The Fundamentalism- Modernism Controversy of the Late 1920s The study of introduces a comparative element, whereby similar ideas can be seen to manifest themselves differently in different spatial contexts.
Although fundamentalism is considered an American phenomenon, the article argues that the concerns motivating fundamentalists in the United States have also fueled heated debates elsewhere.
It uses the three heresy trials of Belfast, Amsterdam and Stellenbosch as case studies. In each case, the participants were part of an international Calvinist network, sharing the vast majority of their intellectual commitments and ecclesial structures.
However, these shared intellectual commitments did not produce the same results when each group attempted to use their church disciplinary procedures to combat "modernist" ideas.
This research shows that social and historical factors played a decisive role in the outcome of each trial, and in Belfast the violent legacy of the recent Irish War of Independence and Irish Partition gave extra weight to calls for restraint and Protestant unity.
In Amsterdam, "pillaring" the social structure means that debates are largely confined to one denomination and can therefore be argued more passionately, while in Stellenbosch, how the church should deal with fraught racial issues is a key factor.
During the nineteenth century , the intellectual foundations of orthodox Christian thought were challenged on several fronts. Bible criticism applies the techniques of literary scholarship to the Bible, viewing it as a collection of documents produced in different historical contexts.
Geology and Biology The findings question common beliefs about creation, specifically the idea that humans are specially created.
At the same time, the rise of scientific naturalism and materialist worldviews also cast doubt on some of the Bible's supernatural claims.
The influence of these intellectual movements was so great that existing theology either accommodated them or refuted them; they could not simply be ignored.
Works such as Essays and Reviews (1860) showed that liberal theologians could incorporate biblical criticism into their work, while David Strauss (1835) and Ernst Renan Scholars such as Renan (1863) have proposed demythologized and historicized biographies of Jesus Christ's "life".
New liberal theologies, such as Richlianism, abandon metaphysics and argue that religious claims are epistemologically different from scientific claims and are based on subjective value judgments.
For conservative evangelicals, these attempts at accommodation go too far, requiring them to abandon key elements of their faith as supernatural in nature and to understand the Bible as God's written work. The fundamentalist-named series "Fundamentals" (1910-15) was a response to these threats and was distributed free to Protestant ministers in the English-speaking world.
In the fraught atmosphere after World War I fundamentalism gained a social dimension, especially in the United States, where the cultural dominance of evangelicals was threatened.
Open conflict between fundamentalists and modernists broke out in 1922, when Harry Emerson Fosdick in First Presbyterian Church of New York Church's sermon provocatively asked, "Will the fundamentalists win?" However, it was at the infamous "Monkey Trial" in Dayton, Tennessee, in July 1925 that John Scopus This conflict dramatically entered the public consciousness when Scopes was responsible for teaching the evolution of and .
Although Scopes lost the trial, fundamentalism ultimately failed in the court of public opinion. A brief period of scholarly attention recast fundamentalism as a backward rural revolt against science and modernity.
This interpretation was reinforced in the popular imagination by the play and film Inherit the Wind (1955 and 1960 respectively), which used the trial as an allegory for McCarthyism.
However, Richard Hofstadter's 1964 Pulitzer Prize-winning 's "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" seems to offer a clear explanation; as the title suggests, fundamentalism was the anti-intellectual reaction to modernity in a community with backward agricultural values.
Scopes' trial hinged on a fairly straightforward question of fact, namely whether Scopes taught evolution through natural selection. The key issue is therefore thought to be evolution.
However, the Scopes case did not arise out of thin air; it was the culmination of a decades-long conflict between intellectual commitments. This concerns not only biological theory but also cultural authority, the role of religion in contemporary intellectual life, and entire systems of understanding the world.
These cultural values are not unique to the United States. In his classic study of American fundamentalism, George Marsden argued that "few anywhere outside the United States has the idiosyncratic Protestant response to modernity played such a prominent and pervasive role in the culture."
However, he argued that one exception might be Ulster and, furthermore, a volume edited by David Bebbington and David Ceri Jones showed that in Britain fundamentalism was "much weaker than in the United States, but it was broadly parallel and displayed the same intellectual and social characteristics".
Recent academic research has also raised the question of whether Dutch Neo-Calvinism, represented by the politician and theologian Abraham Kuyper , has a fundamentalist component.
To explore these transnational connections, this article compares three Calvinist "heresies" of the 1920s: J. E. Davey in Belfast; Johannes Gierkeken in Amsterdam; and Johannes du Plessis in Stellenbosch. In our analysis, we follow David Livingstone's methodology in Dealing with Darwin, examining "the ways in which place, cultural politics, and rhetorical style differ in Darwinian deliberation in religious communities."
Livingstone takes "a spatially distributed but consciously self-identified confessional family - Scottish Calvinists" and traces how varying geography influenced their engagement with evolution.
The Reformed or Presbyterian tradition allows for a particularly valid case study for three reasons.
First, as Livingstone demonstrates, it has a relatively cohesive set of intellectual commitments, so that theological debates about the same issue have different outcomes in different places, and are more likely to reflect specific social conditions than theological differences.
This intellectual heritage included, especially in the Anglosphere, a common philosophical tradition that combined Bacon's ideals of observation and inductive reasoning with the Scottish common sense school of direct realism, which emphasized the human mind's ability to understand fundamental reality through direct sensory experience.
Dutch Neo-Calvinism, however, offers an alternative epistemology that rejects the universal applicability of inductive reasoning and insists that all but the most basic of direct observations are mediated by presuppositions.
Second, Calvinism had an international outlook from the beginning, with students often studying abroad in the seminaries of sister churches, and by the 1920s there were intellectual centers in the Netherlands, Scotland, Ireland, and the United States.
Finally, Calvinist ecclesiology, in which individual congregations are governed by elected councils of elders, meetings, or synods, organized into umbrella governing bodies called presbyteries or classes, means that specific doctrinal grievances can be resolved at trial more easily than in many other denominations.
In fact, during the 920 era, some Reformed churches litigated fundamentalist-modernist disputes through their internal disciplinary processes.This article crosses not only geographical divides but also linguistic divides to explore how Reformed communities in Northern Ireland, the Netherlands and South Africa faced the apparent threat of modernist theology.
Each trial has a Calvinist sect that has a strong confessional identity but is part of a pluralistic society. As with the Scopes case, more important than the precise technical issues on which each trial was based were broader cultural issues and unresolved tensions between theological conservatives and modernists.
In Belfast, the Presbyterian Church of Ireland (PCI) has been established as a result of centuries of Scottish immigration. By the 1920s, however, the city had only slightly more Presbyterian members than members of the Church of Ireland, and a significant and growing Roman Catholic minority.
The Netherlands also has three main denominations: the Dutch Reformed Church (Netherlands Reformed Church, NHK); the much smaller Gereformeerde Kerken (Dutch Reformed Church, GKN) in the Netherlands; and, as in Belfast, the Catholic population is growing.
In the Cape Colony, Dutch settlers brought their national church to Africa. The Dutch Reformed Church (NGK) operates a seminary in Stellenbosch and is the largest denomination there.
However, two smaller denominations, the Dutch Reformed Church of Africa (NHK) and the Gereformeerde Kerke of Suid-Afrika (Reformed Church of South Africa, GKSA), also emerged from the Dutch Reformed tradition, while the British takeover of the colonies led to the establishment of Anglican dioceses, as well as a handful of Nonconformist churches.
By comparing these Reformed communities, it is possible to reveal how groups with the same intellectual commitments addressed ostensibly the same problems.
As Calvinists traveled from one part of their international network to another, they brought with them ideas that could be used for different purposes. By examining this cross-pollination of with , it is possible to trace how these ideas were expressed and how they were used in various contexts to confront the threats of modernity. This clearly shows that these concerns are expressed very differently in different regions, leading to different results in each trial.
