezra Institute and those who share our theological outlook is at odds with the once-popular notions of American ‘fundamentalism.’
He says “once-popular,” I think, because few Evangelicals today refer to themselves as fundamentalists. When I became a Christian there seemed to be a well-defined Christian cultural divide between fundamentalist and Evangelicals. The latter term has historical meaning as well, going back to the Reformation, but in the twentieth century a group led by Billy Graham and other founders of Christianity Today decided to separate themselves from the anti-cultural engagement and anti-intellectual fundamentalists. George Marsden’s Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism, is a great history of exactly how this split took place. After I discovered Francis Schaeffer somewhere around 20, I never referred to myself as a fundamentalist.
I want to further comment on Boot’s conclusion, but that will have to be for another post.
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