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You are here: Home / Historical Theology / “Fundamentalist baggage”

“Fundamentalist baggage”

December 4, 2008 by Andy Naselli

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).

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  1. Dan Phillips says

    December 5, 2008 at 12:11 pm

    Isn’t that odd and sad? “Fundamentalist” as used today has almost no relation to its historical origins and usage. What was central to the word is ancillary; what was no part of the word is central.

  2. Chris Anderson says

    December 6, 2008 at 1:00 pm

    Andy,

    Is Beale disagreeing with the growing contempt for the word inerrancy? Does he agree that it carries “fundamentalist baggage”?

    Also, do you think his (and Packer’s) characterization of fundamentalism is accurate?

  3. Andy Naselli says

    December 6, 2008 at 1:05 pm

    1. Yes.

    2. Yes and no. Answering such a question requires a lot of nuance. See, for example, Timothy George and John D. Woodbridge’s “What’s in a Name: Are We All Fundamentalists?” in The Mark of Jesus: Loving in a Way the World Can See (Chicago: Moody, 2005), 123–50, 182–83. This important chapter traces a significant etymological trajectory of the label “fundamentalist” and usefully overviews fundamentalism’s history.

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