A few days ago, I began a discussion of whether or not Christ Church was a “fundamentalist” congregation, a thread that began when I recalled how often I’d been asked that, usually by people who were unfamiliar with Christian doctrine and assumed that all “Bible believers” were fundamentalists.
In my “They’re Fighting, But They’re Not Fundies” post, I wrote about fundamentalism as both a historical movement within Christiandom and its evolvement into a pejorative when applied to contemporary Christians who hold the Bible as the Word of God revealed, accept the seven generally-held “essentials” of the historic Christian faith, and often view science and society with mistrust. If defined solely in the historic sense — the acceptance of seven Biblical doctrines that conservative scholars at the time felt were essential to the Christian faith — I would have been a fundamentalist, and so would Doug Wilson, I’m supposing. Historically, those seven “fundamental” doctrines of the faith were seen as the deity of Christ, the nature of the Triune Godhead, Christ’s virgin birth, his atoning death on the cross, his bodily resurrection, his imminent and sure physical return to Earth, and the need for personal conversion — what evangelicals call “coming to Jesus” to be saved.
But this final point of fundamentalism is what separates Christ Church and Wilson’s other forums from what we might call “your Dad’s old fundamentalists” — the Bible-waving, conservative Baptists or Missouri Synod Lutherans who non-believers presume represent the whole of evangelicalism. Wilson, et al, decry what they call “revivalism,” or the concerted efforts — Billy Graham-style crusades, for example — to save souls through the preaching of the Gospel. This is primarily out of a Calvinistic view that those who will be saved are thus predestined before the creation of the world, and those who will be damned are as well, a point that Calvin and his followers make by adding that those God denies salvation to are so denied “for His good pleasure.”
But it’s not only Calvin, but Scripture, that teaches predestination, or God’s choice of who finds salvation. The Bible clearly teaches God’s foreknowledge of the eternal destinies of his creatures. I believe in predestination, and so does any other Christian who understands the doctrine. No true evangelical would deny that God has chosen who will be saved. The difference between Calvinists and other evangelicals is the BASIS on which that predestination is determined. Fundamentalists, your Daddy’s old Baptist grandpa, non-Calvinist evangelicals, and I believe that those in Christ Jesus — all who decide, by the prevenient grace of God, to accept his offer of salvation in him — are those destined for eternal life. Those who reject Christ are then destined, or predestined, to loss. But the Calvinist believes that nothing a person does, or no evangelistic effort on the part of the Church, can change God’s eternal, unsearchable decree, which, then, makes revivals (evangelistic crusades, as well as personal evangelism) logically unnecessary. This is a horror to fundamentalists, for whom soul-saving is the work of every believer.
But while “revivalism” is not quite a horror to Wilson and his followers, it is a term of mocking derision, part of the sappy, sentimentalist “choose Jesus” wing of evangelicalism that, in his eyes, denies the absolute sovereignty of God and encourages “morbid introspection” that’s unseemly for members of the Covenant. And that emphasis on Covenant membership, into which a child is born and baptized, replaces the fundamentalist fervor for evangelism, Gospel preaching, personal and volitional conversion, and inclusion in the family of God by virtue of acceptance of the Savior. You won’t find Wilson holding a tent revival, and you won’t find fundamentalists denying the need to evangelize children born into the Covenant.
It’s not only soteriology — the doctrine of salvation — that separates Wilson from the fundamentalists, though, and it’s not just a defense of Calvinistic sovereignty vs. personal choice that motivates his disdain for “revivalism.” The fundamentalist’s strict theology and emphasis on one-on-one evangelism and group meetings leads to a suspicion of “worldly” intellectualism, which, to the fundamentalist, is what gave rise to the higher criticism that caused the conservatives to coalesce in the first place. So Wilson’s passion for “classical” Christian education, with its attendant emphasis on Latin, the canon of Western literature, the study of myth and legend in history, and exposure to “secular” works of art and letters, would strike the fundamentalist as not only a distraction from soul-saving, but an un-Biblical foray into those things that are not of the Bible — perhaps even in opposition to it. And the fundamentalists’ legalism, the belief that smoking, drinking, dancing, and eye-shadowed women in pants represent wrongful behavior on the part of the Christian — things repented of and left behind — is in stark contrast to the “Christian hedonism” of Wilson and his followers, for whom rich food, strong beer, and fragrant cigars are a gift from God to be enjoyed fully. Two Baptists in a liquor store may fail to recognize each other; two Kirkers in the liquor store would compare labels and suggest Grey Goose over Absolut.
The difficulties I and so many others have with the Kirk do not stem from its professed belief in the Bible, and Wilson is not criticized because he’s a preacher of the Gospel. On the contrary, I’d love it if he’d start preaching the Gospel to those who don’t know Jesus. No, Wilson finds himself in controversy and conflict because he behaves badly in the public square, and believers and non-believers in that square and beyond call him on it. When they call him on it — and there ought to be a lot more of that, by the way, from Moscow’s other conservative Christian pastors — they need to avoid the convenient shortcut in their analysis of his theology and conduct that arrives at the mistaken idea that his is just a more publicly obnoxious fundamentalism. It’s more public, and certainly more obnoxious, but “fundamentalist” it’s not.