Apr 13 2006
Geneology of Evangelical Movement in America
Recent article on the New Yorker, “The Big Tent”, by Peter Boyer
Threads, keys, quotes:
The struggle between the fundamentals and the modernists among the Protestants:
b/w 1910 and 1915, an influential series of books called “The Fundamentals” … proveded a body of arugment for the opponents of modernism–who came to be called fundamentalists
The result was, for a period of about 20 years, there was all-out war in most of the major Protestant denominations.
Harry Emerson Fosdick, a Manhattan preacher … found his faith transformed by a study of the orthodoxy’s hindrance to the progress of mankind, delivered one of the most consequential sermons … development is GOd’s way of working out His will.
On the vexed and mooted question of the virgin birth, Fosdick: one of the … ways in which the ancient world was accustomed to account for … superiority (see also Pagels study on Gnostic Gospels, plus the recent discovery of Gospel of Juda)
J. Gresham Machen, fundamentalist theologian, Princeton Theological Seminary, “Christianity and Liberalism” (the latter a separate religion)
He is supported by William Jennings Bryan.
J.D. Rockefeller Jr. built Fosdick a church (Riverside Church in Morningside Heights, the home base of liberalism) after he left his old one.
By the 1940s, a group of churchmen had emerged who were the theological kinsmen o fthe fundamentalists but who were embarrassed by the movement’s excesses… vowed to fight the modernists and liberals from within: Harold Ockenga. Created “New Evangelicalism”
Engaged in social justice topics … Carl Henry published “The Uneasy Conscience of Mondern Fundamentalism”
The vessel into which both the fundamentalists and the New Evangelicals ultimately poured their hopes was Billy Graham
Evangelicalism’s connection to China: Graham’s wife Ruth Bell grew up in China as a missionary’s daughter (Birch society, etc.)
Curiosity almost killed the cat: The one time that Graham undertook a serious theological inquiry, it nearly took his faith. Keywords: Charles Templeton, hermeneutics learned at Princeton, … “Graham grabbed his Bible one night and headed into the woods… But I accept it all by faith.”
Challenge to Graham, Reinhold Niebuhr, “Jesus as the answer to life’s problems … ‘was too simple in any age but particularly so in a nuclear one with its great moral perplexities’”
Graham defines himself ‘a theological conservative but a social liberal’ … marched to the middle. Through the years, Graham assiduously pursued the favor of men of high office, “somebody who stood in the circle of other somebodys” But succeded in branding evangelicalism as the mainstream American faith.
Overall church membership in the U.S. grew by 1/3 since 1960s.
Franklin Graham’s life mirrors that of GWB’s: “got on his knees onday night, threw away his cigarettes and surrendered his life to God” (how much is it social pressure? how soon pendulum start to swing back? For a preacher’s son it is 22 yrs)
Franklin’s stronger trait is certitude (convert’s certitude?), which extends to the divisive issues that Billy chose to avoid.
Some on the left see a newcolonial missionary implus in his motivations … e.g. putting wells on church property in India “Have people come to church to get their water. Why not?”