God's Story: A Student Guide to Church History by Brian Cosby Page A

sought to explain the “non-negotiables” of the Christian faith. They defended orthodox Protestant Reformed Christianity against liberalism, Catholicism, Mormonism, atheism, and (to some degree) evolution. The Fundamentals sparked a movement, joined by the rank and file of conservative Protestants of all denominations (especially Baptists and Presbyterians) in the United States and, to a lesser extent, Europe.
    As the first title was being released in 1910, the Presbyterian Church in the USA declared that there were “five fundamentals” that were necessary and essential to the Christian faith: (1) inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible, (2) the virgin birth of Jesus, (3) the substitutionary atonement of Christ on the cross, (4) the bodily resurrection of Christ from the dead, and (5) the historical reality of Jesus’ miracles. These five fundamentals became a test of Christian orthodoxy for ministers.
    Fourteen years later, these five fundamentals were directly attacked in the “Auburn Affirmation” of 1924 (from Auburn, New York and Auburn Theological Seminary), which garnered more than 1,200 signatures from church leaders and ably expressed the growing division within the church—what is now called the “Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy.”
    Fundamentalism, broadly speaking, also found expression in a small-town courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee during the blistering-hot summer of 1925—at the Scopes “Monkey” Trial . John Scopes, a high school science teacher, taught evolution in the public school, which violated Tennessee’s Butler Act. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) decided to fund the defense—led by the famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow—while the three-time US presidential nominee, William Jennings Bryan, represented the prosecution. In this high-profile, highly-publicized trial, the issue over evolution and creation in government education became an expression of the undercurrents of division within the United States between fundamentalism and modernism.
    Interestingly, at the heart of the Scopes trail was the Civic Biology textbook by George Hunter (published in 1914) used by Scopes, which affirmed the following:
    The Races of Man. At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.
    This racism isn’t too dissimilar to the subtitle from Charles Darwin’s famous book, the full title being: The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life . Evolution is, from its foundation, racist.
Neo-orthodoxy
    Another response to the modern and liberal theology movement of the 19 th century was Neo-orthodoxy , its chief proponents being Karl Barth (1886-1968) and Emil Brunner (1899-1966), even though they weren’t too fond of the label and they sometimes differed on each other’s particular theological issues.
    Neo-orthodoxy revived various themes of Reformed theology that had been snubbed by liberal theology (i.e. the sovereignty of God, human sinfulness, etc.). Theology, Barth and Brunner taught, was to be founded upon the Bible (though they didn’t believe it to be inerrant). The Bible is God’s revelation to humanity; religion, on the other hand, is man’s attempt to grasp God. Thus, one cannot attain to a right understanding of God simply through observing nature. They also stressed the absolute transcendence of God; that God is wholly independent of the material universe—the “wholly Other .” Though erroneous at places and left unfinished,