The Fundamentalist Modernist Controversy

Historical Theology

Historical Setting

By 1900 the major Protestant denominations of the United States — Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, Congregational — stood at the height of their cultural influence and on the edge of a fracture. The instruments of that fracture had been forged in the previous era: German higher criticism, which treated the Bible as a human document to be dissected like any other; Darwinian biology, which appeared to dissolve the historical Adam; and the social optimism of the age, which recast salvation as moral and societal improvement.

Within the seminaries and pulpits, a new theology took root. Its adherents called it modernism or liberalism. They did not see themselves as abandoning Christianity but as saving it — translating an ancient faith into terms the modern mind could accept, shedding the husk of outworn supernaturalism to preserve the kernel of Jesus’ ethic and the experience of God within.

Against them rose the fundamentalists. Between 1910 and 1915 a series of booklets titled The Fundamentals appeared, funded by Christian businessmen and written by a broad coalition of conservative scholars. They defended the inspiration and authority of Scripture, the deity and virgin birth of Christ, his substitutionary atonement, his bodily resurrection, and his return. The name “fundamentalist,” coined in 1920, simply meant one who held these as non-negotiable.

What Was at Stake

The combatants disagreed about whether they even disagreed about something fundamental. The modernists believed the quarrel concerned interpretation and emphasis — how literally to read Genesis, how much of the miraculous to retain. The conservatives believed the quarrel concerned the existence of Christianity itself.

At stake was the supernatural: whether God had in fact acted in history, become incarnate, risen bodily, and spoken authoritatively in Scripture. If these were symbols of inner experience, one religion stood before the church. If they were facts, another. The controversy was, in the end, a contest over whether there is a Word from God outside ourselves to which we must submit.

Key Players

Harry Emerson Fosdick, the eloquent liberal preacher, lit the fuse with his 1922 sermon “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” — a plea for tolerance that framed the conservatives as the aggressors.

J. Gresham Machen answered for the confessional party. A New Testament scholar of the first rank, trained at Princeton and in Germany, Machen was no anti-intellectual. He had felt liberalism’s pull and rejected it on its merits. In 1923 he published Christianity and Liberalism, the era’s decisive book.

Machen’s thesis was as charitable as it was uncompromising. Liberalism, he argued, was not bad Christianity but a different religion altogether — one that shared Christianity’s vocabulary while emptying it of content. The liberal and the believer might both say “atonement” and “resurrection,” but meant by them irreconcilable things. Honesty, Machen urged, required that they part.

“Faith is essentially dogmatic. Despite all you can do, you cannot remove the element of intellectual assent from it.” (Machen, Christianity and Liberalism)

In fairness to his opponents, the modernists were often men of genuine devotion who believed they were rescuing the faith for their children. They feared that to tie Christianity to a young earth and a literal flood was to sink the ship with the cargo. Their motive was preservation, not destruction.

The Outcome

The Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. became the chief battleground. Conservatives sought to require ministers to affirm five fundamental doctrines; liberals and moderates resisted. The 1924 Auburn Affirmation, signed by over a thousand ministers, argued that no doctrine could be made a test of ordination. The denomination’s drift toward toleration of liberalism was, to Machen, a surrender.

When Princeton Seminary was reorganized in 1929 to broaden its theology, Machen and several colleagues withdrew and founded Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia to continue Old Princeton’s confessional witness. When the denomination’s foreign missions board proved tolerant of liberal missionaries, Machen formed an independent mission board, was tried and suspended from the ministry, and in 1936 helped found what became the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He died the following winter, having lost the institutions but kept the confession.

Meanwhile, the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Tennessee handed the cultural narrative to the modernists. Though the prosecution technically won, the national press — and later popular memory — cast fundamentalism as rural, reactionary, and intellectually bankrupt. Fundamentalism retreated from public life into its own institutions, wounded in reputation if not in conviction.

Scriptural Grounding

The conservatives’ refusal to compromise rested on Scripture’s testimony to itself.

“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” (2 Tim. 3:16)

And on the apostolic insistence that the gospel is rooted in fact, not feeling:

“And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” (1 Cor. 15:17)

Paul’s anathema upon any other gospel (Gal. 1:8–9) is the New Testament root of Machen’s thesis: there are not many gospels, and a different gospel is no gospel.

Doctrinal Significance

The controversy clarified, for a generation that had grown vague, the difference between Christianity and its counterfeits. It established that the authority of Scripture is not one doctrine among many but the foundation on which the rest stand or fall. And it demonstrated that a church which will not discipline its teaching will, in time, lose its gospel.

It also bequeathed a sociological lesson the Reformed have pondered ever since: the buildings, endowments, and prestige passed almost entirely to the party that had abandoned the confession, while the confession passed to small, new, embattled bodies. Faithfulness and influence parted ways.

A Reformed Assessment — Wheat and Chaff

The wheat is Machen himself — a model of charitable, learned, courageous confession. He stated liberalism’s case so fairly that liberals praised the book even as it indicted them. He fought for truth without rancor, and built rather than merely protested.

The wheat, too, is the principle that doctrine defines the church. Reformed Christians affirm with Machen that to lose the supernatural gospel is to lose Christianity.

The chaff lies in the broader fundamentalist movement that formed around the controversy. In its anti-intellectual reflex, its frequent dispensationalism, its separatist temper, and its tendency to reduce the rich Westminster confession to a list of five fundamentals, fundamentalism was a narrower thing than confessional Presbyterianism. Machen was a Presbyterian who happened to ally with fundamentalists; he was not, in temperament, one of them. The Reformed inheritance is his confessionalism, not the populist movement’s reactivity.

Connections

This guide stands downstream from the modern era: liberalism (06_03) is the antagonist here, and Old Princeton (06_04) — Hodge and Warfield — is Machen’s theological lineage. He carried their doctrine of Scripture (Bibliology and inerrancy) into a new century.

Systematically, the controversy is about Revelation and Bibliology: whether God has spoken authoritatively. It implicates Ecclesiology in the question of church discipline and the marks of a true church (WCF 25), and Soteriology in the dispute over the atonement.

It links to Westminster Confession 1 (Scripture) and 1.10 (Scripture as the supreme judge). Forward within this era, it sets the stage for the neo-orthodox reframing of Scripture (07_02), the evangelical coalition that grew partly from chastened fundamentalism (07_03), and the recovery of Reformed theology (07_05) in which Westminster and the OPC bear lasting fruit.

Lessons for Today

A church that cannot say no cannot long say yes to anything. Tolerance offered as a virtue may be surrender dressed as charity.

Confession is costly. Machen lost his seminary, his denomination, his ministerial standing, and his health. He gained the approval of his Master and a witness that outlived the institutions that expelled him.

And faithfulness is not measured by influence. The Lord may entrust his truth to the small and the scorned. The question is never whether we win the culture, but whether we keep the gospel.