Fundamentalism and Its Aftermath — Matt Landis & Chester Weaver — Ep. 101A

Good evening, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. We're doing something a little different this time, doing a live event, which is a little different from our typical weekly episodes that we normally do. So this evening, we're going to have Matt Landis and Chester Weaver discussing the topic of fundamentalism, and Marlon Summers, who is a board member with our organization, will be moderating the discussion. So one of the things we want to do this evening is the audience will be free to submit questions, which we'll cover in a later section in this event. So there are several ways you can do that. If you're watching the livestream on Facebook, just leave a comment.

Or if you're watching on YouTube, same thing, just leave a comment. We'll be moderating those and making sure that those get in the queue to be answered later on. We'll see how many we actually get through this evening. And then also, if you're watching on Zoom, same thing, use the comment feature and submit your question that way. And yeah, I think from here, we're going to jump into the event. So I'll get things switched over for the moderator, and then we will begin. Okay, good evening. And yes, once again, welcome to our first-ever live event. So the topic tonight is fundamentalism over the last 100 years, especially 100 to 150 years, and especially how Anabaptists have interacted with that.

And so I'm very happy to have two panelists with us. Both of these men are kind of regulars with Anabaptist Perspectives. Chester Weaver is actually a board member, and so I've got to know him just a little bit through working with him in that capacity.

And we can maybe blame him for tonight a little bit. This spring, we released two episodes by Chester that addressed fundamentalism and Mennonites, and we tried to make sense of that historical story. Chester has been a school teacher, and I think of him as the kind of person also who would be happy to travel halfway around the country if that meant he could get his hands on some obscure document from an Anabaptist group from the 1700s or 1800s.

Now, Matt has done several episodes with us as well. I didn't actually get to speak with him until we were getting ready for this event, doing some practice stuff. But I knew him a while back, not as Matt, but as the Mennonite Minute, based on a blog a while back where he posted some good stuff.

Matt runs a tech computer company, but that does not mean he doesn't read books. So he likes to read long books, including pertinent for tonight, the 12 volumes of The Fundamentals, which I'm sure you'll hear more about in just a little bit.

So introductions aside, let's move to a few questions here. These questions kind of have a sweep of starting with history and then moving to implications. What do we make of it? Where do we go from here? And so on.

Maybe first, I'll direct the question, though. What do you guys think is the common perception of fundamentalism? If you went on an American college campus or the pews of American church, those definitions are going to be different than when you're reading an academic historian.

So what do you think of as kind of the cultural perception around the word fundamentalism?

Yeah, maybe Chester, you can start with that one. Real simple. Fundamentalism is understood as a fanatical religion. It's understood that fundamentalism is what causes Muslims to cut people's heads off. And if I was to add to that, I would say typically people think of inflexible, angry, humorless Christians who enforce their political will on an unwilling culture, or at least thought of that way. They selectively focus on certain doctrines with a seeming emphasis on the angry aspects of God, and maybe embodied by Westboro Baptist.

Another one could be King James-only fundamentalist Baptists. And they seem to maybe be focused on challenges of maybe a generation or so ago and kind of tooled up for that fight. And I'm not sure if we're allowed to talk about more academic descriptions or were you going to get into that?

Yeah, go ahead. Well, a few that I might have, and Chester, you may also be ready for this. But thinking maybe a little to tighten the definition, that previous one might be a little bit of a caricature, especially when you start, and I'm not going to quote the fundamentals, don't worry. But you start reading there, you realize that's not quite true.

But maybe a more accurate, and Chester can maybe speak to this, is they follow kind of a certain pattern. They're embattled forms of spirituality, which have emerged as in response to a perceived crisis. They engage in conflict with enemies whose secularist policies and beliefs seem inimical to religion itself.

They do not regard this battle as a conventional political battle, but experience it as a cosmic war between good and evil. And maybe a significant thing is they fear annihilation and try to fortify themselves by means of selective retrieval of certain doctrines and practices.

And I could go on, but maybe I'll just stop there. That's well said, Matt. I appreciate all that. I think we need to clarify at least one thing. We have fundamentalists who believe in the fundamentals and carry forth what you talked about. That's the capital F fundamentalists. Then we have the lowercase fundamentalists, which will be probably more focused on here this evening. And I think probably the popular description we gave, the description I gave, and to give credit, is Karen Armstrong's description, which I think is somewhat accurate about the ideas more. So yeah.

Yeah, so I think you've captured it well that fundamentalism has become almost just a term of abuse for a lot of us, and especially in a broader culture. But of course, fundamentalism comes from the word fundamental. And the beginning of the movement, the way that they saw themselves was, "Look, we're going back to emphasize the things that are really fundamental about the Christian faith."

But between that and our modern understanding is a pretty big gulf. So it's a good time to get a bit more of a historical sketch.

So when did the fundamentalist movement kind of emerge? What are the beginnings? And then this has to be a thumbnail sketch, but maybe if you could each, yeah, give a little thumbnail. To provide a clear understanding of why the problem developed, we're going to have to look at some history. First of all, we have to look at the departure from historic orthodoxy. And then secondly, the reaction to the departure. And then thirdly, how this all impacted American Anabaptists. And so there's a very good book that you, the readers or listeners, might consider entitled Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism by George Marston. I'm very indebted to that book.

So since we're Swiss Anabaptists or descendants of those folks, we're going to basically relate the story that relates to our own people. So I'd like to make it clear from the beginning that I regard the Holy Scriptures as a divinely inspired word of God. I believe in the virgin birth. I believe in the miracles of Christ, the bodily resurrection of Christ, one book of Isaiah, etc.

And I'm very much aware that this topic is very easily misunderstood. On one hand, the topic may jerk the rug out from under some feet, and to these I plead carefulness and further research of the facts. On the other hand, some may feel threatened.

To these I plead the evidence of Anabaptist history. One pithy statement says, "If something can be misunderstood, it will be misunderstood." And I recognize the truth of that statement. And so I enter into this topic willing to be misunderstood, criticized, and labeled. Somebody has to do this dangerous work, and it might as well be me. So I do plead with you, try to understand. Ask questions if you don't understand. I really wish Jesus Christ was here to do this topic tonight.

So to do the accurate historical look, we're going to have to look back as to why the problem developed. I would like to introduce this book called Modern Religious Liberalism by John Horsch. And he is the same author who wrote Mennonites in Europe. And I would just like to read a little bit of what he quotes people as saying to give you an understanding of how significant this is.

He says, "A prominent modernist of Germany writes, 'We destroy much that was formerly accepted by Christian believers. We deny the authority of the Scriptures. We see in Scripture both truth and error. It goes without saying that we do not consider ourselves under duty to abide by the teachings of Scripture. We do not believe the miracles which are recorded in the Scripture. Nay, we positively deny them.

All stories and miracles contained in Scripture we believe to be either fables or allegories. We do not believe that Jesus was the Son of God. We do not believe that he was God-man. We do not believe that he was a perfect man. We do not believe he was free from every error, from every sin.

Neither his sayings nor his life are to us authoritative in every respect. He is to us a great prophet like many others.'" That's really rank. This was a great deviation from orthodoxy. And so let me read one more statement that they make about sin, and then we'll proceed.

Liberal modern theology leaves no room for a real conception of sin. The doctrines of divine imminence and of universal divine fatherhood take the seriousness out of the thought of sin. The more advanced liberalistic theologians consider sin a necessary incident of evolution, a mere stage in the development of humanity, the growing pains of the soul, etc.

Okay, so that's just the bare tip of the iceberg. Something has to respond to that. And so what happened?

So when modern religious liberalism, born in Germany in the 1800s and often associated with Julius Wellhausen, began to impact the old Mennonite church around 1900, responsible leadership needed to combat the attending unbelief in some way. Old Mennonite leaders noted that Princeton Theological Seminary had already paved the way, was providing answers for its students. The answers seemed sound. At least they seemed loyal to the Scriptures.

Thus, the old Mennonite leaders picked up many of these ideas and began to promote them in the old Mennonite world in the battle against encroaching religious liberalism. And many of the answers were adequate, but some were inadequate, and some were downright wrong.

A serious problem developed as many of the old Mennonite leaders adopted a non-Anabaptist worldview out of which they thought and worked. The new fundamentalist worldview deviated significantly from the historic Anabaptist worldview. Just to make sure I'm on the same page and some of our listeners, the term old Mennonite, which is the historical term. So am I correct to understand that that's primarily referring to it would have been groups like Lancaster Conference, Virginia Conference, a number of other groups? So these were not the old order Mennonites like Waverland Conference or General Conference, but yeah, groups like Lancaster Conference and then down the road closer to our time.

Derivative churches. Go ahead, Matt. Yeah, all the derivative churches. Derivative churches like the Eastern Conference, Mid-Atlantic, Keystone, and some of those. The important thing to remember is that there's no Amish background among these people that we're talking about. We might talk more about that later.

All right, so to go to the next part here about fundamentalism itself, I have this book entitled A History of Fundamentalism in America by George Dollar, and it was produced by Bob Jones University. And I need to share with you several things from this book.

First of all, look at the front piece.

Historic fundamentalism is the literal exposition of all the affirmations and attitudes of the Bible and the militant exposure of all non-biblical affirmations and attitudes. This is in response to the kind of thing that I've already looked at. The attack of new thought and liberal attitudes, which was part of a many-sided declaration of war on the word. Many sources of opposition to well-established beliefs and spiritual disciplines were then evident, which formed such an attack against the word of God that orthodoxy collapsed and fundamentalism, as it emerged, became a minority movement. American Christianity was so vitiated that it would never again dominate American thinking. That's how serious this was. The response to the liberalism that came from Germany actually changed forever the religious landscape in America.

So who were some of these men in Germany? You probably have heard of some of them, like Immanuel Kant, Hegel, Albrecht Rietzschel, Schleiermacher, and some others. These catapulted German philosophy and theology across the Atlantic onto American soil, philosophizing its theology, providing sharp tools to destroy the historic faith, and bringing into slavery the minds of the intelligentsia and prospective leaders of the denominations.

Okay, so what are some of the things that they actually said? One of them, Immanuel Kant, said that reason has to be given supreme place, not revelation, reason. Ethics were nothing more than those moral precepts dictated by conscience.

Kant contributed five things. First of all, the history of redemption was not needed. God speaks through the conscience. Original sin was denied. Christ is just a great example. The church is merely a society interested in moral laws. That's heresy. Hegel said these kinds of things.

Well, first of all, let me say he tried to reconcile reason and religion. And believe it or not, Hegel became one of Adolf Hitler's teachers, so to speak. He was not a literal teacher, but he got some of his ideas from Hegel.

Friedrich Schleiermacher, I guess you could say, is the father of them all. He is the one who came up with the idea that religion is not a truth or a doctrine, but it's an intuition. It's a feeling for the universe. It's an awareness of God. He said, "We are Christian to the extent that God impresses us in all our experiences, not as we study and believe the events or dogmas of the life of Christ. It's the impressions that we get."

And Schleiermacher is known as the father of modern theology. Few men have done so much harm to the faith of young men as Friedrich Schleiermacher. Moving on to Albrecht Rietzschel. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing his name right, but he saw the kingdom of God as a total company of all who act on the inspiration of love.

And so out of his influence, we got the social gospel. God is love. Holiness is set aside. The thought of judgment is completely ignored. Liberals have followed this concept and abhor any hint that millions of people will suffer eternally because of their sins. And then there was a man by the name of Ernst Trulch. And again, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly. But he says that the best of the New Testament can be found in other religions, and that the study of these other religions gives deep insight into Christian faith. And so there's really a denial of Christian distinctives.

And so out of this, we have great relativism in doctrine being born.

Religion should use scientific law, and they should not have Christianity should not have distinctive tenets of faith. God is not sovereign, but imminent in the world around us. And so we should use criticism, relativity, and analogy. And there's much more that we could put there. But one of the reasons why all this developed was because of Charles Darwin and his teaching of evolution.

Somehow, evolution has to be put into the picture. No longer revelation. We discover an alternative for the universe outside of God. And so liberal theology was an effort to do that. Now, once we have Darwin on the scene, the reliability of the Bible in the areas of science, history, and other disciplines cannot be dependent upon.

And so the liberal principles have eroded American sound doctrine and caused a theological collapse and apostasy. Okay, so that's probably enough on the history. Maybe we have some questions so far that you want to pursue. Anything, Matt? Well, so you brought us up to the point of what caused the response.

So now you're probably the next part of it, part two, is the fundamentalist response. Am I thinking correctly? Yes. So let me go on here. Yep. So fundamentalism developed in response to this liberalism. In fact, fundamentalism as a word entered the English language about 1920.

And so I'm going to like to read now from Marsden's Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. He says, "Perhaps the most important point for understanding theological liberalism is that it was a movement to save Protestantism." The generations of Protestants that came of age between 1865 and 1917 were faced with the most profound challenges to their faith. Darwinism and higher criticism were challenging the authority of the Bible, and the new Freudian psychological ways of thinking were revolutionizing thought at almost every level.

Immense social changes, plus rapid secularization, especially in science and higher education, were eroding Protestantism's practical dominance. So in personal terms, this meant that many people brought up to accept unquestionably the complete authority of the Bible and sure truths of evangelical teaching found themselves living in a world where such beliefs no longer were considered intellectually acceptable. Such was typical of the personal histories of the leaders of the liberal movement. When they reached the universities, they were confronted with a most difficult choice. They could hang on to evangelicalism at the cost of sacrificing the current standards for intellectual respectability. If they were going to retain such intellectual respectability, it seemed that they had to either abandon Christianity or modify it to meet the standards of the day.

And for many, that latter choice of modification seemed the only live option. And so many churchgoing people must have also shared these liberal sentiments. So by the first decades of the 1900s, liberalism or modernism, as it was coming to be called, was well entrenched in almost all the leading theological seminaries.

Probably more than half of Protestant publications leaned toward modernism, and liberals occupied probably one-third of nation's pulpits. And so a little summary here. Liberalism was trying to save the faith by deifying the historical process, which meant God was incarnate in the development of humanity. God was in versus the idea that God is invading history to do particular work.

Secondly, liberalism stressed the ethical. Christianity was doing good. It's not about doctrine versus the other side of being a child of God. And thirdly, as a summary, we have this idea of the centrality of religious feelings versus routine faithfulness to Christ.

Now, if you're listening carefully, you'll notice that there's a problem, but it's not the problem of the people of the two-kingdom concept.

But because of encroaching worldliness and the increasing loss of the two-kingdom concept, the problem became an Anabaptist Mennonite problem. And so what do I mean by that? Well, let me use this chart. I hope you can see it well enough. Is it adequate here?

So we'll say Anabaptism was born around 1500. Through the 1600s up to the 1700s, the story of Anabaptism in Europe was a story of persecution. But we crossed the ocean in the early 1700s, and we came to the land of the free, and we had economic opportunity like we never. We had the opportunity to make money in ways we never had the opportunity before. And so this is embarrassing to say, but materialism became a defining adjective.

We were materialistic. I'm sorry. By coming across the ocean, there are several reasons we got to be so materialistic. One of them was just crossing the ocean. There's a lot of miles across the Atlantic Ocean, so we lost touch with our own story in the past by crossing the ocean. And secondly, we changed languages from German to English. And so we were cut off from our written records.

And so we were naturally involved in our materialism. And this, again, is embarrassing to say, but it's a part of the historic record. Around the Civil War right here, we have a very poor record of our young men going off to fight in the Civil War. If you want to read the whole story, look at the American Mennonites and the Civil War. You can read the whole story there. Well, that partly stirred John F. Funk to action. He started the Herald of Truth to call us back to our story.

And out of that grew the revival movement. We call that the Mennonite Great Awakening. And so by 1900, we're starting to come to terms. Well, at this very same time, liberalism is making its bend to the left, and fundamentalism is making its bend to the right. We were not very well prepared, but there was one man who was. His name was Harold Bender at Goshen College. And he got busy and began to assemble for us the written records that we had in Europe.

And he helped us understand that the choices are not just either liberalism or fundamentalism, but to go back to our own story. And that, in a sense, to me, saved the day. Unfortunately, his third way was not the popular way, and it's still not the popular way today.

And so that brings me to this book entitled Vision, Doctrine, War. This is the third book in the series of The Mennonite Experience in America. And it's edited by a man by the name of Theron Slabaugh. I know this man personally. And I would like to just read a few things of what he says about the Mennonites in this time period.

In 1914, a book by Daniel Kaufman was written called Bible Doctrine.

And in 1928, they had a revised edition called Doctrines of the Bible.

Now, these books bore the marks of the escalating American Protestant debate between modernists and fundamentalists. In his 1898 volume, Kaufman simply assumed the authority of the Bible without worrying much about the theory of inspiration. Now, get that. He assumed the authority of. That's been the traditional Mennonite Anabaptist understanding.

But a man by the name of J.B. Smith of Heston College introduced terms that were new to Mennonites. The idea of plenary inspiration, verbal inspiration, original autographs, that's all new. And so old Mennonite definitions of ordinances and restrictions based directly on biblical texts gained a more legalistic undergirding than ever before.

The original Anabaptist understanding is a love, faith, obedient relationship to Jesus Christ. It's like Jesus, "Tell me what you want me to do, and I'll be just delighted to do it." So a lot of Anabaptism has to do with being obedient to the scripture.

Okay, so in this context in America, we got some strange things going on. Let me read further in this book. Mennonites wanted to be obedient to the scripture, but they faced the problem that intense obedience might produce legalism rather than real transformation of the heart. Discussions and resolutions relating to dress occupied more time and attention at old Mennonite conferences than anything else.

And as a result of that, an impulse toward written and prescribed uniform dress standards paralleled the impulse for written and prescribed doctrine. This is brand new, the Anabaptist. It's all about obedience. It's not about prescriptions. For example, the way the dress problem had been handled in the past was they said things like this, "We do nothing for pride's sake."

It's on the negative side rather than being prescriptive.

But the Dress Committee declared in 1921 that the church is vested with authority in all matters of doctrine and discipline. Therefore, so long as her rules and regulations do not conflict with the word of God, her decrees are binding, and her authority should not be questioned.

So I'll stop with that. Now, this is huge. When these thoughts began to take hold, we have Mennonite General Conference was formed in 1898. We have the leaders coming, and by 1943, they were at loggerheads. We have, on the one side, the people who were tending to be on the liberal side, and we had, on the other side, the people who tended to be on the fundamentalist side. And they were at loggerheads in their conference.

They could not agree. Could not agree. And so in 1944, it's considered the watershed year. And in that year, there was a movement that began toward the liberal side, but the conservatives remained entrenched in their fundamentalism. And so if I can pick up there I'm sorry, I should give some opportunity for some discussion, some questions. Matt, do you have something you want to say? Yeah, a few questions that I think about when you go through that. The one is the academic respectability.

Were Mennonites, do they even care about that? Why were they even attuned to that? It didn't need to be an issue. That's one item. The other item, let's say that all of culture was becoming not Christian. Well, weren't Anabaptists used to the whole world not being like them? So why the fear? Why the need to worry about annihilation? And then a last question I have that back to our story. A question about back to our story and what you and this might distract you from the other two questions. Maybe get those first. And then the back to our story. Why could Anabaptists not pick up their Bibles like they did in the 1500s and say, "Wait, we need to be why did they need the history?

Why could they not look at Jesus and pick up their Bibles like they did in the 1500s and do what they needed to do?" The simple answer to that, Matt, is they're too busy.

Materialism had taken over too much. And they were too formal. They were relaxed into their tradition. There were some exceptions, like Christian Burkholder, who did pick up his Bible. But unfortunately, I mean, it's just a very our story, the old Mennonite story, we were a dying people in the 1800s.

If it wouldn't have been for John Funk and the Great Awakening, I'm not sure if you and I would even be here today. Back to your Goshen College question, intellectual respectability. Part of the effort to gain some credibility was that we've got to have our own institutions of higher learning. So we've got to have our institution called Goshen.

And that's where we started. But some of the teachers there were on the liberal side of things. And some of the conservatives were so concerned about this that they shut that institution down for 1923. It started back up again under Daniel Kaufman.

And so that's just an illustration of the struggle. But it seemed like by that time, intellectual respectability had become we had stepped up to that level. The common love, faith, obedient relationship to Jesus Christ somehow wasn't as respectable as some of this intellectual stuff. So another way to say it is fundamentalism may have arrived to the church via academic institutions. Exactly. That's exactly right. To help fight the liberalism on the one side, you have to have a corresponding intelligentsia on the other side to be credible. Do you have more, or should I go on? I think that's okay. How about you go on with the more developments in the fundamentalist side? Okay. American society was changing profoundly because World War I happened soon after 1900.

Now, World War I was supposed to be the war that ended all wars. This modern religious liberalism, mankind was his own God. He was going to solve everything. But then World War I came along, and it proved liberal theology false. Man did not have all the answers, but it survived anyway. And so this liberal theology, in its survival, brought it unleashed secular forces, such as bringing jazz into the mainstream of America.

It sparked an era of bitterness and reaction with the loss of American Christian ideal. The Christian America mystique lost. And it created a hatred for anything German. Our people were German. So now we have the opportunity to be persecuted. And World War I was the last time we were actually persecuted. This time, we're persecuted in America.

But when the war was over, the remaining energy for attaining an ideal and this is on the fundamentalist side. They used their energy to move into prohibition. Actually created a constitutional amendment. That's how much energy they had to do this.

And believe it or not, we actually benefited on that one. Talk about a contribution, a positive contribution of fundamentalism. Our people distilled their own liquor for all their history until prohibition. And the fundamentalists actually helped us become teetotalers at that time.

And we've been teetotal ever since. Do you think that was a historically was that at one with historic Christianity? Yes. Teetotalism. You read the scripture, you know Timothy says, "Use a little wine for your stomach's sake." Well, Anabaptists were pretty liberal with that. And they had some problems as a result of that.

Abraham Overholt was a whiskey distiller out near Pittsburgh. If you want a life lesson, go visit Jacob's Creek. It were Old Overholt whiskey was distilled. That's off the subject. I don't want you there. Quite a life lesson. Okay, so another part of the energy of fundamentalism here is zeal to oppose Marxism because Marxism is built on atheism. This liberal theology is very closely related to atheism. And so it is all about anti-communist.

And not just anti-communist out there, but anti-communist in the United States.

Along with that, we had the revival of the Ku Klux Klan to deal with Blacks. In spite of those efforts, secularism had come to stay in America. There was a revolution in morals. We have newspaper tabloids and movies that created sex stars and violence. We have Freudianism, and we have freedom of expression now in America.

We have modern advertising, which encouraged consumerism. These are all things on a secular level. We have the collapse of communal standards for enforcing proper behavior. And so there's one of the reasons why Mennonites began to codify some things because nothing else was codifying. And evolution was viewed as scientific, and creationism was caricatures as ignorance and religious clothes.

And so if there's nothing in society to hold stuff, these fundamentalist ideas and answers were very appealing. Instead of getting people to have their own love, faith, relationship with Jesus Christ to create their own convictions, too often they weren't even there as convictions. And so you have to create rules to stop all of this.

What are you thinking, Matt? Well, I do have a question about giving fundamentalists the credit for rules. And maybe I'll ask it as a question.

Has the church, the historic Christianity, has it not had rules in the form of church orders, instruction class manuals, and confessions of faith and responses to issues of the day throughout its history? For example, the apostolic traditions by Hippolytus.

It almost sounds like some of our Mennonite rules and rule books could have been almost copy and pasted. Example, the faithful should greet one another, the men with each other and the women with each other. No man should greet a woman, and the woman shall cover their head with a veil, but not with just a piece of linen for that is no covering.

That was 235, Hippolytus Apostolic Traditions 235. That sounds incredibly modern. And then we have class instruction manuals. The Teacher by Clement of Alexandria. He talks about plain dress material for the ladies, literally plain dress material. He has interesting reasons for that. He talks about coverings. He even talks about shoes and things on shoes. Talks about beards for men. And I like to say that Clement of Alexandria almost certainly was a beachy because his instruction manual was down the line, almost everything except that he allowed a little drinking for older folks.

Not for children, mind you, but for older folks. So I have a question about giving the credit for rules to fundamentalists. How would you handle that? Or do you have a comment on that? I think rules have their place, as you illustrated it. But a thousand years passed. We have a Roman Catholic understanding, and they have lots of rules in monasticism, like in monasteries and convents and so on. But that's for the perfect. The imperfect really can't have rules, the people down at the bottom.

So if we have an obedient, love, faith, relationship with Jesus Christ, we don't mind some of those kind of guidances, like you mentioned there with Hippolytus and so on. We don't mind that. But what do you do if you have a whole group of people, say by 1900, that are really sadly lacking in an obedient, faith, love relationship, and they don't see the reason for rules? What do you do?

Well, the fundamentalists were plugging in some rules. And so we ought to try some of those. The fundamentalists, their rules were a different category. Their guidelines were doctrinal, which was kind of but I guess they also did bleed over in their no dancing, no drinking.

They did have some ethical, yeah, that's true. And so maybe that, yeah. But largely, if I'm thinking correctly, their rules or guidelines were doctrinal. Am I thinking correctly? Yes, I think so. And maybe some that were kind of good American cultural, you ought to do this to be a nice, clean American were more of the ethical rules. Yes, yes, yes.

Yeah, can I maybe shift the conversation just a little bit here? I think with the historical sketch, you got, first of all, kind of the background of what modernist theology was like, which in some cases was closer to atheism than theology, but dressed up as Christian.

And then, Chester, as you moved on through that sketch, you started to see more and more fundamentalism as not just opposing that kind of denial of belief in God and so on, but really reactionary and really plugging into kind of American culture. I mean, yeah, so the anti-communist was probably anti-atheist, right? And it also was very much a nationalist pro-American sentiment driving that too, which probably is where we start to get some of this really negative reaction to fundamentalism when we start to tie it in with some of those other systems.

Okay, one of those other systems right there that is associated with fundamentalism is premillennialism, eschatology. That was a brand new idea for Mennonites. But there were some influential preachers who began to preach that, and many Anabaptists bought the idea. One of the interesting things that I understand that fundamentalism grew out of dispensational premillennialism conferences.

So it was kind of an outgrowth. And I'm not sure that I could have said that. I mean, I knew the strong association, but having the prophecy conferences and then that kind of being where they could jump off to do the rest, do the other work that they felt needed done.

So a very tight connection between fundamentalism and dispensational premillennialism. Yeah, but part of it was part of it was born out of reaction. If there is no Christ who's going to return again, then you go to prophetic scriptures and become very literal with prophetic scripture. And so that's how it came into existence. So maybe to take it from there and move through some of our topics beyond the historical part just a little bit.

Matt, since you read the fundamentals and are thinking about one of my questions was, how do we look at some of these people more sympathetically than we often do? Could you maybe just name one or two things that surprised you reading this document? Yes, there's a couple.

So Charles Erdman, in writing his chapter on the dispensational premillennialism, he notes that the great objection to premillennial position is the apparent prediction in 2 Peter 3 that at the coming of Christ, the day of the Lord, the earth will be destroyed, and then there could be no place for a millennium.

And so I was greatly surprised to realize that he indeed did not believe that 1 Peter 3, am I saying a 2 Peter 3? Actually, he did not believe that that would destroy the world. He said that the predictions of fiery judgments and the consequence of new heaven and earth will be it'll be just it'll be so far figurative, insofar figurative that the earth still continues with its life, its nations, its progress after these judgments are over. The Nile will still be there. Jerusalem will still be there. And this is the one that's just greatly quotable. According to the Lord himself, his return is to bring the regeneration, not the destruction of the world.

And that was not one of the things I expected to hear in the fundamentals. Another one that was a bit of a surprise for me in the essay on essay number 18 on science and Christian faith by Professor James Orr.

There is no—and this is a quote—there is no violence done to the narrative in substituting in thought aeonic days' vast cosmic periods for days on our narrower sun-measured scale. Then the last trace of apparent conflict with science disappears.

Did you expect to read that in the fundamentals? And I realized after reading that that that's very much an early fundamentals position. They were, as Chester so clearly outlined, they were very interested in arguing on the same level. If science says something, they have to argue at that level.

So that is something. And maybe Alvin Plantingas, famous definition of fundamentalism, the full meaning of the term or the full meaning of the term fundamentalism, therefore, can be given by something like it can mean something like stupid idiot whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine.

To just give how when you compare what I just read and not saying they're my positions, just their positions and how people look at fundamentalists, you can see that there's kind of this disconnect. They're not quite as simple. And if we would have looked in the history, and I'm finding a way to trend backwards here and looking at their history, one of the things is they really do this weaving back and forth. So for example, they start out very glad to be helping socially, helping humanitarian aid, helping with the poor. And then they get to this area where they kind of weave back and say, "No, we can't be doing that because that could make us look like some wrong."

They are jumping to another one, political aloofness. I can totally understand why Anabaptists felt comfortable with them because at one period, they had this incredible political aloofness. They might have voted, but at that point, I'm sure Mennonites did as well.

This aloofness, but we'll vote, but not get too worried about it. To weaving back, and during that political aloofness period in 1965, Jerry Falwell could have a sermon on ministers and marchers in which he proclaimed that the duty of the church was simply to preach the word and not to reform the externals.

And if we know just a few years later that that really turned around. They're not sure if government—they're kind of this weaving thing. They're not sure if the government is of the devil or God's new Israel. They're not quite sure.

And when they'll walk with their sign saying, "God is judging the USA," but if someone walks up and starts protesting the soldiers, they'll say, "Don't do that." So is God judging the USA? And can you also protest soldiers? So there's kind of this weaving back and forth. And maybe just giving that a little bit of a historical sketch to say they're complex, just like any people.

My original definition of how most people view them is probably not accurate.

Yeah, so for the next several questions, I'm going to wrap several together. I'm going to share a slide here with a few dates on it. And I've got the screen here. So 111 years. And of course, as Chester outlined, the roots go back well before 1909. But 1909, you can think of that as the year of the publication of the fundamentals, this collection of essays.

And then I was pleased that Chester mentioned Harold Bender as an early kind of Anabaptist historian. So in 1956, and this is straight out of the Mennonite Encyclopedia.

But he's looking at the fundamentalist movement, and he's probably optimistic. But he says, "With a considerably faded fundamentalism and a generally subsiding fundamentalist influence, Mennonites see more clearly than before that they belong neither in the modernist nor fundamentalist camps, but have a satisfactory biblicism and evangelicalism of their own."

So if we have, in Bender's words, a biblicism and evangelicalism of our own, what he's trying to say there is we back up to Chester showed us a paper with the kind of split between liberalism and modernism, and Bender saying, "Yeah, we're in the middle."

Move up to 1997, Dallas Willard. He's not talking about Mennonites in particular, but I noticed that he said fundamentalism versus modernism, the controversy still works powerfully in the depths of American religion across denominations.

And so one of those questions for you is, "Okay, why are we still talking about this in 2020? Does it matter?" But then another question that I'm going to loop in with that one when we talk about why are we still talking about this 100 years later? Does it still matter for us? Is fundamentalism was a reaction to modernism.

And Matt already touched on this where we're so afraid of being modernists because they don't believe in the Bible and so on, that it's easy to start rejecting things that really are biblical because they look modernist. Can you make a comment on maybe what some of those things have been over the last decades where we've been scared to be biblical because it might look modernist? So I'll turn it back. Actually, Matt, I'll let you go first, and then Chester. One of the—basically, the question, it was a little hard to hear you cut out a little bit, but did Anabaptists avoid certain doctrines, Christian emphasis because fundamentalists, according to fundamentalism, it would have seemed liberal or modernist?

And I think, yes, a very significant one. And I've become increasingly suspicious that a strong emphasis that Jesus is Lord now has been muted because of dispensational premillennialism and their pushback against possibly post-millennialism. Interestingly enough, Carl F.H. Henry, in The Uneasy Conscience of Fundamentalism, noted that he was writing some essays, and he was cautioned by a fundamentalist spokesperson when this series of articles was projected to stay away from the kingdom. There was a growing reluctance, and I'm still quoting, "A growing reluctance to explicate the kingdom idea in fundamentalist preaching because a kingdom now message is too easily confused with liberal social gospel, and because a kingdom then message will identify Christianity further to the modern mind in terms of an escape mechanism.

Yet no subject was more frequently on the lips of Jesus Christ than the kingdom. He proclaimed kingdom truth with a constant exuberant joy. It appears as the central theme of his preaching, and to delete his kingdom references, parabolic and non-parabolic would be to excise most of his words." And that is sometimes called progressive fundamentalist, Carl F.H. Henry's own words.

I have been wondering why the pushback or kind of the mutedness about the kingdom and about Jesus being Lord and King now. And when I ran across these words, I thought, "Maybe we've latched on to a possible reason."

A second maybe idea or maybe another posture or emphasis that comes from fundamentalist emphasis, and that is fear of annihilation, causing an overly sharp response to anything outside a very specific range of options that now increasingly appears more narrow than historic Christian practice and belief.

When I read the book, Keeping the Trust, I finally—I grew my experience, and now I'm going—so we're kind of switching between our experience and describing history. And now I'm going maybe to my experience of having lived under leaders that went through the trauma of the modernist fundamentalist. And as I read Keeping the Trust, I finally could understand that trauma of fear that there may be no faithful Mennonite church in the future, or maybe the way Chester was talking about possibly no faithful church, and how that really, really was a trauma that shook and shaped people so that their lives could not be the same afterward.

And I did not live through that, but Chester did, so go ahead. I'll let him riff off of that. This book, when Aaron Shank tells that story of how Aaron himself navigated that, and he gave me, and I think a lot of other people, some very good example of how you live this. In fact, integrity was even more important to him than even doctrine, although it would be hard to separate the two. And he gave a wonderful model on how to proceed without a lot of fear.

Those are the two that I was going to give, and I'll let you—if you want to—I know that you have a long list, but those are two that I was thinking about.