The Fundamentals

History

The project was conceived and bankrolled in 1909 by California businessman and oil tycoon Lyman Stewart, the founder of Union Oil and a devout Presbyterian and dispensationalist, who had converted to Christianity during the "Businessman's Revival" of 1857. Stewart, along with his brother and business partner Milton Stewart, anonymously supported the composing, printing, and distributing the publication through the establishment of the Testimony Publishing Company. His original plan was simply to finance a 12 part monthly magazine for a year called the Testimony, in order to correct what he saw as erroneous Christian teachings among Christian workers like preachers, teachers, and missionaries, who Stewart said "do not know what they are teaching is error; they teach what they have been taught; they do not know any better."

The first editor and executive secretary was A. C. Dixon. Dixon was already well known as the pastor of the Moody Church in Chicago who vehemently opposed modernism, and was brother of the former Baptist preacher Thomas Dixon Jr., famous for his white supremest fiction such as The Clansman, later adapted into the film The Birth of a Nation. Stewart had chosen Dixon because of a sermon he had given attacking "one of the infidel professors in Chicago." Dixon, whose interests in fighting theological liberalism aligned with Stewart's, quickly agreed and declared it was "of the Lord," a sentiment with which Stewart agreed. He choose men from his evangelical network to assist him as an executive committee—R. A. Torrey, Elmore Harris, Louis Meyer, D. W. Potter, H. P. Crowell, and Thomas S. Smith—all of whom were aligned with the nondenominational evangelicalism inspired by Dwight L. Moody and a premillennial eschatology, as well as an opposition to theological liberalism. The committee persuaded Stewart to expand the one year project to five, to turn the final result into a book to make it more permanent, and to rename the project The Fundamentals. With Stewart's input they selected men "true to Christ and the Bible, and capable of doing the best possible work" drawn from their evangelical revivalist networks, as well as retrieving some previously published works. The initial volume was published in February 1910, only a few months after Stewart and Dixon's first meeting. The Stewart brothers were originally identified in the introduction simply as "two prominent Christian laymen" backing the project. It was mailed free of charge to ministers, missionaries, professors of theology, YMCA and YWCA secretaries, Sunday school superintendents, and other Protestant religious workers in the United States and other English-speaking countries. Over three million volumes (250,000 sets) were sent out.

Dixon resigned as executive secretary in 1911 preach at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, but only after the first five volumes had been released. Once Dixon left the project, he was followed as editor by Meyer from the executive committee, who died in 1913, and finally by Torrey. Throughout the project, the executive committee was careful to make sure that the resulting articles aligned with their theological outlook. The final product was 88 articles plus two editorials written by 64 writers and filling 12 volumes with a total of 1,434 pages. The initial response was much smaller than hoped, as both theological journals and popular religious magazines mostly ignored the The Fundamentals, but the long term effect was significant.

Content

According to its foreword, the publication was designed to be "a new statement of the fundamentals of Christianity". Its contents reflect a concern with certain theological innovations related to liberal Christianity, especially biblical higher criticism, evolution, New Theology, and the Social Gospel. "True" science or criticism was acceptable, but "illegitimate" science or criticism, based on speculative hypotheses, was not. About a third of the essays defend the scriptures from liberal theology and higher criticism, while another third deal with theological questions, with the rest being miscellaneous articles. According to the essays, there are five essential elements of Christianity: literal Biblical inerrancy and infallibility; Jesus' virgin birth, sinless life, crucifixion, and physical resurrection; Jesus' divinity as the second person in the Trinity; substitutionary atonement; and Jesus' literal and physical second coming. Additional important beliefs included personal salvation from original sin, the link between unorthodox belief and immorality, the acceptance of creationism, and a proactive support of evangelism. The project was significantly influenced by the premillennial dispensationalist Keswick movement, but according to George Marsden, "they showed remarkable restraint in promoting the more controversial aspects of their views" in order to maintain a unified front against religious modernism. According to Geoffrey R. Treloar, their "ultimate objective was the transformation of Christianity" and thereby society.

Direct discussion of political causes, including prohibition, were generally avoided outside a few warnings about communism and anarchy, and a moderate essay on socialism which stated that the church should stay away from the topic, but that personal advocacy was acceptable. In addition, despite the rising popularity of Asian religions in the wake of the 1893 Parliament of the World's Religions, The Fundamentals largely ignored religions outside of Christianity with the exception of one article on spiritualism, and mostly reserved its criticism for what it considered to be deviant Christian sects. The editors heavily attacked what they saw as the greatest single threat to Protestant doctrines: the Roman Catholic Church, what they called "Romanism." According to Douglas E. Cowan, anti-Catholicism was "something of a cottage industry" among Protestants in the United States at the time, partially because of the significant number of immigrants coming to America from predominantly Catholic countries. Other Christian targets included Christian Science, Mormonism, and Millennial Dawn, also known as Russellites and later Jehovah's Witnesses. The final volume was devoted to evangelism and missionary work, and was intended to be a capstone of the project. A common theme throughout was the rejection of what it saw as an unscientific prejudice propagated by "illegitimate" science and higher criticism against miracles. It also argued that the "supreme proof" of God was the Christian's "own inner experience of the transforming power of his Lord upon the heart and life."

The Fundamentals essays

Arrangement of the original 12-volume set: