Fundamentalism — Chester Weaver — Ep. 084

Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. We're here at Effort of Mennonite School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. We're with Chester Weaver. Now, you've spent an awful lot of time teaching, and I know you especially love history. And I think this is a great opportunity to dive into some of our past. So the one we're going to cover today is fundamentalism. And before we get too deep into that, just describe a little, what is Christian fundamentalism? Okay.

First of all, I would like to give a caveat that our session here tonight is not going to be dealing with the story of the Dutch Mennonites. We'll talk about fundamentalism in the context of the Swiss Brethren people. So there are three branches of Anabaptism: the Dutch, Prussian, Russian Mennonites, the Swiss Brethren, and the Hutterites. So I'm only looking at the Swiss Brethren part of the story. I'm also very much aware that this topic is very easily misunderstood. On one hand, what we're talking about may tend to jerk the rug out from under some people's feet. I plead carefulness and further research. And I realize whenever I'm entering into this, some people may feel threatened by what I have to say.

And I just ask the evidence of Anabaptist history. If something can be misunderstood, it will be misunderstood. So I recognize this, that it's dangerous, and I probably will be misunderstood and criticized and labeled as a result of this. But somebody has to do this dangerous work. Okay, fundamentalism grows out of a reaction to liberalism. So I'm going to have to define both fundamentalism and liberalism. Let me start with liberalism. Modern religious liberalism was born in Germany in the 1800s. And it's often associated with Friedrich Schleiermacher and Julius Wellhausen. So their religious liberalism was, we usually think of in terms of higher criticism, where you doubt what God says in His word until it's proven. Okay?

So that began to filter into the Mennonite Church, what I'm calling the old Swiss Brethren Mennonite Church, especially through Goshen College. Not full-fledged, but it began to edge into that. Some responsible leaders began to see that they need to do something about this. And to combat liberalism, they borrowed fundamentalism. They did not go back to their own story. And so if I could go to this chart, you'll notice that in our beginnings here, in 1500 and 1600, we experienced persecution.

Eventually, when we came across the water, our people experienced materialism from 1700 up to the 1800s. And in the mid-1800s, by this time, we were losing people by the droves because they were moving west. The word was, "Go west, young man."

But they didn't go west to a church. Church was not as important as money. Okay, so if people have no anchor and they're going to set up a school, part of the revival that happened over this time, like with John S. Kaufman, is we got to go to school. And so when they started Goshen to deal with some of our weaknesses, it became tainted with liberalism. And so that is why fundamentalism was born and borrowed. Okay, so now let's go back and talk about fundamentalism. So what is it?

May I read something directly off this paper? Because I want to be careful that I said exactly right. 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 in this country. Now that we're talking about America. America, that's right. In personal terms, this meant that many people brought up to accept unquestioningly the complete authority of the Bible and the sure truths of evangelical teaching found themselves living in a world where such beliefs no longer were considered intellectually respectable.

Such was typical of the personal histories of the leaders of the liberal movement. When they reached the universities, they were confronted with the 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 must either abandon Christianity or modify it to meet the standards of the day. For many, the latter choice seemed the only live option. Many churchgoing people must have shared these liberal sentiments.

By the first decades of the century, liberalism, or modernism as it was coming to be called, was well entrenched in almost all of the leading theological seminaries. Probably more than half of Protestant publications leaned toward modernism, and liberals occupied perhaps one third of the nation's pulpits. Okay, that's a quote from Marston in his book.

His book is entitled "Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism." Okay. Now, so liberalism is trying to save the faith. They're trying to save the faith by deifying the historical process that God was incarnate in the development of humanity versus God invading history to do a particular work.

Now, I don't have time to flesh all that out, but just take my word on it for right now. Secondly, they were stressing at the ethical Christianity. Christianity was doing good, not doctrine. Okay? Versus being a child of God.

Stressing ethics over actually living your faith. Ethics. That's right. Ethics and theology versus living. Wow. Okay, so now we come into dualism. And if you notice this, Gnosticism, and we ought to do a whole session on this. Gnosticism is practically expressed in Protestantism as salvation is separated from ethics, beliefs, and church.

Whereas the New Testament teaches salvation, it's all this as one. Oneness. Okay? So this is a part of the mix. Dualism is coming in. Okay, another way of defining this is the centrality of religious feelings versus routine faithfulness to Christ.

Okay, so this problem is not a problem of the people of the two kingdom concept. This is a problem for people who have dualism.

But because of encroaching worldliness and the increasing loss of the two kingdom concept, the problem became a Mennonite problem. It wasn't originally a problem. It's because Mennonites, by this time, had lost their story. They were on this side of the ocean. They were going from German to English, and they were borrowing Protestantism as their worldview.

And because of that, they inherited this problem. But instead of looking to their own history to solve the problem, they looked to Protestantism to solve their problem. And so, on the one hand, while Goshen was getting these liberal influences, some leaders were seeing that this is not okay. But their way of combating it was not to go to their own story, but to borrow fundamentalism.

So now we need to flesh out what we mean by fundamentalism.

There are several fundamentalist lies. Christianity is performance, perfectionism-based.

Fundamentalism teaches pride, fear, and shame, and despair that characterize normal Christian experience. Now, again, it would be nice to flesh all this out. Sure, sure. But a third lie, others who do not do it our way are threats to us. And fourth, being argumentative, critical, and judgmental of others is okay.

And so, in our people, we have a divide. We have the liberal influences now being attacked by this kind of thing. And it made a huge issue in our people. And finally, the issue came to a head in 1944, a watershed year. In 1943 and '44, the church leaders came together in Mennonite General Conference, and they were at loggerheads.

Something had to give. Yeah. Okay? We cannot, there's two thoughts. Can two walk together except they be agreed? No. So what happened there? The liberals took it from there. Okay? So that lays the groundwork as to what happened later in the '60s and why it happened.

Okay? So that's not where we're going right now. Sure. Which we'll catch that in the next episode. So stay tuned, audience, for that. The conservative Protestants saw the religious liberalism as a sellout to simple unbelief. So they launched this counterattack. Okay? So part of their basic part of their counterattack was rejection of Darwinism because it questioned the accuracy of the Bible and reversed the relationship of science to Christian faith.

And secondly, they introduced several Protestant innovations, such as premillennialism, dispensational premillennialism. There was a book, a set of books, 12 books that were written called The Fundamentals. And that's where the word fundamentalism actually was taken from. And we have 12 volumes, and I don't want to take the time. You can see them here, like The Virgin Birth, The Deity of Christ. Some of these fundamentals we very much appreciate, like the little resurrection of Jesus Christ, the virgin birth of Christ. Inspiration of the Bible. Inspiration, all that stuff. But there's a whole lot more to it that makes the issue. Okay? And so it's those issues that actually turned the Anabaptists away from their own story.

Let me show you this. The impact of fundamentalism on the old Mennonites now. Okay? In reaction to this liberalism, we absorb the Protestant emphasis on a personal conversion. It's God and I. Historically, Anabaptism talks about God and we. As in the community of believers. That's right. God works with us as individuals and as a group.

But now we're losing the group consciousness. We're losing Glassenheit. We're going back to just God and I. I need to get a ticket to heaven. Okay, so number two, revival meetings of the 1800s were modeled after the evangelical revival meetings. The fundamentalism, that's the strong preaching against liberalism. We just borrowed it. But revivalism is not a part of our history. It's not a part of our story. Yeah, interesting. Okay. Okay, so the effects of American individualism affected how some viewed their salvation and walk of life. And so we're back to this dualism thing over here.

See, the Protestant version of dualism, you separate salvation from ethics and beliefs and church. And that's not biblical. The real source of this fundamentalism comes from Princeton College's militant fundamentalism and Calvinism. Fifthly, borrowings from D.L. Moody and Schofield's premillennialism helped bring these ideas into the mainstream of evangelical Christianity. And as they came in, we borrowed it. Yeah, I don't want to hit a rabbit trail here, but the premillennialism thing, was that at all anything to do with Anabaptism before this time? No. That is so interesting because it's not like that at all anymore.

Okay, I didn't know that. Prosperity eliminated the need for each other, and train travel made transportation both fast and comfortable. And so we're losing community also as a part of this. Okay, that's some of the impact here. Ideas always have consequences. And sometimes we need to look at the ideas to understand the consequences that have generated these ideas. Get back to the bigger picture in our country. World War I was like a watershed. It was the last time Anabaptists were persecuted. But it's also prime time for fundamentalism to come into the church. We actually benefited from some of this fundamentalism because we drank and brewed our own liquor. But the fundamentalists helped us understand that teetotalism is better than that.

And we are indebted to fundamentalism for helping us get rid of alcohol, believe it or not. And prohibition was the national mood, and we bought into it. And we actually helped ourselves on that one. That's interesting. So now we're talking about 100 years ago at this point, right? That's right, 100 years ago. So another thing that happened over this time, atheism and religious liberalism are related.

And this was unfolding in Russia. Stalin's Russia, Lenin's Russia, atheism. It's an outgrowth of liberalism. Okay, so anybody who is fundamentalist is against communism and atheism, big time. So that also feeds into the emotional reaction that we had. We want to oppose this with everything we've got. So we're against communism and against atheism. We transferred that over into this country, and we started getting involved in politics. We need to vote now to keep these atheists and communists out of government. But the facts are, secularism had come to stay in America, and we had to deal with it. And so instead of borrowing from our own, using our own story, we did all this borrowing.

And we didn't stay on top of it too well because there was a revolution in morals that was going on, and we used fundamentalism to deal with the morals. The movies were coming in as a new thing. Sex stars, violence. But the way we dealt with it is through fundamentalism. We make rules against it. Anabaptism is all about a living personal relationship with Jesus Christ. A love, obedient relationship to Jesus Christ. And this idea of having rules now to deal with our issues is opposite, is not a part of the Anabaptist story. So that's more of a newer thing that came because of the secularism. Exactly. Wow. Freudianism and the freedom of expression is another one.

Modern advertising encouraged consumerism. But again, if you have a fundamentalist mindset, you got to make rules to deal with all these things. And if you have the collapse of communal standards for enforcing proper behavior, that's what was happening in America. Everything was, the morals were breaking down. You got to make rules to make people behave right, correctly. And that's not Anabaptist. It's not a historic faith. Women began smoking in public. They didn't always cover their knees. They cut their hair short. They stepped outside the home.

You got to make a rule to deal with this. Instead of having a relationship with Jesus Christ where he already speaks to those things, we switched from Christ to fundamentalism as a way to solve our problem. Dancing became socially acceptable out there. So we need to make a rule on it. Evolution was viewed as scientific, and creationism was caricatured as ignorance in religious clothes. On this one, we actually learned some things. We never lost our creationism.

Interesting. Okay. So we benefited from this one. And our liberal Mennonite friends have turned to more of a theistic evolution kind of thing. But the kind of people you and I represent have not. So again, not everything the fundamentalism introduced was negative. So we've unpacked some of what fundamentalism is, specifically how it's affected our Mennonite churches here in America.

With that backdrop, how do we move forward? What's the next step for, well, I guess you could say my generation, the millennials? That's a very good question. May I answer that in 10 points? Yes, please. Yeah. First of all, there was no such thing as liberalism, fundamentalism, controversy in our story for 350 years.

Whoa. I never thought of that before. Okay. Old Mennonites understood the word of God as Jesus Christ, the living word. He was to be believed and obeyed to the best of one's ability. No alternatives existed. Secondly, Jesus Christ stood at the center of the Holy Scriptures. He was Emmanuel, God with us. The Holy Scriptures were to be interpreted Christocentrically.

Christ himself was to be incarnated in every individual Christian, as well as every congregation in their everyday experience. It's not dualism where you do religious things on Sunday and other things during the week. This is all one. This is standard Anabaptist theology since its origin. And to be real strict on Sunday and then loose on Monday through Saturday is an expression of fundamentalism. Thirdly, the Schleithaim Confession, 1527, the first known as Brotherly Union, states in his cover letter, quote, "Dear brothers and sisters, we who have been assembled in the Lord at Schleithaim make known in points and articles unto all that love God that as far as we're concerned, we have been united to stand fast in the Lord as obedient children of God, sons and daughters who have been and shall be separated from the world in all that we do and leave undone, uncontradicted by all the brothers, completely at peace."

That's our story right there. And it was stated in 1527, Schleithaim. Fourthly, Anabaptism has always held a theology of a living story based on a relationship with a living Christ, with his disciples walking in the resurrection. Christianity was about a relationship with a person. Daniel Kaufman used strange language in his doctrines of the Bible when he said, quote, "The right keeping of the teaching of the word of God necessarily depends on the right understanding of the truth. Christian doctrine involves the commandments, teaching, standards, and principles essential to saving faith and victorious life." End of quote. The entire book, Doctrines of the Bible, breathes a different spirit than traditional Anabaptist understanding. Number five, movement forward on issues happens with strong group consensus.

That's a way forward. The Schleithaim Confession was a statement of the Christian way of life in the context of brotherhood. No man is in Christ apart from his brother. You and I find our way together as a part of the body of Christ in dealing with the issues we face. Thus, the simple majority vote is invalid on major issues because not all the brothers have come to agreement. And we could park and talk about that. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting, but I see where you're coming from. Yeah. Number six, an obedient love-faith relationship between Christ and a believer is prerequisite for church membership. Anabaptism then understood the locus of authority to be in the local congregation.

Old Mennonites borrowed from other traditions the idea of institutions like conferences to manage spiritual life intercongregationally. That also comes in as a borrowed idea. We're talking about ways forward here. Number seven, this is pretty important. The Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, the first article of the Dordrecht Confession, which is in 1632, all begin with God. Subsequent articles of the Dordrecht Confession define living faith as discipleship to Jesus Christ. However, the Garden City Fundamentals, which were written in 1921, in the time period we're talking about, do not begin with God. They begin with the Holy Scriptures, being careful to include the language of inerrancy while being less careful to define Christianity as discipleship to Jesus Christ.

That's a subtle shift, but I've never thought of that before. And some people would say that the Garden City Fundamentals, which are used by a number of conservative groups today, is a Lutheran confession, a Lutheran statement. Okay, number eight, historian Robert Friedman noted that Glassenheit had largely been lost among the old Mennonites by 1930. As a result of borrowing this fundamentalism, we lost our Glassenheid.

Glassenheit is a key element required for individuals and churches to work together. Glassenheit, or lack thereof, is evidence of Christ's presence or absence in working relationships. However, the use of the law during times of ordination as a working congregational expression of Glassenheit has not been lost. Number nine, in the first half of the 1900s, the Old Mennonite General Conference, founded in 1898, had become a legislative enforcement agency in its effort to preclude encroachment by the world, including liberalism.

When local leaders failed to win the loyalty of their local congregations to Christ in the perennial struggle against general worldliness, the Mennonite General Conference was expected to do the job. This institutional expectation was the departure from traditional Anabaptist understanding. We're talking about ways forward here. And the way forward is not to have an institution make the rules. Number 10, 1943-1944 meetings of the Mennonite General Conference illustrate the clash and the impasse between progressive and fundamentalist leaders. The suspicions, the stubbornness, and Glassenheit failure on both sides of the clash had troubled the Mennonite General Conference for years. And that 1944 was considered the watershed year. To this day, the old Mennonites of both sides, the liberal side and the conservative side, neither one of them have recovered from the innovations introduced during that liberalism-fundamentalism clash to this day.

Wow. Okay, so I'd like to conclude by saying Harold Bender, when he went back into history and shared with us our own story, refused to buy into liberalism or fundamentalism. He insisted that there's another way, but he was a lonely voice, and only a few people got it. Now I'm curious, what did he call that other option between those two? Did he have a name for it? No, he didn't really have a name for it. It's almost like a third way. It was a third option. Exactly. Yeah. See, human beings are forever. If you're not in this ditch, you go to the other ditch. Right.

We are so predictable in that way. So to wrap it all up, people that are watching this, what's one thing they can do right now to either learn more about this or instigate some of these changes in their own lives? Most important thing is to have a living relationship with Jesus Christ. A living love-faith relationship with Jesus Christ. That is, and it's called discipleship. The Anabaptists insisted on discipleship. And the other thing, there's all kinds of books out here to read.

Joy and Submission is one of them. And this book by Marsden understanding fundamentalism and evangelicalism. When we work on uploading this, we need to make sure and put links to those books so people can go and buy those.

Because a lot of this is maybe people need to gain the knowledge to understand these things to be able to choose the right path. That's right. Don't trust me. Read it for yourself. Yeah. The very sad thing is that many people now are equating fundamentalism with Anabaptism. Yeah, I've heard that. It's not true. It's not true.

But we're living in ignorance, and nobody knows. That's part of the passion. That's part of the burden that I have. So maybe hopefully this video and this podcast will help change some of that. Hopefully. Well, thank you so much for sharing that. I really appreciate it. And anybody listening or watching this, send us an email, write us a comment, and look up some of these materials you've mentioned as well. Yeah, thank you so much.