This is lecture number 16—The Rise of Fundamentalism. Greetings once again in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and let me invite you to join me in prayer as we always do at the beginning of this class. Let us pray. Eternal God, we give you thanks once again for the privilege of studying. We ask that you would be with us by your Spirit, that all that we say and think together would be honoring to you. For it’s in Christ’s name that we pray, Amen.
Today I want us to begin exploring one of the most important eras in all of church history. The time is the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The focus: the rise of fundamentalism, the rise of modernism, and their intense battles of the nineteen-teens and twenties. The implications of these struggles are enormous for virtually all of us. Our understanding of theology, our practice of Christianity, our attitudes toward others—all of these things and many others are profoundly affected by these distant struggles. So I want to try to describe the growth of the two major traditions of the late nineteenth century—fundamentalis m on the one side, and modernism on the other—and then explore together with you some of the dimensions of the famous fundamentalist- modernist controversy, which tended to focus around the 1920s.
Let me describe this in the most visual way I can, as a struggle between a husband and a wife. Some of you will recall either witnessing or participating in those interesting arguments that sometimes emerge in our homes. They’ll often start out rather tamely—concern about a broken window that doesn’t get fixed, or the way one squeezes a toothpaste tube; but gradually, as it heats up, mothers-in-law are brought in and all kinds of other concerns and issues. And finally you are saying things to one another that in a sane moment you would never want to say. You’re taking positions that are far too extreme ever to be maintained, and there’s deep anger and hostility, bubbling of the emotions, that become part of those events.
Garth M. Rosell, PhD Experience: Professor of Church History
and Director Emeritus, Ockenga Institute at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary
In a sense, that is exactly what we’re talking about here in the enormous conflict of the fundamentalists and modernists. The argument begins to take shape and heat up in the late nineteenth century. By the nineteen-teens and twenties these two groups have come to loggerheads on many different levels in terms of intellectual life, social institutions, political views, and so on. Those battles then rage; and, as a result, both sides take positions that are so extreme in many cases and so truncated that both movements ultimately collapse. We have in the 1930s not only an economic depression, following the crash that all of us know about, but perhaps an even more profound spiritual depression. It is out of that, then, that God renews the church through two great renewal movements that we’ll talk about later on. Essentially I want to describe that movement and its impact, not only upon all of our churches, but upon most all of us, for a lot of our own views and attitudes and behaviors are deeply affected by the events that I’m going to be describing in this lecture and in the next two lectures to follow.
Let me begin by pointing to a number of resources that are available for our study. Those of you who are reading along in the Latourette volume will want to look especially at pages 1258 to 1278. In addition to that, there are a number of fine sources. Perhaps the best study of fundamentalism available is George Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture, Oxford, 1982. Ernest Sandeen has written two books which are very valuable for us: The Origins of Fundamentalism, Fortress Press, 1968; and The Roots of Fundamentalism, University of Chicago Press, 1970. Willard Gatewood’s book Controversy in the ’Twenties, Abingdon, 1969, is a useful source; as is C. Allyn Russell’s Voices of American Fundamentalism, in which he discusses some of the major figures of the fundamentalist wing, Westminster Press, 1976.
These and others are well worth exploring, but let me start our discussion together by asking a question to you that I often ask to my students in class. And that is simply a kind of word-association game. When I mention the term “fundamentalist,” what immediately comes to mind? I often have my students call out in the class the words that they associate with that term. I’ve been struck, over the years, with the kinds of words that are used—words like negative, bitter, head-in-the-sand, obscurantist, Scopes trial, anti-intellectual, angry, argumentative—all of those qualities which we most admire.
Unfortunately, it’s true that many of the fundamentalists came, in the late 1920s and 1930s, to reflect precisely those qualities that have been called out; but in their very best years, they were a remarkably able and gifted group of people. I like the fundamentalists. I find myself happily associating with the fundamentalists on many levels. I regret the fact that so much charity and love seemed to drift out of the movement in the heat of the battles. Some things are worth fighting for, however, and the fundamentalists impress me by the quality of their willingness to struggle for those elements of faith, those fundamentals of Christian belief, that are absolutely crucial for us to contend for in every generation. The deity of Christ, the authority of the Bible, the saving work of the atonement—these are not matters of indifference, or they shouldn’t be, to any of us! These are things worth fighting for, and I admire the fundamentalists for their willingness to do that against enormous odds.
The sad part of the story—and I’ll return to this later on—is that so many of the fundamentalists, though contending for the right things, became contentious in the way they did it. As a matter of fact, what we need in our day today is not crusty, angry people who are fighting each other, so much as joyful, deeply committed, winsome men and women of faith who communicate the Good News because, in fact, it is good news. I celebrate many of the things that the fundamentalists were trying to do, and they’re things, in many cases, that we need to continue to try to do in our day.
Fundamentalists have suffered by their commentators over the years. Some of the early books about fundamentalism: Stewart Cole’s The History of Fundamentalism, 1931; Norman Furniss, The Fundamentalist Controversy, 1954. These and others have pointed to fundamentalists as essentially a sociological movement, a kind of Southern, Bible-belt, head-in-the-sand, retrogressive force within our social structures. The breakthrough came with the writings of a man named Ernest Sandeen. Sandeen taught for a number of years before his death at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He wrote an article for Church History Journal. That article ultimately was expanded into the two books that I mentioned to your earlier, The Origins of Fundamentalism and The Roots of Fundamentalism.
The unique thing about Sandeen’s argument is that he took fundamentalism to be basically a theological movement, not a sociological one. I think Sandeen is exactly right; and, in fact,
Sandeen’s work paved the way for some of the most exciting historical research that’s come out of the presses in the last several decades. This is an area that has gotten enormous attention and continues to. In fact, our whole understanding of this era is changing as a result of some of this fine work that’s going on. At the heart of it, however, is a commitment to seeing fundamentalism as basically a theological movement. Sandeen argues that it is a theological movement that combines two basic theological elements that come together to form fundamentalism. On the one side is dispensationalism, on the other side is the Princeton Theology about Scripture. These may seem to be strange bedfellows, but I think Sandeen is right in drawing those together; and, in fact, the more work that goes on in the area, the more these two seem to be part and parcel of what comes together to form fundamentalism.
Let’s talk about those just a bit. Most of you, I suspect, are familiar in one way or other with dispensationalism and dispensational theology. It stems primarily from a small British group called Plymouth Brethren. This sprang up in Ireland and England in the 1820s. The most notable leader was John Nelson Darby, whose dates are 1800 to 1882. Darby was born in London, educated in Ireland as a lawyer, but instead of entering law he became a priest in the Anglican Church of Ireland in 1825. He soon became depressed by political interference in ecclesiastical affairs, and by 1828 he had not only left the church but had joined the Plymouth Brethren. He became one of their most ardent supporters. Darby believed that Christ would rescue all true Christians before the tribulation, which was soon to befall the earth, including apostate Christendom, just prior to His coming in glory to establish the Israelite millennium kingdom. Gradually he developed a periodization of history, an understanding of Scripture which divided it into various dispensations or eras, each with its own promises, each with its own responsibilities.
I hold in my hand a little Bible map, one of hundreds of this sort, with bright colors and illustrations of what are considered the seven basic dispensations or ages. The easiest place for you to find these, if you would like to explore these more fully, is in the Scofield Reference Bible notes. Most of you can probably find a copy of the Scofield Reference Bible. In fact, among the fundamentalists and more recent evangelicals, Scofield Bibles have been used extensively, and they’re available in libraries, if not in your own home. Look in the early chapters, and read the notes, and you will see in those notes a description of a dispensational
kind of structure. One of the other fine places to find this is in Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology. It’s an eight-volume series, which is resident in a number of theological libraries. In the first of those volumes you’ll see a very fine description of the seven ages, which make the pattern of dispensational life and understanding of Scripture.
Let me describe it for you at least briefly. The first of the ages is the Age of Innocence. This focuses around the covenant in Eden with Adam before the Fall. The second age is that of Conscience. This focuses on the Adamic covenant, after the expulsion from the garden. The third age is that of Human Government, focusing on the covenant with Noah after the flood. The fourth is that of Promise, focusing on the Abrahamic covenant with God’s chosen, Israel alone remaining under human government. The Law is the fifth, the Mosaic covenant with Israel, extending through the ministry of Jesus to the Jews until the crucifixion, in which Jew and Gentile both participate. The sixth age is the Age of Grace, or the Church Age, the covenant of grace in and through Christ to Jews and Gentiles individually, until Christ’s second coming. And, finally, the Millennial Kingdom, the fullness of time, or The Kingdom as it is sometimes called—when Christ will restore the Davidic monarchy of Israel and rule for a thousand years.
There are various forms and descriptions of these dispensations, but the basic idea is that all of history is divided up into different periods, and God judges us not by an unchanging standard but according to ground rules especially devised for each dispensation. For example, under Grace we’re required to repent and turn to Christ. Under the Law, the requirement was the obedience to the Law. The earthly people of Israel and the spiritual community of the church are sharply distinguished from one another, and essentially all of the dispensationalists are relatively strong Zionists. There’s pessimism about the world’s future, and virtually all dispensationalists are premillennialists. That stands in interesting contrast to what we discovered about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evangelicals, which were virtually all postmillennialists.
The apostates of the age are identified by the dispensationalists as the nineteenth-century liberals, about whom we’ll speak in a bit. The church is seen as God’s elect. It is a remnant; it seldom possesses power in the world. The large denominations are riddled with heresy, and, in fact, a number of those early dispensationalists wanted to see people leave their mainline churches because of
the heresy and apostasy of those bodies. The Bible is interpreted literally wherever possible, and this emerges around the issue of creation in seven days, or those seven twenty-four-hour days, and the like. We’ll come back to that theme a bit later, because it’s part of the issue that emerges in the late nineteenth century.
Dispensationalism was spread to America and Canada in the 1840s and thereafter. Darby himself traveled here to North America seven times between 1862 and 1877. He spent a lot of his time in the large Eastern cities. His aim was, in part, also to get Christians to leave their corrupt churches, although few actually left. His appeal seemed to be especially powerful among Presbyterians and Calvinistic Baptists. As we will see, the groups that are caught in the crossfire of the battles in the 1920s include at the very heart Presbyterians and Baptists. We’ll come back to that story in a bit.
The Princeton Theology was born with the founding of Princeton Theological Seminary in 1812, which was to continue for a good many years thereafter. The leaders were the first professors at Princeton: Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, A. A. Hodge, B. B. Warfield, J. Gresham Machen later on, and so on. They focused their study upon the Scriptures, and they were the group who argued that the original autographs of the Scriptures were inerrant, that is, free from any error of any kind. It’s quite true that in earlier centuries and earlier eras, as others have argued, there was a deep commitment to the authority and the truthfulness of Scripture; but the theory that is incorporated, and the language that’s used to do that in the fundamentalist camp, emerges out of the Princeton teaching of some of these remarkable folk, who argued for verbal inspiration, plenary inspiration, and inerrancy in every reference, statistic, and quotation of Scripture.
If you put the Princeton teaching on Scripture together with the periodization of history of dispensationalism, you have what is called fundamentalism. How do these come together? Sandeen has argued that it took place in the summer Bible conference circuit. It was popular at that time—and, in fact, in some quarters continues to be popular right down to our own day (I grew up going to Maranatha Bible Conference and often Winona Lake Bible Conference). People got together during the summers to live for a period of time in homes that they had built there, or places that they rented, in order to study the Bible and to relax for vacation during the summer. In the Bible conference circuit many of the Princeton folk, as well as a number of these dispensational leaders,
began to come together, and over a period of weeks these people would hammer out some of the elements of emphasis within the life of the church. We see these in the Niagara conferences at Niagara Falls in the later part of the nineteenth century. We see it at the International Prophetic Conferences and the like.
The people who led these were folk like James H. Brooks, a Presbyterian, a graduate of Princeton, pastor of the Walnut Street Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, an editor of the periodical The Truth. Also William J. Erdman, pastor of Presbyterian and Congregational churches, one of the founders of Moody Bible Institute, an editor of the Scofield Reference Bible; in fact, father of Charles R. Erdman, a professor of practical theology at Princeton. Another leader was William G. Moorehead, Presbyterian professor of New Testament at Xenia, editor of the Scofield Reference Bible, and the like. These are very interesting figures and are very substantial figures, and in the summer Bible conference circuit they began to hammer out what eventually emerges as the fundamentals of the faith, the basic issues that need to be articulated and fought for in the face of enormous changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
What are the characteristics of fundamentalism then? I think we need to say that it had very strong, able, intellectual leadership. Folk like Charles Trumble, Arnold Gaebelein, James Gray, Reuben Archer Torrey, William Moorehead, J. Wilbur Chapman, and so on, were very substantial leaders within the community and very able people. Fundamentalism also centered in the cities. We tend to see it as a kind of rural, sometimes Southern Bible-belt phenomenon, but in the early years, fundamentalism was largely focused in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles. It wasn’t primarily a rural phenomenon. The South, in those early years, was largely unrepresented, even though later on they became firm adherents to fundamentalist teaching.
The fundamentals themselves, and the title fundamentalism, really emerge out of a twelve-pamphlet series, published and distributed free by two brothers, Lyman and Milton Stewart. They were chief stockholders of the Union Oil Company of Los Angeles. They were both Presbyterians, members of Emmanuel Presbyterian Church of Los Angeles, and they were ardent dispensationalists. They paid for the distribution of almost three hundred thousand copies of these basic writings; sixty-four authors participated, ninety total articles were produced in this twelve-pamphlet series. Some of the writers were folk like Amzi
Dixon, pastor of Moody Church; Reuben Archer Torrey, dean of Biola; Elmore Harris, president of Toronto Bible Institute; Louis Meyer, a converted Jew on the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions; and so on. These folk produced fundamental articles on basic teachings of the faith.
These are still well worth reading. I was fortunate to find, in a used bookstore, the full set myself that had been distributed free originally, as you will recall; but it’s certainly not free any longer. And though I paid a bit for them, I’m pleased to have them on my shelves, and they’re well worth reading. Now some of you will say, Well, aren’t the fundamentals those five points that we always hear: inerrancy of Scripture, virgin birth of Christ, substitutionary atonement, physical resurrection of Christ, and the miracle-working power of our Lord? It’s true that those became the most famous of a whole series of lists of basic Christian teachings, and you can see there the mix of Princeton and dispensational thought; but the actual five-point grouping emerged from the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in 1910, when they adopted these five points as being the fundamental teachings of the faith. In fact, later on they even require these to be subscribed to by all young men coming into ministry in the church.
What we have occurring, then, is a movement which is fundamentally theological, an amalgam, as Sandeen and others have argued, of dispensational thought and Princeton understandings of the Scripture—drawn together, promoted by the summer Bible conference message, promoted also through the enormous spread of the Scofield Reference Bible, and becoming established as a basic core of things that needed to be articulated, preached, taught, and fought for against any inroads from whatever quarters. Let’s leave that for a moment, though we’ll come to the fundamentalists again more specifically in a bit.
Let’s turn our attention for a while to some of the enormous changes that were taking place following the Civil War in the 1860s. The period from 1860 to 1920 was a time of almost breathtaking change here in America. America became an urban, it became an industrial power, it became a very much more pluralistic society; and the challenges to the church were enormous. Let me mention first some of the intellectual challenges that were posed to the church. This was a time of great change intellectually as well. Particularly, this was true in the sciences. Let me mention a few examples.
In the first place, let’s look at geology. James Hutton of Edinburgh had published in 1788 his Theory of the Earth. This was followed by Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, published between 1830 and 1832. Both of these books supported the idea that all former changes of the organic and inorganic creation are referable to one uninterrupted succession of physical events, governed by the laws which are now in operation. What this means, in essence, is that we live in a closed universe, operating under laws which we understand and which are here resident now. This excludes, however, all interventions from any divine source—miracles, supernatural interventions, and the like. This closed universe idea became an important foundation upon which many of the scientists began to do their work.
More troubling than that was the discovery of little items called fossils. I think most of you have seen those, embedded in stone, little shapes of earlier forms of life, whether they be fish or animals of one sort or other. Fossils don’t seem to be too threatening, in and of themselves, but when you start thinking about those, and put those into a nineteenth-century context, you can see that they are enormously threatening. Those of you who know the Scofield Reference Bible know that a part of the notes of the Scofield Reference Bible are the dates for events given by Archbishop Ussher. If you open your Bibles to Genesis 1, and you have a Scofield Reference Bible, you’ll see a little box. There’s a divided page of text, and at the top of that, in a little box, is a date. And in that box you’ll find 4004 BC. That date, which is a part of the text, as we all know now, was Archbishop Ussher’s reconstruction of the date of creation. If creation took place in 4004 BC, how in the world do you get these little geological fossils which the scientists were saying take tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, to form and develop? If the creation took place only a few thousand years before, how then does one handle the problems of science, especially in geology, and especially focused around these troublesome little fossils?
This triggered a whole series of debates. In America, the leading geologist was Benjamin Silliman. He sought to harmonize the Bible with geology. While a student at Yale, Silliman had been converted under the preaching of Timothy Dwight. He was then called to Yale to be a science professor at the college and sent to Edinburgh for further study. He returned to Yale convinced of Lyell’s uniformitarian understanding, and he began to argue that the word day in the creation story should be translated “eon.” In other words, it wasn’t twenty-four hours; it was a much longer
period of time. One of Silliman’s students, Edward Hitchcock, in 1851, wrote The Religion of Geology, in which he explained the earth’s long history as a further revelation of God’s constancy and glory. The Silliman-Hitchcock school in America opened the way then for a rapprochement between religion and science; yet the great bulk, the increasing number, of American Christians could probably have cared less about these newly developing scientific discoveries, even though their lives would be profoundly influenced by them eventually. Most of them still accepted the commonly believed Ussher dates for the creation; and if they thought about it at all, they started becoming troubled about these little fossils.
Even more difficult was the work of Charles Darwin and the emerging theory of evolution. The fossil records of geology, with the estimates of the earth’s great age, made developmental theories of biological evolution increasingly plausible in the scientific community. Indeed, before Darwin, a strong tradition of evolutionary speculation already existed. Lamarck announced his theory in 1801. Romantic nature philosophers had given further encouragement to developmental views. Indeed, Herbert Spencer, who was to become perhaps the greatest popularizer of Darwinian notions in Britain and America, had long been defending a view that cosmic progress took place from homogeneity to heterogeneity, from one to many, from simple to complex. Thus, by 1857, the time was ripe for a theory of natural selection; and we see, in fact, two individuals developing similar ideas at the very same time. In 1858 at a historic meeting of the Royal Society of London, two papers were read: one by Charles Darwin, the other by Alfred Russel Wallace. The year following, Darwin’s Origin of the Species appeared. This 1859 volume which, I think almost without question, was the most influential single volume to be produced in the nineteenth century—not only in biology but for many other areas as well. We’ll touch on some of those in a bit.
Not since the scientific revolution completed by Newton had the humanistic and religious traditions of the West been confronted by greater need for adjustment and reformulation. The response was incredible within the scientific community. Folk like Louis Agassiz at Harvard rejected Darwin, almost absolutely. He called for a special understanding of creationism. It’s a kind of odd view, but it was picked up by a number of others as well. Some wrote favorable reviews of Darwin, so you have complete rejection of Darwin by some; complete acceptance of Darwin by others; and a number of folk, like George Frederick Wright, who argued in
Darwiniana in 1876 that “one ought to read and carefully study Darwin’s empirical and theoretical work” but without immediately accepting it, that this was a good foundation upon which to continue to do additional scientific work and study.
Those who accepted Darwin almost uncritically included people like John Fisk. It’s almost humorous to read some of the things that Fisk wrote. In his Destiny of Man, 1884, he wrote: “Darwinism has placed humanity upon a higher pinnacle than ever. The future is lighted for us with the radiant colors of hope. Strife and sorrow shall disappear. Peace and love shall reign supreme. The dream of poets, the lesson of priests and prophets, the inspiration of the great musician is confirmed in the light of modern knowledge. And as we gird ourselves up for the work of life, we may look forward to the time when in the truest sense the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdom of Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever, King of kings, and Lord of lords.” It’s almost something that Handel could put to music.
You have, then, a wide variety of responses to the scientific work that Darwin was doing. And when you put these geological fossil studies, with their pointers toward an elongated time period for the earth’s existence; and the Darwinian work on evolution, a movement from simple to complex, including eventually with his Descent of Man, humanity being brought into that process of evolution; and you’ve got the grist for an enormous conflagration. In effect, that’s what began to happen. Fundamentalists, increasingly skeptical of these new scientific insights; modernists, as we’ll see, opening themselves up increasingly to these new modern insights and developments in science, as well as in other areas.
In addition to that, there’s the development intellectually of historical criticism, particularly as it works in relation to the Scriptures. Increasingly, people are beginning to study religious subjects just as they would any other historical topics. The History of the Jews, by Wilhelm Vatke; The Life of Jesus, by David Strauss; The Rise of Christianity, by Ferdinand Christian Baur; these and others tend to take religious subjects, or churchly subjects, and explore them just as they would explore any other historical events. This becomes particularly troublesome when applied to the Bible itself. Higher criticism, lower criticism, basic critical methodologies were emerging, particularly in Europe; and these were raising serious questions about the authority, the authorship, the dating of various parts of the Scripture. Those
placed intellectual challenges before the church that were enormous, and we’re going to come back to talk specifically about parts of that, because some of the battle was fought on those very grounds.
What is happening, then, within many of our universities not only overseas but right here in America was an emerging scientific understanding of life, which came to dominate the intellectual world and which placed enormous challenges before the church. The fundamentalists, feeling that certain basic doctrines must be maintained, no matter what, tended to be very skittish about them and sometimes very antagonistic toward these discoveries and the tensions between science and religion, so called. The emergence of what was perceived in some quarters—I think erroneously—as anti-intellectualism began to emerge as the fundamentalists tried to continue to reaffirm those central teachings of the faith against the intellectual challenges of the universities, coming largely from the scientific community.
In addition to those kinds of challenges, the church was confronted by enormous changes on virtually every other level as well. America was becoming a vastly different place than it had been before, and this was taking place around the growth of the city, the enormous influx of new immigrants into America, the growth of industry, as America moves from a basically agricultural society to a largely industrial society. Look at the implications of a few of these changing elements. Look, for example, at the rise of the city. Arthur Schlesinger calls the late nineteenth century a time where the city acts as almost a magnet. He calls it “the lure of the city.” People are drawn to the new urban realities of America and the world. For every one urban dweller that goes out to take up farming in the last decade of the nineteenth century, twenty farmers drop their plows and head to the city to seek their fortune. Cities which had been very small prior to the Civil War now burgeoned to become major centers of population.
When Fort Dearborn was incorporated as the Village of Chicago in 1833, it was a small frontier outpost of only seventeen houses. By 1900 it was a sprawling western metropolis, with 1,698,000 people, the fifth largest city in the world! Chicago stands as maybe the most dramatic symbol of this enormous social trend which was going on after the Civil War. Boston, a city that had been here for a good deal longer, grew from 177,000 at the time of the Civil War to 560,000 by the end of the century. Philadelphia grew from 565,000 to 1,293,000. New York City, our largest city, grew from
just about one million to almost three and a half million people in that same time.
The folk who are coming into the cities are coming in not only from the farms, but they’re also coming in from the outside, as immigrants begin to flood into America. If you think back to the time of the American Revolution, in the 1770s, you need to remember that the total population of those original thirteen colonies, now become states, was less than—this is the total—less than four million. Add to that the fact that over the next century, in the nineteenth century, fifty million immigrants come into America with all their children, with all of the offspring of these new settlers here in the world. Four million, added to that fifty million, and you have a very different nation than you had before. Furthermore, many of these folk are coming, not from northern and western Europe, which was true of immigration up to the 1880s; but from the 1880s on, what Marcus Hanson and others have called “the new immigration” begins to take place. And these folk are coming from southern Europe, eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, places that are bringing very different cultural patterns into America, folk with different colors of skin, with different religious backgrounds, with different practices and emphases and skills. Here is where America becomes the kind of plural reality that we know today, and many of these folk are flooding into the cities because it’s in the cities that they find their jobs and hope to make their future living.
You put all of those various elements together, and you have an enormously different kind of society and one that is deeply troubling to many in the church. How do we minister now, in a day when so many different kinds of people are living together in such proximity in these big cities? City life is, in fact, changing some of the patterns of family life for people here in America. We have different districts where people live and where they work. We have residential districts. We now have industrial districts. Formerly, children had been able to see what their fathers and mothers did in their work, what they were able to produce. Now they went off to work, and the children, who had been a great asset on the farms, now are no longer an asset—they’re a liability, they’re a cost. So we see almost immediately, with the rise of urbanization, the decline in the numbers of the family, so that what were families of eight, ten, twelve, fourteen on the farm now become families of two, three, four; and now, in our day, even shrinking below that number.
Life begins to change, and these changes place enormous challenges—intellectual, social, political—upon the church. I want to pick up that element of the story as we move into our next lecture, because it has a profound impact upon the way that both fundamentalists and modernists react. Fundamentalists, skittish about these new changes; modernists, welcoming them almost naively; and the two are obviously going to come at loggerheads with one another as a result. We’ll look at that story next time.
