Kevin Bauder, a self-identified fundamentalist, hits a home run with “Let’s Get Clear on This.”

Some excerpts:

• Conservative evangelicals are different from Fundamentalists, but they are not new evangelicals.
• Conservative evangelicals have majored on the centrality of the gospel and the exaltation of God.
• Nevertheless, some Fundamentalists have managed to convince themselves that conservative evangelicals are the enemy.
• [Some fundamentalist leaders are] recognizing that the Fundamentalist label is no guarantee of doctrinal fidelity. They are aware that historic, mainstream Fundamentalism has more in common with conservative evangelicals than it does with many who wear the Fundamentalist label.
• Conservative evangelicals are not our enemies. They are not our opponents. Conservative evangelicals have proven themselves to be allies and even leaders in the defense of the faith.
• If we attack conservative evangelicals, then we attack the defense of the faith.

The version of this essay that appeared in my inbox this afternoon concludes with these two paragraphs:

If we believe that we must respond to conservative evangelicalism, then let us begin by addressing the areas in which they have exposed our weakness. Let us refocus our attention upon the exaltation of God. Let us exalt, apply, and defend the gospel in all its fullness. If we were more like what we ought to be, perhaps we would feel less threatened by those whose exploits attract the attention of our followers.

Whatever our differences, I thank God for John Piper. I thank God for Mark Dever. I thank God for John MacArthur. I thank God for D. A. Carson. I thank God for a coalition of Christian leaders who have directed our focus to the centrality of the gospel and the exaltation of God. May their defense of the biblical faith prosper.

Read the whole thing: PDF | HTML.

Update:

1. Dave Doran responds to Kevin Bauder.
2. Chris Anderson responds to both Bauder and Doran.
3. Dave Doran responds again.

So writes Mark Dever in a new book based on a conference honoring J. I. Packer at Beeson Divinity School on September 25–27, 2006:

Timothy George, ed. J. I. Packer and the Evangelical Future: The Impact of His Life and Thought. Beeson Divinity Studies. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009. [Amazon | WTS Books]

Sample pages as a PDF include the TOC, preface, and opening chapter by Alister McGrath.

Here’s the opening paragraph of Mark Dever’s chapter, entitled “J. I. Packer and Pastoral Wisdom from the Puritans”:

There are some people for whom it is an honor to be asked to honor, and J. I. Packer is certainly one of them. And this is a surprising honor, considering that I disagree with him on baptism, church, and the resources of and prospects for rapprochement between Protestants and Roman Catholics. After all, I am a fundamentalist, Calvinistic, separatist Baptist—I barely believe in rapprochement with Presbyterians! (p. 87)

In the final section of his essay, titled “Puritans on the Definition of Justification and Questions of Church Cooperation,” Dever respectfully disagrees with Packer on Evangelicals and Catholics Together (pp. 93–96).

In Packer’s response to this book’s essays, he playfully picks up a metaphor in which he is Robin Hood, Timothy George is “Little George,” etc. He writes,

I saw in my Baptist brother Mark Dever a latter-day Sheriff of Nottingham, giving me a passing grade on the doctrine of grace but a firm “F” in ecclesiology. (p. 172)

Related: Mark Dever interviewed J. I. Packer ten years ago.

“Comparing Fundamentalist faith and practice to the faith and practice of historic Christianity is like comparing a hamburger to a filet mignon. The two obviously have something in common, but it would be misleading to say that everything in the steak is also in the hamburger.”

–Kevin Bauder, “Fundamentalism: Whence? Where? Whither? Part 2: Fundamentalism and History”

“Fundamentalism: Whence? Where? Whither? Part 1: Things Have Changed”

Some excerpts:

• In 1986 [i.e., when "the last sustained history of fundamentalism" was "published by a fundamentalist"], neither Dave Doran nor Tim Jordan held the pastorates that have come to be associated with their names. Dan Davey and Mark Minnick were associate pastors in Virginia Beach and Greenville, respectively. Matt Olson was just a few years into the planting of Tri-City Baptist Church near Denver. John Hartog III was a college student, and Stephen Jones was still in high school.
• In 1986, clear fissures were already evident within the fundamentalist movement.
• Things have changed for fundamentalism. Indeed, they still are. Rapidly. For a generation there has been no comprehensive attempt to summarize the changes and directions within fundamentalism, to link them to the past, and to draw out the trajectories along which they may carry fundamentalist churches and institutions in the future.
• These essays will neither defend nor denounce fundamentalism.
• I do not intend to try to persuade anyone—least of all young leaders—that they must remain in the fundamentalist movement. I love the idea of fundamentalism, and I would like to persuade people of its beauty and utility. The fundamentalist movement, however, is at best an imperfect embodiment of the idea. Those who can find a better incarnation of the idea ought to pursue it. Ideas ought to command our allegiance, not party or institutional loyalties.
• One underlying thesis of this series is that the fundamentalist movement no longer exists. The unraveling of the movement began in the 1960s and has continued virtually without interruption. At the present, little coherence remains among self-identified fundamentalists. The result is that no one can choose to be a fundamentalist simpliciter. In order to be a fundamentalist at all, one must choose among fundamentalist influences and institutions. The inevitable result is that all contemporary fundamentalists are modified fundamentalists, in the sense that they all require some modifier or qualifier to be attached to the name.

Note: Central Seminary emails Kevin Bauder’s essays every Friday afternoon. You can join the mailing list (as well as access the archives) here.

This week I enjoyed following the events at the SBC and SBTS from a distance and wish I would have been in Louisville to experience it. I’m encouraged by what I’ve heard. (Cf. summaries by Danny Akin, Tom Ascol, Timmy Brister, Denny Burk, Greg Gilbert, Owen Strachan, and the many articles by Southern Seminary’s news service.)

In the midst of many reasons for rejoicing in the positive advances made in the convention this year, one event stands out as confusing to Protestant fundamentalists: SBTS dedicated a building (cf. audio and video) to former president Duke McCall, a theological moderate who tolerated theological liberalism and opposed the Conservative Resurgence.

Doran’s Objection

Dave Doran (a graduate of TEDS, senior pastor of Inter-City Baptist Church, and president of Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary) reflects on this in these short articles:

1. “Honor to Whom Dishonor Is Due” (He concludes, “I just don’t get it.”)
2. “Is This an Application of Loving Your Enemies?“
3. “We Report, You Decide” (a response to Greg Gilbert’s post)
4. “Some (Final, I hope) Thoughts on the McCall Pavilion and Objections to My Questioning It” (a response to Mark Rogers’s post)
5. “Missions, Pavilions, and Wives” (paragraph two responds to Owen Strachan’s post)
6. “Seeing the Difference between Ideas and Individuals” (an implied response to Gilbert, Rogers, and Strachan)
7. “Ideas and Individuals (Again)“
8. “Sticking to the Point . . .“

Reponses to Doran

1. Greg Gilbert (a graduate of SBTS, former assistant to Al Mohler, and assistant pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist Church) respectfully responds to Doran’s first article: “Mohler, McCall, Truth, and History.”
2. Mark Rogers (a graduate of SBTS, son of a pastor in the SBC, current PhD student in historical theology at TEDS, and D. A. Carson’s administrative assistant) also respectfully responds to Doran’s first article: “Southern Seminary’s Anniversary and a Question of Honor.”
3. Owen Strachan (a graduate of SBTS, former research assistant to Al Mohler, current PhD student in historical theology at TEDS, and managing director of the Henry Center) also respectfully responds to Doran: “At SBTS, Fidelity Matters: A Friendly Response to Dave Doran.”

a guest post by Jenni Naselli

1. John Piper and Bethlehem Baptist Church have Children Desiring God.

2. The Fundamental Baptist Fellowship International national conference this week has “When I grow up, I want to be a fundamentalist.”

Dave Doran, senior pastor of Inter-City Baptist Church and president of Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary, just started a blog (RSS).

John Piper commends Kevin Bauder’s “A Time to Speak Up“:

I would like to encourage all fundamentalists and former fundamentalists to feel a good breeze from the fevered landscape of controversy.

Read the whole thing.

John D. Woodbridge is research professor of church history and the history of Christian thought at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where he has taught since 1970. One of his areas of expertise is the history of fundamentalism and evangelicalism. (I benefited from taking a seminar with him on that subject in fall 2007.) His father, Charles Woodbridge, taught at Fuller Seminary (cf. George Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism) and later wrote The New Evangelicalism (Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press, 1969). So John Woodbridge has had a front-row seat on this issue since childhood.

Trinity Magazine recently published this useful interview:

John D. Woodbridge. “The ‘Fundamentalist’ Label: An Interview with John Woodbridge.” Trinity Magazine (Spring 2009): 7–9, 23.

The subtitle of this evenhanded interview captures its theme: “We regularly hear people from different religious backgrounds referred to as ‘fundamentalist.’ Is this labeling appropriate?” Woodbridge responds to nine questions and statements:

1. What do you think the word “fundamentalist” means to people today?
2. Where did this concept of “world fundamentalisms” come from?
3. Were there any other significant contributing factors?
4. Is it legitimate to use the word “fundamentalist” for Muslims?
5. How does this usage misunderstand actual American fundamentalism as well?
6. I think what happens in the media is that they end up thinking about the kind of people who bomb abortion clinics, then assume that that’s really where this type of Christianity leads.
7. What can happen because of this popular misusage of “fundamentalism”?
8. Has anyone challenged the assumptions of Fundamentalisms Comprehended?
9. There is a challenge in all this for us as evangelical Christians as well.

Read the whole thing.

For a more thorough handling of this issue, see the following:

Timothy George and John D. Woodbridge. “What’s in a Name: Are We All Fundamentalists?” Pages 123–50, 182–83 in The Mark of Jesus: Loving in a Way the World Can See. Chicago: Moody, 2005. 192 pp. This important chapter traces a significant etymological trajectory of the label “fundamentalist” and usefully overviews fundamentalism’s history.

“Time to Speak Up” is a bold, timely, provocative, sane word from Kevin Bauder that accomplishes at least three goals:

1. refutes Danny Sweatt’s recent diatribe (cf. “An Example of a Fundamentalism Not Worth Saving“)
2. assures young fundamentalists that “Sweatt does not represent historic, mainstream fundamentalism”
3. challenges fundamentalist leaders (esp. in the FBF) to face this Calvinism-phobia (of which Sweatt’s diatribe is symptomatic) directly and promptly

Update:

1. John Piper comments on Bauder’s article: “Good Breeze from a Fundamentalist Neighbor“
2. Justin Taylor in “Fundamentalism 101“: “Slandering fundamentalists is something of an acceptable pastime for evangelicals (not to mention the wider Christian commnunity and culture). But since slander is sin, we’re better off showing respect (even when we critique) and seeking to learn what we can.”

Danny Sweatt’s sermon entitled “Young and Restless” (preached on April 7, 2009 at a regional FBF meeting in North Carolina)

A good friend asked me to listen to it last week, so I did (with my wife) early on Sunday morning. Not a good start to Mother’s Day.

Cf. Bob Bixby’s thoughts.

(The title of this post is a play on Kevin Bauder’s thoughtful paper.)

Update:

1. Perceptive advice from Chris Anderson
2. Bauder to FBF Leaders: “If you wish to model the kind of fundamentalism that really is worth saving, then the time has come”

Tony Payne, publishing director at Matthias Media and a Sydney Anglican Evangelical, explains why he is generous to fundamentalists but not to “those who have given up on the fundamentals and who seek to teach others likewise.”

• The former, he argues, are orthodox believers (albeit ones, from his perspective, who “may be or think or do all sorts of things that we find strange, unattractive or even distasteful”).
• The latter, he argues, are people whom the NT urges him to fight.

Collin Hansen reflects on his book Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists. (Cf. my review.)

Note his comments re fundamentalism:

Increasing my coverage of Reformed blogging is not the only change I would make. Readers have emerged from the woodwork to tell me about growing pockets of Reformed interest in Great Britain and among African Americans and fundamentalists. . . . As for fundamentalists, I have heard testimonies of college and seminary students who tell me something big is stirring. Perhaps there is hope that these young Calvinists will rebuild the bridges burned generations ago between evangelicals and fundamentalists.

Here is an observation that is related to the discussion generated by my previous post (though it may not apply to anyone in that discussion): People are often more gracious to those on either their left or right.

1. Some people are more gracious to those to the left of them than they are to those to the right of them. For example, some (not all) more broadminded evangelicals will tip-toe around a postconservative evangelical or emergent leader in order to give the least possible offense, but they will also strongly denounce “fundamentalists” without the least concern about offending them.
2. Other people are more gracious to those to the right of them than they are to those to the left of them. For example, some (not all) fundamentalists will overlook egregious errors by fellow fundamentalists (e.g., errant bibliology or soteriology) in order to give the least possible offense to those in their camp, but they will also strongly denounce “new evangelicals” for less serious issues without the least concern about offending them.

Is this a fair observation? Perhaps there are too many exceptions for this to be any sort of a general trend.

Fascinating statement:

Ehrman proves the dictum that old fundamentalists never die; they just exchange fundamentals and continue in their unimaginative, closed-minded rigidity and simplicity.

-William H. Willimon, review of Bart D. Ehrman, God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer, The Christian Century, December 30, 2008.

Here are a couple of interesting paragraphs from Greg Beale’s latest book, The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism: Responding to New Challenges to Biblical Authority (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008).

In fact, there is an increasingly popular attitude that the Chicago Statement and the term inerrancy carry significant “fundamentalist baggage,” with all the negative associations that go with the word fundamentalism (e.g., narrow, obscurantist, anti-scholarly, unsophisticated). I have found that this perspective is also shared by some more conservative biblical and theological scholars. This is not the place to discuss the origins of the word fundamentalism and the development of the use of the word. Suffice it to say that what appears to be “fundamentalist” is in the eye of the beholder.

J. I. Packer in his “Fundamentalism” and the Word of God has given a nice, brief discussion of the origins of fundamentalism and how the word has come to be used. Though that was written in the late 1950s, his basic points still hold. There he distinguishes a fundamentalist view of Scripture from an  evangelical view, the latter of which he subsequently identified with the Chicago Statement on inerrancy since he himself was one of the more well known among its signatories in 1978 (p. 21).

Earlier this week Pillsbury Baptist Bible College, a fundamentalist college in Owatonna, Minnesota, published this announcement:

The Pillsbury Baptist Bible College Board of Trustees has announced that the college will cease academic activities on December 31, 2008. National economic conditions combined with deficits caused by declining enrollment have exhausted Pillsbury’s financial reserves, leaving the college without funds to complete the school year.

Continue Reading »

Kevin Bauder recently presented a ten-part seminar on “Biblical Separation” at International Bible College in Tempe, Arizona.

1. Images of Christian Unity: The Flock and the New Humanity (9.16.2008)
2. Images of Christian Unity: Body (9.16.2008)
3. The Basis of Christian Unity and Jesus’ High-Priestly Prayer — Part 1 (9.16.2008)
4. The Basis of Christian Unity and Jesus’ High-Priestly Prayer — Part 2 (9.16.2008)
5. The Nature of the Gospel (9.17.2008)
6. The Notion of Fundamentals and Levels of Doctrine (9.17.2008)
7. Departures from the Gospel and Basic Separation (9.17.2008)
8. The Whole Counsel and Levels of Christian Fellowship (9.18.2008)
9. Discipline Offenses in the Church and Beyond (9.18.2008)
10. The Problem of Indifferentism (9.18.2008)

I have not listened to the MP3s yet (they are downloading as I type), but I would be surprised if this seminar is not a thoughtful, reasonable, respectful, logical argument for separation as held by historic fundamentalists. Kevin Bauder is a sharp thinker and gifted theologian. If you don’t have much exposure to fundamentalism or if the exposure you’ve had to it has been disappointing, you may be pleasantly surprised with Bauder. (Some of his writings are available here.)

Mark Dever just posted this short article on the 9Marks blog: “Mark Dever doesn’t practice separation”?

He concludes:

To sum it up, I want my separation from the world to be more pronounced than my separation from other Christians.  Does this make sense?

The latest 9Marks interview by Mark Dever is now available: “Fundamentalism and Separation with Mark Minnick: Pastor and Bob Jones University professor Mark Minnick presents the case for the Fundamentalist doctrine of separation.”

Related:

• 9 Marks interviews and Henry Forums
• Mark Minnick MP3s
• Minnick: “Theology Matters”