One of the major religious phenomena of the twentieth century, one that has been enduring and which has captured the hearts and imaginations of millions of Americans, is the thing we call fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is all around us, from the seemingly countless independent Baptist and independent Bible churches to the Promise Keepers movement to the controversial Pentecostal evangelist Jimmy Swaggart to the suave Dr. D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church to the flamboyant healer Benny Hinn. The majority of American Protestants are fundamentalists of one sort or another.

In addressing this subject, my purpose is to help give you an understanding of what fundamentalism is and what it is not; to offer a critique of fundamentalism; and to talk about how we as Congregationalists have historically related to this movement and whether the fundamentalists are correct in their assertion that we don’t have a theology, that we Congregationalists can believe whatever we want.

The American fundamentalist movement is nothing new. It began early in this century as an effort to defend what was considered traditional Protestant beliefs in the face of such challenges as the theory of evolution, growing Roman Catholic influence, theological liberalism, and so-called higher criticism of the Bible, that analysis of Scripture that treats it as a human document. Many people regarded these things as threats to the integrity of the Christian faith as it had been propounded by the Protestant Reformers and their spiritual descendants. Such challenges arose as the result of a long trend toward unfettered thinking that began at the time of the Enlightenment, and which, one recalls, met resistance by the church way back in the days of Galileo. The challenges to America ’s evangelical Protestant hegemony coalesced after the Civil War. As church historian Timothy Weber points out, many evangelicals [felt] that they were losing control. ¹

During this time, many other Protestants, however, adjusted to these contemporary challenges by altering their theological presuppositions in such a way as to accommodate evolution and biblical higher criticism, and by reinterpreting Christian doctrine to make it more acceptable, as they saw it, to the modern mind. Theologians such as the Baptist Walter Rauschenbusch developed the so-called social gospel that tended to emphasize saving society over saving souls. A noted Congregationalist of the mid-1800s, Horace Bushnell of Hartford, dared to contradict the prevailing Calvinism of the Congregational churches by suggesting that a child baptized and raised in the Christian faith, acknowledging Jesus Christ as his or her Savior, would never know him or herself to be anything but a Christian --- in other words, it was not necessary for an individual to have a conversion experience that could be pinpointed in time. Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, founded by Calvinistic, evangelical Congregationalists in 1806 in reaction to the liberalism of Harvard, had by the 1880's come to affirm evolution, biblical criticism and, to a degree, universalism (the doctrine that in the end, all will be saved and reconciled to God). All of this would have been anathema to the founders of the school.

Many of the more conservative Protestants found these trends deeply troubling. Denominations such as the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. and the Episcopal Church were rocked by heresy scandals involving clergy who were accused of denying such things as the virgin birth of Christ, the Trinity, and the inerrancy of Scripture. The Presbyterians in 1893 suspended Dr. Charles Augustus Briggs from the ministry. Briggs, a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York , had lost his teaching post there in 1891 because of an address in which he denied the inerrancy of the Bible and appeared to place the authority of reason on a par with Biblical authority. After his suspension, the Union trustees voted to sever the seminaries official ties with the Presbyterian Church and Briggs went back to teaching, ultimately becoming an Episcopal priest. ²  And yet it was the Episcopal Church that just a few years later, in 1906, placed on trial for heresy a prominent Rochester , New York minister, the Rev. Algernon Crapsey, who was accused of denying the doctrines of the Trinity, the virgin birth of Christ, and the divinity of Christ. Mr. Crapsey was deposed from the Episcopal priesthood in December of that year. ³

Other denominations as well were feeling the brunt of the challenge to orthodoxy. A group of conservative Baptists left the Michigan Baptist Convention around 1905 because of perceived theological liberalism among some of the churches and clergy in that state, particularly within the Grand Rapids Baptist Association, which lost all its churches but one to a new association that supplanted the original body. ⁴  The Divinity School of the University of Chicago , then a Baptist institution, was the chief target of the conservative’s ire. Crozer Theological Seminary near Philadelphia , Rochester Theological Seminary in Rochester , N.Y. , Colgate Theological Seminary in Hamilton , N.Y. , and the Newton Theological Institution in Newton , Massachusetts were also considered suspect, to varying degrees, by evangelical Baptist leaders. In 1915, conservative Baptists in the Chicago area established Northern Baptist Theological Seminary to counteract the liberalism of the Chicago Divinity School ; in 1925, a similar move was made in Philadelphia with the formation of Eastern Baptist Seminary. Clearly things were in ferment everywhere, and conservative Protestants felt themselves forced to be on guard. Bible institutes such as Moody, Gordon (my alma mater, which later became a liberal arts college and seminary), the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (later Biola University), and the Philadelphia College of the Bible were established to train young men and women for various kinds of ministry --- each of these schools upholding a traditional, orthodox theological stance with an emphasis on the integrity and authority of the Bible. Independent, nondenominational missionary agencies were set up that individual churches could support without fear that the appointed missionaries might be Universalists or might be soft on the matter of conversion.

The Fundamentalist movement coalesced, and the controversy came to a climax, between 1910 and 1936. The Fundamentals, a twelve-volume paperback series, was published between 1910 and 1915 and is regarded by historians as largely signaling the beginning of the organized fundamentalist movement. The project was funded by two wealthy California oilmen, Milton and Lyman Stewart. When the volumes were completed, some three million copies were distributed free to Protestant religious workers all over the English-speaking world. ⁵ The volumes contained ninety scholarly articles that addressed various issues of interest and concern to conservative evangelical Christians. The articles criticized such things as Mormonism, Christian Science, Roman Catholicism, atheism, spiritualism, modern philosophy and socialism. But they most strenuously objected to liberal theology, higher criticism, Darwinism, and anything else that was perceived to be an attack on traditional Christian doctrines and on the inspiration and authority of the Bible. The Fundamentals served as a rallying point for those conservative Protestants who came to be known as fundamentalists. The volumes identified five doctrines which came to be known popularly as the fundamentals of the faith, namely: (1) the verbal inspiration of the Bible, (2) the virgin birth of Christ, (3), the substitutionary atonement, (4), the bodily resurrection of Christ, and (5) his imminent and visible second coming. ⁶

By the end of the World War I (which some fundamentalists blamed on the effects of German higher criticism and the acceptance of evolutionary thought) ⁷, fundamentalism had come to be an organized movement, with, as Weber puts it, a well-defined enemy and a list of non-negotiables. ⁸ Fundamentalists were on the war path, with liberals, Catholics, and evolutionists as the enemies.

Lest it be thought that all the fundamentalist leaders were ignorant and poorly educated, it must be stated that such was definitely not the case. For example, the most acclaimed fundamentalist of the period, Dr. J. Gresham Machen, was a renowned New Testament scholar regarded even by many of his enemies as a brilliant thinker. Machen was a conservative, Calvinistic Southern Presbyterian who was a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and who later founded Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia to counteract the liberal influence in the Presbyterian Church. He was educated in the classics at Johns Hopkins, held both an M.A. in philosophy and a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Princeton (having studied for both simultaneously), and did advanced graduate work in New Testament at the universities of Marburg and Göttingen in Germany. Machen was also said to be the very epitome of an educated Southern gentleman. His desire was not to be an obscurantist, but to take a stand for what he regarded as the historic doctrines that his church had always held. Other well-known scholarly fundamentalists were Dr. R. A. Torrey, a Yale-educated Congregationalist and dean of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles; Dr. G. Campbell Morgan, the prominent British Congregationalist who served Westminster Chapel in London for many years and who later was on the Gordon College faculty, and Dr. Clarence Edward Macartney, long-time minister of the huge First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Princeton Seminary and Princeton University. These were not stupid people.

They were, however, deeply convinced of the truth of their position, and were committed to the defense of it, as were many others, some of whom, unfortunately, were less well educated and who had combative personalities to boot. The most notorious and vituperative fundamentalist of the period was one J. Frank Norris, a gadfly Baptist and longtime leader of the movement who served as pastor of the First Baptist Church of Fort Worth, Texas, and Temple Baptist Church in Detroit, simultaneously --- commuting between the two churches. Norris took such unrelenting delight in exposing what he felt to be creeping modernism in the Southern Baptist Convention that he was expelled from the denomination, at which point he established his own separatist Baptist group. Some maintained that he took the pastorate of the Detroit church solely because it provided him the opportunity to despise the Northern Baptists too. In 1926, Norris shot and killed a man who had entered his Fort Worth study and allegedly threatened him. He was charged with murder, but the jury acquitted him because they believed he had acted in self-defense. One can only guess what a minister was doing with a loaded gun in his desk drawer to begin with.

The famous Scopes Monkey Trial held at Dayton , Tennessee , in 1925 was a turning point with regard to public sentiment about fundamentalism. John Scopes, a young, mild-mannered high school biology teacher, had been arrested for violating a Tennessee statute that forbade the teaching of evolution in public schools. The prosecuting attorney was William Jennings Bryan, a Presbyterian politician who was a three-time candidate for president and who served as secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson. Bryan was a silver-tongued orator, a noted prohibitionist, and an ardent fundamentalist who in the early 20s gave a series of lectures on evolution that propelled him to the forefront of the fundamentalist cause. The defense attorney at the Scopes trial was the brilliant Clarence Darrow, who argued that nothing less than intellectual freedom was at stake in the trial. He succeeded in getting Bryan to sit on the stand, and using Bryan ’s testimony, further succeeded in making Bryan look like a fool when Bryan attempted to defend his belief in a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis. Fundamentalism wound up being the object of national ridicule.

The fundamentalists of the early twentieth century eventually lost their battle to maintain their hold on American Protestantism. Noted for their general divisiveness and discordance, the fundamentalists fought unceasingly among themselves. The fact that these conservatives seemed utterly incapable of cooperative action constitutes one major reason why [they] lost every ecclesiastical battle they undertook. ⁹

On the other hand, the liberal wing of American Protestantism was substantially unified, and had many able exponents. Church historian Kenneth Scott Latourette points out that the liberals had some differences among themselves, but in general they had confidence in human reason, applied it to the study of the Bible, using the historical methods that had acquired wide vogue in the nineteenth century, tended to believe that essential Christian doctrines could either be demonstrated by rational processes or could be shown not to be contrary to them, and were hopeful that a society could be achieved by [humankinds] efforts which would progressively conform to Christian standards. ¹⁰

What liberalism stood for was best exemplified in the pulpit ministry of Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, a Baptist minister who stands out as arguably one of the three greatest religious figures in America of the twentieth century (the others being Reinhold Niebuhr and Billy Graham). Fosdick wielded international influence during his long pastorate at the Riverside Church in New York City , writing many books and broadcasting his sermons nationwide each week on the NBC Radio Network. Fosdick was trained at Colgate and at Union Theological Seminary in New York , and very early in his ministry developed a reputation for brilliance, incisiveness, and preaching ability. He earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University and taught at Union Seminary while serving as minister of the First Baptist Church of Montclair, New Jersey, then at First Presbyterian Church in New York and finally at New York’s Park Avenue Baptist Church, which later became Riverside.

Fosdick aroused the wrath of fundamentalists through a sermon that he preached in 1922 titled Shall the Fundamentalists Win?, which he intended as a plea for greater tolerance between fundamentalists and liberals. He suggested in the sermon that there were three central issues in which fundamentalists needed to be more tolerant: (1) that belief in the virgin birth of Jesus was not essential to Christian faith, (2) that belief in the inerrancy of the Bible was incredible to the modern mind, and (3) that belief in the literal, bodily Second Coming of Christ was outmoded and needed rethinking. Fosdick alerted fundamentalists that they could not drive out from the Christian churches all the consecrated souls who do not agree with their theory of inspiration and concluded by encouraging Christian fellowship that is intellectually hospitable, open-minded, liberty-loving, fair, and tolerant. ¹¹

It needs to be made clear that Fosdick was no Unitarian; indeed, he described himself as an evangelical Christian. But, as he put it in one of his later sermons, he insisted that the deep and vital experiences of the Christian soul with itself, with its fellows, with its God, could be carried over into this new world and understood in the light of the new knowledge. ¹²

Fosdicks position eventually won the day. Fundamentalists became increasingly marginalized as they squabbled among themselves and sought to split several of the major denominations, taking many congregations and clergy with them in their quest for doctrinal and ecclesiastical purity but leaving many others behind who looked upon them with disdain. Even archconservatives such as Clarence Macartney refused to leave the Presbyterian Church when many of his friends left it, feeling that he could be of more influence within the mainline body than he could be outside it.  Many fundamentalists felt the same way. W. B. Riley, minister of the First Baptist Church of Minneapolis and by far the most outspoken critic of theological trends in the Northern (later American) Baptist Convention, never left the Convention but remained within it, ultimately becoming the mentor to an up-and-coming young evangelist named Billy Graham.

So while fundamentalism lost its hold on the leadership of the major denominations, it was able to keep itself alive in various expressions both within and without those denominations. By the mid-1940s, the theological climate in America had changed considerably. Liberal Protestants were forced to alter their naïvely optimistic estimate of the human situation when they found it demolished by the inhumanity of people like Hitler and Stalin. The confident expectation that the social order could be progressively transformed into the kingdom of God by the efforts of men and women alone was repudiated. ¹³

At the same time, a theological movement that came to be known as Neo-Orthodoxy was gaining attention in the seminaries. Theologians like Karl Barth and Emil Brunner of Europe and Reinhold Niebuhr of the United States, men trained in liberal theological academies, were now stressing some themes that conservatives had always proclaimed, such as the transcendence, or otherness, of God, and his sovereignty over creation; the reality and depth of human sin and the need for salvation through Christ (albeit a universal salvation); and the witness of Scripture as to the mighty acts of God in history that culminated in the revelation of himself in Christ, the understanding of whose ministry was by and large cast in terms that were quite orthodox theologically. Neo-orthodoxy also placed a stress on the unity of the Church, recognizing that Jesus prayed that his people might all be one (John 17:21 ).

All of this gained the attention of some young fundamentalists who were, for the most part, within the mainline denominations, were well-educated, and sought to distinguish themselves from the extreme separatism, bad manners, obscurantism and anti-intellectualism so characteristic of fundamentalism, but not from the fundamentalist insistence on the authority and inspiration of Scripture, the necessity of conversion, and the mandate for evangelism. ¹⁴

They called themselves the New Evangelicals, a term coined by the Congregational pastor Dr. Harold John Ockenga of Park Street Church in Boston, a fundamentalist intellectual who in 1942 issued a call for more moderate fundamentalists to join hands in working toward a transformation of mainline American Protestantism by cooperation and by persuasion from within. The National Association of Evangelicals was formed as a coalition of these moderate fundamentalists both within and outside the major denominations. Over the past fifty-five years the NAE, which now numbers several million members, has come to encompass most of the conservative evangelical bodies in America, ranging from Pentecostals to Calvinists, as well as hundreds of churches and clergy in mainline denominations such as the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., the Reformed Church in America (which recently joined as a body), the American Baptist Churches, and our own National Association. The NAE is the evangelical counterpart to the National Council of Churches. It encompasses many evangelical interests including religious broadcasting, politics, humanitarian relief, and Christian higher education; it also addresses social issues and has spoken out on matters such as church-state separation, racism, drug abuse, pornography, and apartheid.

During the course of the 1940s and 50s there emerged a number of highly educated new evangelical thinkers, people such as Edward John Carnell and Carl F. H. Henry, who were determined to develop a rational and philosophic apologetic for what they regarded as historic, biblical [Christianity], and who were at the same time willing to engage in constructive theological debate with the exponents of contrary views.¹⁵ This kind of creative theological engagement came to predominate such historically fundamentalist institutions as Gordon College , Wheaton College , Dallas Theological Seminary, and Westminster Theological Seminary, and it gave rise to new theological schools such as Fuller Theological Seminary, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School . Some of these are more moderate than others; all of them are academically rigorous and have been influential in promoting the evangelical cause both within and outside the major denominations.

Dr. Billy Graham should not be overlooked as a major figure in the rise of evangelicalism. A graduate of Wheaton College and a Southern Baptist minister of Presbyterian background, Graham originally had been recruited by Youth for Christ, an evangelical ministry to high school and college youth, to serve as an itinerant evangelist for its big youth rallies. By 1949 he had stepped out on his own, conducting revival campaigns that gained him international attention and sympathy from unexpected quarters. William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate, took an early interest in Graham, and when liberal British clerics snubbed him at the time of his first crusade in Great Britain , Queen Elizabeth II received him warmly and publicly praised his ministry. He also won the friendship of every American president since Truman. Such publicity didn’t hurt. What’s more, early on in his ministry Graham distanced himself from the divisiveness of his more militant fundamentalist brethren and made an effort to cooperate with mainline church leaders, inviting them to participate in his local crusades. Over the years Graham has become something of an ecumenical statesman, speaking for evangelical Christianity amidst the mainline ecumenical milieu. In 1956 Graham, together with Dr. Ockenga and Dr. Henry, was one of the founders of Christianity Today magazine, which has become the semi-official periodical voice of the evangelical world. Until quite recently Graham served as board chairman of Gordon-Conwell Seminary.

With the advent of the New Evangelicalism as propounded by Ockenga, Graham, Henry and others, American fundamentalism, in its more moderate form, gained a new respectability within the ranks of American religion. In recent years, some of the more progressive evangelicals have developed an interest in Barth and other neo-orthodox scholars, and have begun creative engagement with such questions as the nature of the inspiration of Scripture and the extent to which the Bible is both a divine and human document and whether indeed the punishment of sinners in hell is merely punitive or whether it may be temporary and remedial --- questions that Biblical critics in the mainline denominations were asking over a century ago. Some evangelicals, in recent years, have been in dialogue with Roman Catholics over issues of common concern to both groups, and it has been recognized in some quarters that Catholics and evangelicals do, to a large degree, share a common faith and that they can cooperate rather than being estranged from one another. Some evangelicals have distanced themselves from the traditional political conservativism of fundamentalism. Periodicals such as Sojourners and The Other Side represent what might be called a liberal evangelicalism that advocates for the poor, presses for prison reform, welcomes gays and lesbians into the fellowship of the church, and advocates pacifism.

At the same time, evangelicals of a more conservative theological and political stripe have wielded considerable influence within American Christianity, particularly during the past twenty years. In the late 1970s a faction of fundamentalists within the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod succeeded in gaining control of that denomination, after several years of upheaval in which charges were made that the Synod had been infiltrated by a liberalism that was compromising the Synods historic doctrinal stance. A more moderate faction left and is now part of the more mainline Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. Similarly, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in America , has been fragmented in recent years as the result of a fundamentalist takeover. The six Southern Baptist seminaries, which hitherto had come to espouse a moderate evangelicalism bordering on neo-orthodoxy, have come firmly under fundamentalist control during the past fifteen years. Southern Baptist moderates and liberals have coalesced into two groups, the Alliance of Baptists and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Para church bodies both of which are organized in a loose, congregationally-oriented fashion much like our National Association. Former President Jimmy Carter has publicly announced his solidarity with the latter group, which with over a million members is as large as a number of mainline Protestant denominations, yet many of whose churches still hold dual standing with the Southern Baptist Convention.

Other denominations have seen the rise of evangelical caucuses within. The Biblical Witness Fellowship of the United Church of Christ seeks to maintain a conservative, evangelical witness within that denomination. In the American Baptist Churches, the American Baptist Evangelicals have organized to ensure that ABC evangelicals have a voice in the fellowship in the face of such issues as gay and lesbian ordination. The Good News Caucus in the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Lay Committee and Presbyterian Renewal Fellowship in the Presbyterian Church USA serve a similar purpose within those churches. The Episcopal Church contains coalitions that seek to preserve, on the one hand, a Protestant evangelical witness and, on the other hand, a conservative witness rooted in Anglo-Catholicism. The latter is organized as a separate synod within the church.

Politically conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, alarmed by what they perceive to be the moral decline of America, have, under the leadership of Southern Baptists Jerry Falwell and Marion Pat Robertson, formed political coalitions that have gained the grassroots support of hundreds of thousands in recent years, including conservative Roman Catholics. Robertson, a televangelist, ran for president in 1988 on the Republican ticket. Both he and Falwell continue to be major spokespersons for politically conservative evangelicalism. Robertson’s Christian Coalition has infiltrated local school boards, propelled conservatives into local, state and national politics, and has been the major catalyst toward the conservative shift in the Republican Party.

In 1977 the Reverend Donald Wildmon, an evangelical United Methodist minister from Mississippi , founded what is now known as the American Family Association, whose purpose it is to combat the influence of the liberal and secular media, particularly television, which the Association maintains, is destroying the ethics and morals of Americans. Wildmon was early on dismissed as a crank by many, but the AFA is now clearly a force to be reckoned with. It was the AFA that first mobilized evangelicals to boycott the Walt Disney Company because of its openness toward gays and lesbians. That boycott has now extended to the Southern Baptist Convention, the Assemblies of God, and a number of other smaller evangelical bodies.

Another trend prevalent within the more conservative ranks of evangelicalism since before the turn of the century has been a strong emphasis upon the imminent second coming of Christ, which has gained increasing attention among the wider population in recent years as the world has neared the new millennium. Evangelicals and fundamentalists who are preoccupied with the Second Coming for the most part take their understanding of the doctrine from the writings of a turn-of-the-century Congregationalist named Cyrus Ingerson Scofield, whose famous Scofield Reference Bible has served as the authoritative study Bible for several generations of fundamentalists. I was brought up on the Scofield Bible and know it well. Dr. Scofield propounded a theory of Biblical interpretation known as dispensationalism which, among other things, holds to the notion that the Bible teaches two totally distinct divine plans for history, one concerning an earthly people (Israel), the other a heavenly people (the church). Gods plan for Israel was revealed through a series of covenants . . . which pointed to the establishment of a Messianic kingdom on earth. But when the Messiah arrived, Israel rejected him. God then postponed the kingdom, turned away from Israel and created out of the Gentiles a new people, the church. According to this postponement theory, God will not resume his dealings with Israel until he finishes building his church and raptures it to heaven just prior to the Great Tribulation to come. Then after the Tribulation and the battle of Armageddon, Christ will return to earth with his raptured saints and set up a literal thousand-year millennial kingdom. ¹⁶

A lot of people believe this. Initially, the embracement of dispensationalism was confined mostly to fundamentalist Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists and a few Congregationalists as well as to some smaller sects. However, with the popularization of it through Hal Lindsey’s lurid The Late Great Planet Earth in the 1960s and, more recently, the series of Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins (which have sold over fifteen million copies), it has come to be unquestioningly accepted by a vast number of evangelicals and by the wider American public --- this despite the fact that many evangelical scholars repudiate it, maintaining that it lacks adequate Biblical support. Dallas Theological Seminary in Dallas , Texas , is the leading institution that espouses a dispensationalist theology.

Having said all this thus far, it becomes apparent that American fundamentalism and evangelicalism, while united on the basic beliefs that were expressed in the volumes of The Fundamentals back in the earlier part of the century, today constitute a varied and diverse group, the most influential bloc of Christians in North America , for better or worse.

Congregationalism, historically, has gone substantially untouched by fundamentalism. It has had its share of fundamentalist leaders, Dwight L. Moody, C. I. Scofield, R. A. Torrey and Harold Ockenga among them; the National Association has had within it several important evangelical spokesmen including Dr. Ockenga, former Executive Committee chair Dr. Leslie Deinstadt, and, most recently, Dr. Terry Lindvall, an NA minister who served for several years as president of Pat Robertson’s Regent University. And yet fundamentalism and evangelicalism have never had the influence in Congregational circles that they have had in other denominations. Why?

I think the answer is found in our history and our polity. Historically, Congregationalism has emphasized the mind above the emotions. We have always stressed the need for an educated clergy. We have, even during the years when we were rigidly Calvinistic, looked at Christianity from the vantage point of logic and rationalism. (There is nothing more airtight in its logic than Calvinism.) It was Congregationalism, you remember, out of which American Unitarianism sprang. Congregationalism provided fertile ground for free thought --- and it did so by virtue of its polity as well as its ethos. A Congregational church is theologically bound only by its own covenant. A Baptist friend of mine who observed this remarked to me, your polity is your theology. There is a set of very basic beliefs that Congregational churches generally hold in common by what might be called historic consensus. But there is nothing that binds us theologically as a body of churches or as a body of individual believers. As a consequence, I believe, because of our polity fundamentalism never could gain a substantial foothold in Congregationalism. There were, and are, a goodly number of individual Congregational churches that have leaned toward a fundamentalist or evangelical viewpoint, but fundamentalism has never been able to capture the imagination of the fellowship as a whole. We are by nature theologically diverse, and it is a singular fact of our history that of the major American denominations we have never, since the Unitarian defection of 1820, undergone a major schism over theology. To be sure, at the time of the United Church of Christ merger, a number of churches and ministers did leave to form the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference, but the number was small and their influence within the old denomination, aside from Dr. Ockengas, rather marginal. Amidst all the splits and schisms and fights in the denominations around us, our National Association, virtually alone, has survived intact because we recognize that our diversity is one of our strengths and we deliberately agree to disagree, yet love one another.

Be that as it may, fundamentalism and evangelicalism, today, are on the rise while the influence of mainline Christianity is waning. People are attracted to fundamentalist and evangelical churches for a variety of reasons. One is their upbeat music. Baby boomers, many of whom left Sunday school at age twelve or who never had any church experience at all when growing up, by and large have little appreciation for formal liturgy and traditional hymnody (which, I might add, can be taught, but I will leave that for another time). Weaned on television, raised with an entertainment mentality, they want worship that makes them feel good. They enjoy the comparatively informal services offered in many fundamentalist, evangelical, and Pentecostal churches. The so-called Vineyard movement, which is an offshoot of Pentecostalism, and the Willow Creek movement, which emphasizes worship that is theatrical in nature, are both geared primarily to baby boomers and their families. Fundamentalist preaching seeks to apply what are regarded as the unambiguous teachings of Scripture to everyday life. In a culture that is fairly drowning in secularism, many Americans are searching for meaning in their lives. Fundamentalism and evangelicalism especially have a deep appeal because they point simply to the infallible Bible and proclaim, this is what it says. Period. It’s black or white. There are many who find that comforting and reassuring. Most importantly, fundamentalist and evangelical churches stress the importance of having a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ, something which has been sidestepped and even largely forgotten in mainline liberal churches.

As a theological moderate and as a Congregationalist, I believe Congregationalism at its best offers an alternative to fundamentalism that is spiritually satisfying, intellectually stimulating, and which affirms the central truths of the Christian faith in a context that can be uniquely meaningful to people at the end of this chaotic twentieth century. There is a triad that our National Association has used for decades to define what Congregationalism is about, a triad that has been overused to the point of being hackneyed but which nevertheless serves as the best and most succinct summary of the essence of the Congregational Way. It is this: Faith, Freedom, and Fellowship.

Congregationalism stands first for faith --- a faith centered in God’s self-revelation in Jesus of Nazareth, his life, death and resurrection, which demonstrate to humankind that self-giving love of God worked out in God’s relationship with the human race and in our relationships one with another, in that realm which Jesus called the Kingdom. The Way of the Kingdom contravenes the world’s way of thinking, and offers to people the good news of universal forgiveness and reconciliation that spells hope to a world filled with hopelessness. One need only open his or her life to Jesus and his Way to know that hope. Historically, Congregationalism has emphasized the necessity of conversion and of a personal faith in Christ. Where we differ from the fundamentalists is that Congregationalists do not all agree on every jot and tittles of theological interpretation. Nor do we insist on such agreement. Some of us are liberal, some of us conservative, many of us somewhere in-between. There is great latitude in Congregationalism.

And that is part of what our freedom implies the second part of the triad. Congregationalists are free to use their minds. Congregationalists are free to interpret Scripture according to their own consciences and understanding, uniting together, ideally, in a quest for a common understanding under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Congregational churches also are free; we are free of denominational parameters that might otherwise fence us in theologically and tell us we have to believe thus-and-such. Congregationalists are bound together not by creed, but by covenant.

And this leads us to third part of the triad, fellowship. Our theology, as Congregationalists, is not merely propositional and static; rather, it is worked out in the context of the fellowship of the church. A Congregational church defines itself to the community not just by what it believes, but by what it is. Back in the seventies a book on nutrition and diet appeared that became very popular. It was titled You Are What You Eat.¹⁷ Similarly, we are what we believe. If we believe that Christ is truly present where two or three gather in his name, which is what he said (Matthew 18:10), then the spirit of Christ is with us when we explore our beliefs, when we look at Scripture, when we question (and provoke one another with our questions), when we hold business meetings, when we pray, when we do mission. Congregationalism is dynamic. We hold that in the context of community, in the context of being what we are in Christ, Christ is found.

All of this serves as a powerful alternative to fundamentalism. It calls people to use their minds. It calls them to a Christ-centered faith in the God whose light and truth are continually breaking forth out of the Word. It calls them to become the people God created them to be by nurturing their faith and commitment within a loving, praying, confronting, risk-taking fellowship in which the living Lord makes himself known.

As I said earlier, people are searching. And Congregationalism has something to offer, something potentially life-changing, even world-changing if people commit themselves to it. For what we’re about is what the New Testament church was about --- koinonia, the free fellowship of the people of God.

In 1629, the First Church in Salem , Massachusetts , drew up that now-famous church covenant that has been adopted by many of its descendant Congregational churches, including our own in Bingham. It is found in the Pilgrim Hymnal, and reads:

We covenant with the Lord and with one another, and do bind ourselves in the presence of God to walk together in all his ways, according as he is pleased to reveal himself unto us in his Blessed Word of Truth.

Seven years later, in 1636, the Salem church members, after much consideration and study, wrote an interpretation of their covenant, recognizing, as they put it, how apt we are to wander into by-paths even to the loosening of our first aims in entering into church fellowship.¹⁸

Of the nine interpretations written, I would like to close this morning by briefly reading four. Think about what it means to be Congregational as you hear these words:

--- We give ourselves to the Lord Jesus Christ, and by his word of grace, for the teaching, ruling and sanctifying of us in matters of worship, and conversation, resolving to cleave to him alone for life and glory; . . .
--- We promise to walk with our brethren and sisters in this congregation with all watchfulness and tenderness, [and] in all offences to follow the rule of the Lord Jesus . . . to bear and forbear, give and forgive as he has taught us.
--- We bind ourselves to study the advancement of the gospel in all truth and peace, both in regard to those who are within or without, no way slighting our sister Churches but using their counsel as need shall be; nor laying a stumbling-block before any. . .
--- Also promising to our best abilities to teach our children and servants the knowledge of God and his will, that they may serve him also; and all this, not by any strength of our own, but by the Lord Jesus Christ. . .¹⁹

I submit that if we hold these ideals before us, we will recapture the power inherent in the Congregational Way, and can capture the hearts and imaginations of seekers and believers who would join with us in fostering God’s reign.  May it be so.

¹ Weber, Timothy G., AFundamentalism, in Dictionary of Christianity in America, Downers Grove , Illinois : InterVarsity Press, 1990, p. 462. (Return to text)
² B.J. Longfield, op.cit., p. 188. (Return to text)
³ D.S. Armentrout, op.cit., p. 325. (Return to text)
⁴ Buchen, Philip, Liberal Legacy, Vol. III,, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Fountain Street Church, 2nd edition, 1992, Roger R. Bertschausen, ed., pp. 153ff. (Return to text)
⁵ George M. Marsden, op.cit., p. 468. (Return to text)
⁶ Quebedeaux, Richard, The Young Evangelicals, New York : Harper and Row, 1974, p. 9. (Return to text)
⁷ Weber, op.cit., p. 463. (Return to text)
⁸ Ibid. (Return to text)
⁹ Quebedeaux, op.cit., p. 9. (Return to text)
¹⁰ Latourette, Kenneth Scott, A History of Christianity, New York : Harper and Brothers, 1953, p. 1420. (Return to text)
¹¹ From an article on Harry Emerson Fosdick by C. W. Whiteman in Dictionary of Christianity in America , p. 446. (Return to text)
¹² Fosdick, Harry Emerson, The Church Must Go Beyond Modernism, in Riverside Sermons, New York : Harper and Brothers, 1958, p. 354. (Return to text)
¹³ Quebedeaux, op.cit., p. 11. (Return to text)
¹⁴ Op.cit., p. 12. (Return to text)
¹⁵ Op.cit., p. 13. (Return to text)
¹⁶ Cf. Weber, Timothy G., ADispensationalism@ in Dictionary of Christianity in America, op.cit., p. 358. (Return to text)
¹⁷ Gilbert, Sara, You Are What You Eat: A Common Sense Guide to the Modern American Diet, New York : Macmillan and Company, 1977. (Return to text)
¹⁸ Walker, Williston, The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism, Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1960, p. 117; quoted in Abercrombie, A. Vaughan, The Congregational Way of Devotional Life and Evangelism, published by the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches, 1990, p. 6 (Return to text)
¹⁹ Walker , op.cit., pp. 117-118, quoted in Abercrombie, pp. 6-7. (Return to text)