Baptists and Early Fundamentalism
I. Baptists and Early Fundamentalism
A. As a fellowship of autonomous churches committed to no creed, confession, or system of theology, even premillennial Baptists felt less compelled than did their Presbyterian brethren in the earliest period of Fundamentalism to defend their views of eschatology beyond their own local churches.
1. Although Baptists remained second to Presbyterians in the leadership of old guard Fundamentalism during the movement’s first period, 1857-1920, they made key contributions and provided outstanding leadership.
2. Gradually, Baptists rose to a majority within the Fundamentalist movement, but they did so at the expense of many scars and casualties from the controversies with the modernists during the 1920s.
3. Beginning in the 1930s, most Baptist Fundamentalists began much more persistently than ever to make premillennialism (often including pretribulationalism) a trademark of their faith.
B. Northern Baptist Seminaries
1.Even before the turn of the twentieth century, the five Baptist seminaries in the North were showing signs of liberalism, a)Newton Theological Institution.
(1) Newton Theological Institution in Newton Centre, Massachusetts, originated in 1825 as a Baptist seminary.
(a)its notable leaders included (i)the great administrator, Irah Chase (1793-1864);
(ii) the scholarly conservative, Alvah Hovey (1820~1903)1;
(iii)the model pastor, Nathan E. Wood (1849~1937); and (iv)the tolerant professor, Frederick L. Anderson (1862-1938)
(b) Both Wood and Anderson identified with early Fundamentalism, with Wood signing the call to and Anderson addressing the reconvention Fundamentalist conference in Buffalo when they organized the Fundamentalist Fellowship in 1920.
(i) Anderson was not a militant, however, and he denied the necessity of belief in the virgin birth:
(a) "My mind is still open on this subject, which I do not consider of the first importance. I am rather inclined to believe in the Virgin Birth, but it is not essential to Christian faith (cf., Peter and Paul) and should not be made a condition of church membership or ordination."
(ii) By the 1930s, when Andover Theological Seminary moved to the Newton campus, the seminary was well within the mainstream of liberalism.
(a)Nels F. S. Ferre (1908-1971) taught theology at Andover Newton Theological School from 1937 to 1950 and from 1957 to 1965. Ferre attacked virtually all of the historic fundamentals of the Christian faith. b)Colgate Theological Seminary.
(1) Colgate Theological Seminary was established in Hamilton, New York, in 1817, with "thirteen men, thirteen prayers, and thirteen dollars," as the first Baptist seminary in America.
(2) In 1890, however, the modernist William Newton Clarke (1841-1912) began teaching at Colgate, where he remained until shortly before his death.
(a) One of Clarke’s books, An Outline of Christian Theology (1894), was the first systematic theology of American liberalism.
(3)In 1928, Colgate merged into Rochester Theological Seminary. c)Rochester Theological Seminary.
(1) Rochester Theological Seminary in New York was founded with the University of Rochester in 1850.
(2) Among the scholarly Fundamentalists who enhanced the seminary faculty during the last half of the nineteenth century was Howard Osgood (1831-1911).
(a) Osgood addressed the Fundamentalist conference on inspiration in Philadelphia in 1887 and the Seaside Bible Conference at Asbury Park, New Jersey, in 1893.
(3) It was a professing conservative, Augustus H. Strong (1836-1921), who prepared the way for Rochester Seminary’s fall into apostasy.
(a) After serving as pastor of several churches, Strong became president of the seminary in 1872, and he remained there until 1912. Perhaps most remember Strong for his Concordance and Systematic Theology.
(b) Though he was conservative enough in his early career, he later adopted theistic evolution, a low view of the Bible’s inspiration, and pantheistic ideas.
(c) 1t was Strong who brought Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918), the father of the Social Gospel, to Rochester’s faculty in 1902.
(i) Rauschenbusch soon released his Christianity and the Social Crisis (1906) and Theology of the Social Gospel (1917).
(ii)He became a popular speaker in Northern Baptist gatherings and continued at Rochester Seminary until his death in 1918. d)Crozer Theological Seminary.
(1) Baptists established Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania, in 1867.
(2) Crozer Seminary’s first president, Henry G. Weston (1820-1909), an ardent Fundamentalist,served as a consulting editor of the Scofield Reference Bible.
(3) Fundamentalist James M. Stifler (1839-1902), after serving several pastorates, taught as professor of New Testament at Crozer from 1882 until the year of his death.
(4) Other conservative Crozer professors included George D. B. Pepper, who defended the Bible’s inerrancy in his Outlines of Systematic Theology (1873), and Howard Osgood, who taught there before going to Rochester Theological Seminary.
(5) It was here at Crozer, however, that Henry C. Vedder (1853-1935), the Baptist historian, taught from 1894 to 1926.
(a) Vedder vigorously attacked Christ’s substitutionary atonement. He considered "the idea of sacrificial expiation made by the innocent for the guilty" as "especially repugnant to our best ethics."
(b) He called the Old Testament sacrificial system "too revolting, too stupidly absurd, to be worthy of serious refutation" and a gross, impudent, insulting slander against God.
(6) Alvah Sabin Hobart (1847-1930), who taught at Crozer from 1900 to 1920 expressed similar views.
(7)In 1970, Crozer moved onto Rochester’s increasingly ecumenical campus. e)The University of Chicago Divinity School.
(1) John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (1839-1937) established the University of Chicago in 1891.
(2) Actually a predecessor of the university, the divinity school originated with the old Morgan Park Seminary, which had been chartered by the Baptist Theological Union back in 1865.
(3) The University of Chicago Divinity School is one institution that clearly did not "fall" into modernism;
(a) it originated that way and continues as one of the most radical seminaries on the continent.
(b) By the turn of the twentieth century, the school had created a furor among Fundamentalists.
(c) The first president and one of the founders of the University of Chicago was William Rainey Harper (1856-1906), who also served as professor of Hebrew and Old Testament.
(d) Shailer Mathews (1863-1941), professor of New Testament and systematic theology, was another famous theologian there.
(e) These men were among the leading modernists of their generation, and they were obviously proud of it.
(f)Liberals and modernists representing the University of Chicago Divinity School included (i)Shirley Jackson Case (1872-1947), (ii)Edgar J. Goodspeed (1871-1962), (iii)William Warren Sweet (1881-1958), (iv)J. M. Powis Smith (1866-1932), (v)George Burman Foster (1858-1918), (vi)Gerald Birney Smith (1868-1929), (vii)Ernest DeWitt Burton (1856-1925), (viii)Henry N. Wieman (1884-1975), 26 (ix)Martin E. Marty, in the late 1970s, in an apparent attempt to attract more students to its ecumenical base, the school declared itself as simply an "unofficial" institution of the American Baptist Churches in the USA. It continues to maintain its "historical and friendly" relationship with this denomination