Six Critiques of 'Fundamentalism'

Hey everyone. Terribly sorry for taking so long to post. I realized with some dismay that I have forced you to click on that latest stupid blog post for over two weeks now. That is the horrible thing about blogs- what is written in some haste while taking a coffee break from the legitimate work of sermonizing might just sit on the web for two weeks (and, actually, will sit on the web for much longer).

This morning I was listening to one of Pastor John Piper's biographical sermons from the Bethlehem Conference for Pastors on J. Gresham Machen. It is an interesting and insightful discussion of the 'fundamentalism-modernism' struggle in the first decades of the past century. Check it out:
http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/Biographies/1464_J_Gresham_Machens_Response_to_Modernism/

Piper recounts Machen's distaste of the label 'fundamentalist', though he accepted such a classification in the struggle against the foe of modern liberalism. Why the reticence to be identified with this emerging (he he he) evangelical army? Piper lists seven reasons (there is mention of notes in the paper, though I couldn't find the direct source. Most likely this material is from Stonehouse's biography of Machen). Machen was prophetic in his critical assessment of the movement that would forge the contemporary evangelical identity. Here they are:

1) the absence of historical perspective
2) the lack of appreciation of scholarship
3) the substitution of brief, skeletal creeds for the historic confessions
4) the lack of concern with precise formulation of Christian doctrine
5) the pietistic, perfectionist tendencies (i.e., legalism, hang ups with smoking)
6) one-sided other-worldliness (i.e., a lack of effort to transform culture)
7) a penchant for futuristic chiliasm (or: pre-millenialism)

First, let me remind you that the fundamentalism of 1900-1940's (represented in the classic four volume work edited by R.A. Torrey, The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth-http://www.xmission.com/~fidelis/) was a very important, and crucial movement at a time when the Christian faith was under attack on almost every front. We often dismiss the 'fundamentalist' of this era based upon the silly caricature that such a title calls forth in the postmodern imagination, from our own limited experience. But we can't be so naive as to trust our reductionistic and anachronistic, or narrow and subjective, contemporary assesments of history and her players. For the most part the 'Fundamentalists' were giants of the faith, on whose shoulders we stand, and the 'fundamentals' they fought for were absolutely crucial tenets of an historic and biblical Christianity. This is why Machen stood on their side in the battle for the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. All that being said, Machen truly identified what would become a rather unhealthy 'fundamentalist' ethos that so many have had to reject or rebel against.

Perhaps this is bound to happen in any movement that is primarily borne out of reaction to another movement or some struggle.