All right, so battle for the Bible. I wanna refer you again, because we've done it pretty much every time we've had this conversation, to the house that we've been building. I'm gonna actually have, can you run this back to Rick and Susie? I think everybody else probably has seen this or has one of these. But back, I mean, probably what, I guess in the fall is when we really first started. So it's been the better part of nine months that we really began this study. But we began working through each of the rooms in this house, starting, you know, with the foundation, the Lord Jesus Christ and the witness of the apostles to him. And then going from century to century, looking at all of these different figures throughout church history in the patristic age, up into the middle ages. And then finally, with the past few weeks, we've spent time in the modern age, really starting with the Reformation and then coming all the way up through the great awakening And today, as you're gonna see, one of the most intense controversies that the church has really seen, which is the modernist versus the fundamentalist controversies, of which we really, we ourselves, as conservative Bible-believing Christians today, when I say conservative, I'm talking theologically conservative, I'm not necessarily per se talking about a political stance, but that we have come to this place today in large part because of much of the work that was done and the controversy we're gonna be looking at today. So hopefully this is helpful just again to help you to understand why it is that you think about things the way that you think and why it is you understand your Christianity the way that you do. Yes, obviously it's founded on God's word, but also through all these other influences that have come your way throughout history. Okay, so that's what we wanna do. And we're again, just wanna remind you it's our last time to do this, but we really have looked at the three major pillars that have really established the church throughout 2,000 years of church history. And that's the word of God, the work of God, and the worship of God. And throughout all these different eras, There's been attacks on those pillars in different points with different amounts of pressure. And we've seen how the Lord used the church to respond to those things. And we're gonna continue to see that even tonight. So you hear the word fundamentalist? You've probably heard that before. You've probably heard the word evangelical. We're gonna tell you where those words came from tonight. That's the goal. All right, so really tonight our key passage 2 Timothy 3, 16-17. And as I've mentioned, the title of tonight's lecture is The Battle for the Bible. The subtitle, Faithful Believers in the Face of Modernism. Modernity. Key passage, 2 Timothy 3, 16-17. All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching. for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequately equipped for every good work. So hopefully that's a verse that many of you have memorized, that you're familiar with, and it has a tremendous amount of influence or relevance for what we're gonna be talking about tonight. So the years of really what we're gonna be looking at is gonna begin in the year 1812, which is gonna be the year that Princeton Seminary was established. So 1812, the year that Princeton Seminary was established, and then really coming all the way to the current day in some sense. And in this long 100 plus year battle that's going on has largely, in many cases, been settled, and yet you still see the rumblings of it even to our very moment. In some ways, it's just intensified in other ways. So the Bible, we talked, Jake talked about the spreading of the gospel through the modern missionary movement last time we were together. Before that, We spent some time talking about the history of the Baptist, because that's, I think, an important thing for us to understand, because we are, in many ways, a Baptist church. We function as a Baptist church would. And then before that, we looked at the Reformation and some of the dynamics that were going on there. We come to our text today, and we saw back whenever we were looking at the Puritans, okay, the Puritans, and then the way that the Puritans pulled out of the Church of England, and they became separatists. As they became separatists, they would become, in their church polity, they separated from the state church, and they became congregational, right? And so that shift, at that moment, that was a huge, you can call it a philosophical shift. Because really, before that time, Christians conceptualized the church and the state as being very much intertwined like this. So that was at one of those moments, whenever that began to unravel, and people began to separate from these state churches, that major shifts in how Christians thought about what the church was, how they answered the question, how are we to be faithful? We started to see that take a very different turn. In the 17th and 18th centuries, we see that the philosophical underpinnings of Europe really also began to shift around this time as well with two big movements. Something called rationalism. What do y'all think rationalism is thinking about? Okay, thinking, kind of just said like reason, the age of reason that would come in. And with that, something also called empiricism, okay, which really is where some of our ideas of the scientific method would come from. So think about, I mean, we're talking about stuff that most of us learned in school growing up about going to chemistry class. So many of these things, when we think about science, when we think about medicine, when we think about all these things, they really were a byproduct. Many of them very good things. In modern medicine, it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's a very good thing. But a lot of these things were starting to kind of really come to the surface and be birthed around this time. And what ended up happening, okay, is that the rationalism, empiricism really began to start to replace some of the religious traditionalism that was prevalent throughout most of the Middle Ages. And the big name for this shift, what do y'all think it is? Anybody know what this big shift that we're kinda still on the tail end of today, I would say, what do y'all think that's called? Okay. Modernism, that's a good, that's a way to put it, but it's the Enlightenment. Okay, so I'm sure y'all have heard that term as well. But the enlightenment or the age of reason. And as I've said, there was much good that came from this. But as we'll see, there's also many, many negative things that came as well. And interestingly this movement, this philosophical movement, really was primarily led at the beginning by Christian philosophers and scientists. But soon it became dominated by those who claimed that the Bible should be discarded. So how did they come to this conclusion? You have these Christians who are beginning to understand the way that God made the world, and they're beginning to try to understand that from a materialistic perspective. When I say that, I'm not saying it necessarily in the negative way, but they're observing what God has created, and they're trying to understand it as He created it. And over time, many of those began to abandon the Bible, essentially, And they began to ask questions of why do we even need this? They began to see that reason and science, maybe that's enough. Maybe we can reject some of this traditional religious way of thinking that has been around for so long. They began to openly question the inspiration and the authority and the accuracy of scripture even. So these skeptics would eventually begin to even challenge the very veracity of scripture itself, and they would deny that, and this is a really key point that I want us to focus on tonight, they would deny the biblical accounts of supernatural events. When you hear that term supernatural events, another term for that that I want you to walk away with tonight is miracle. They began to deny the possibility and the reality of miracle. Because if you're looking at a world where everything is measurable, everything is explainable through the scientific method, what room is there in that for something that we know as a miracle? They began to question that. Are they even real? They would argue that miracles were either legends or coincidences that could and should be explained as the result of a natural cause. So if you're denying miracle, guess what's gonna be close behind you denying a miracle? God. They're going to also deny scripture. And if you think about it, why is that? If you deny the miraculous, you are also going to deny the biblical view of scripture. That's a funny thing to say. but the Bible has a view of itself. The Bible presents an understanding of itself that it wants us to submit to. And guess what? This view of itself is miraculous. The Bible is a miraculous book, right? So if you're denying miracle, you're about one step away from also denying the the truthfulness, the reliability, the very place of the very understanding that the Bible has of itself, which is as a book that has been divinely given to us, divinely inspired, right? By not just miracle, okay? We know that holy men, okay, wrote, they wrote, they used their intellects to write the Bible. They were inspired, but they were also fully engaged in that process. And yet the fact that it was given without error, completely inerrant, completely sufficient, completely all the things that we talk about, there's no way to describe what the writers of the Bible did without also understanding it in terms of a miracle, that God inspired the Bible, which sets it apart, apart from every other book that's ever been written. So you can see how these ways of thinking deny miracle, and you're one step away from also denying the Bible. A lot of this is gonna focus obviously on the miracles that Jesus himself performed, obviously, because the Bible accounts these things. So obviously they're gonna poke at those things and start to question if these things really happened, are they legend, or whatever else. But the attack on the trustworthiness of the Bible would cause some professing Christians to question whether scripture should be regarded as the foundation for the Christian life. And again, if you go back to our chart that we gave you, it's founded on Christ as revealed in scripture. So if you reject scripture as being able to provide an appropriate foundation for the Christian life, then you really don't have much Christianity really at all. And many Christians begin to argue that the basis for Christianity should be found in other places like maybe just a general feeling of dependence upon God, as though that would be enough to establish a foundation for Christianity, or many others, particularly in places like South America with some of the more liberal theologies down there. Social activism would become maybe the foundation for the Christian life, or maybe just the church's influence in society would become the thing that would really provide the foundation for the Christian life. But all of those things were beginning to be thrown around at the expense of scripture filling that role. So because of all this, really a new category would emerge within the history of the church. And this category is gonna be called liberal Christianity. It really is pretty remarkable to think that liberal Christianity really probably, it did not exist. more than 100, I guess about 150 years ago, the way that we understand it now. Of course, there were some things here and there that would eventually lead there, but when you hear liberal Christianity, that's a relatively, in the span of 2,000 years, that's a very modern phenomenon, and it's a modern phenomenon that exists in the world that we live in today. So liberal Christianity or theological liberalism. Now, broadly speaking, this liberalism would reject the inspiration and the inerrancy of scripture, and it would redefine the church's mission in terms of things, like we've already said, like social activism. That's the great scandal of liberal Christianity, is it rejects the inspiration and the inerrancy of scripture, and tries to redefine the church's mission in terms of some kind of a social program. By the early 20th century, theological liberalism was prevalent in both the United States, but also in Europe, obviously, and the West in general. And in addition to rejecting the inerrancy of scripture, many proponents of liberalism also would deny the deity of Christ. So think back to week three or whenever that was that we spent so much time looking at the deity of Christ. Okay, that's out the window, that's rejected. The miracles recorded in the Bible, rejected. The substitutionary atonement of Jesus' death on the cross. Okay, that's another, that's a long fancy way of saying the gospel. Rejected, right? Why? Because that's sin involved, and we pretty much reject sin too, right? And also rejecting the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. So hopefully in describing it this way, you can see that liberal Christianity is really no Christianity at all. It's really best, and one of the men we're gonna talk about today, Jay Gresham Machen, he really defines it as another religion completely. And that's appropriate. So in response to this, many Bible-believing Christians from various Protestant denominations, when I say that, think Baptists at the time, think Presbyterians, even think Methodists, and really many other more, these were Bible-believing Protestants, really banded together to defend the cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith. That's what they wanted to do. And in 1920, these Christians would be known as fundamentalists. Okay, why? Because they believed the fundamental truths of Scripture, and they were willing to contend earnestly for these truths. So really today, we're gonna look at the ideological battle that took place in the early 20th century, especially in the United States, between the theologically liberal modernists and the Bible-believing fundamentalists, and eventually the evangelicals as well. As I said, our journey really does begin in 1812 at the establishment of Princeton Theological Seminary. The Lord would use this school to really raise up a formidable defense for the doctrines of the Bible. It was started in 1812 by a man named Archibald Alexander, who was alive from 1772 to 1851. And he served as the school's first chair of systematic theology. Three notable figures that you may have heard of that were part of the faculty around that time were gonna be Charles Hodge, who even today has written one of the greatest systematic theologies that you can find. That was published in 1872. He taught Princeton for more than 50 years, and during that time, he staunchly defended the Christian faith from attack. His son behind him, A.A. Hodge, who was actually named after the president, Archibald Alexander, He would also become a professor of systematic theology at Princeton. When his father died in 1878, he too would defend the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. And then probably most familiar, if you've heard of any of these guys, would be a man by the name of B.B. Warfield, who was around from 1851 to 1921. He would succeed Hodge as the professor of systematic theology in 1877. He was a prolific writer. and an ardent defender of the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith. So if we think back to those three pillars, the word, the work, and the worship that we talked about in our house that we've been building, and we've really been tracing those all the way through church history, we see those three things clearly defended by these Princeton theologians. So here's some quotes from B.B. Warfield just to illustrate that. So one, the word of God in scripture, the word of God in scripture. So here's to summarize it. The true church views scripture alone as its final authority. And followers of Jesus submit to him by submitting to his word. Here's Warfield. When Paul declares then that every scripture or all scripture is the product of divine breath, is God-breathed, he asserts with as much energy as he can employ that scripture is the product of a specifically divine operation. What that means is he's saying scripture is miraculous. It is specifically divine operation. Here's Warfield again. The Bible is the word of God in such a way that when the Bible speaks, God speaks. One more time, related to the word. Thus, in every way possible, the church has borne her testimony from the beginning and still in our day to her faith in the divine trustworthiness of her scriptures and all their affirmations of whatever kind. The church has always believed her scriptures to be the book of God, of which God was, in such a sense, the author, that every one of its affirmations of whatever kind is to be esteemed as the utterance of God of infallible truth and authority. It's these kinds of things that were under attack during this time, and they remain under attack even today. So relating to the work of God, particularly in salvation, the true church understands that sinners are justified by God's grace through faith apart from works. They recognize, they understand that their salvation is completely dependent upon the work, the finished work of Jesus Christ who rose bodily from the grave. So here's Warfield on the work of God. We have but one Savior, and that one Savior is Jesus Christ our Lord. Nothing that we are and nothing that we can do enters into the slightest measure into the ground of our acceptance with God. Jesus did it all. or filled again. From the empty grave of Jesus, the enemies of the cross turn away in unconcealable dismay. Christ has risen from the dead. After 2,000 years of the most determined assault upon the evidence which demonstrates it, that fact stands. And so long as it stands, Christianity too must stand as one supernatural religion. Relating to the worship of God in spirit and in truth, the church has understood that the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in purity of devotion, in purity of doctrine, that that's who we worship, in purity of devotion, in purity of doctrine. And this includes the clear affirmation of Christ's deity. Two more quotes from Moorfield, then we'll move on to the next section. The deity of Christ is in solution in every page of the New Testament. Every word that is spoken of him, every word which he is reported to have spoken of himself, is spoken on the assumption that he is God. And that is the reason why the criticism which addresses itself to eliminating the testimony of the New Testament to the deity of our Lord has set itself to a hopeless task. The New Testament itself would have to be eliminated, nor can we get behind this testimony because the deity of Christ is the presupposition of every word in the New Testament. So this guy obviously was a very intelligent guy and some of his stuff you have to read it a few times to probably pick up what he's saying. But I think you get the flavor of it just by us hearing these things. One more. Had Christ not risen, we could not believe him to be what he declared himself when he made himself equal with God. I'll read that again. Had Christ not risen, we could not believe him to be what he declared himself when he made himself equal with God. But he has risen in the confirmation of all his claims. By it alone, by it alone, but by it thoroughly, is he manifested as the very Son of God who has come into the world to reconcile the world to himself. It is the fundamental fact that it is the fundamental fact in the Christian's unwavering confidence in all the words of this life. So that's our unwavering confidence is really found in the resurrection of Jesus. Okay, so that's B.B. Warfield, that's some of the stuff that was going on at Princeton Seminary as it was beginning to confront some of this theological liberalism that was beginning to really wreak havoc upon the church. So if you hear the word fundamentalist, okay, probably that might carry a bit of a negative connotation for you today. Does that carry a negative connotation for some of you? It kinda does me. Why, right? Why is that, I wonder? There's, yeah, legalism. Yeah, there's good reasons why it might cause some concern for you. But just like everything else, remember, you come across something like that and you feel the hair stand up on the back of your neck. You need to ask yourself, why do I feel this way about this? Where do these feelings, these thoughts come from? And of course, it's really helpful to go back to the beginning of when these things began to happen and try to understand what they were trying to solve at the time when they were trying to solve them. Okay, so the term fundamentalist generally has a negative connotation in our contemporary culture today. But as I've already said, fundamentalism really began as a movement consisting of Bible-believing Christians who were really responding to something that was very, very, very insidious against the church. Some other well-known names that existed in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. This movement included well-known evangelists like D.L. Moody, Dwight L. Moody was one of them. Another one, C.I. Schofield, okay, good dispensational evangelist for the Schofield Study Bible. And another man, which I'm not familiar with, Billy Sunday, he died in 1935. But these are three figures that really would play a very significant part in the early parts of this movement. This movement in the early days was also associated with various Bible conferences. There was one called the Niagara Bible Conference, which met annually from 1876 to 1897. So before the year 1900, right at the end of that century. And in 1878, a group of scholars associated with the conference articulated 14 doctrinal principles outlining the basic Christian beliefs. Okay, these 14 points would essentially comprise the Niagara Creed, essentially. Other groups would create similar kinds of statements, all in an effort to safeguard the essential biblical doctrines in the face of liberalism's growing influence. And we've seen this before, haven't we? If you think back again, back to the fourth century, the fifth century, whenever the church was under major attack, what did the church, what was one response they typically had? They would try to clarify what they understood the Bible to teach. And a lot of times that would take the form of a creed or a confession. And so even to our own day, if you look at the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy or some of the more modern statements, that's really what these are. They're clarifying and they're trying to guard the truth that the church has been entrusted with from external attack. In 1910, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church would identify five fundamentals, okay, of the faith. And what do y'all think these fundamentals were? We're gonna create five fundamentals for the Christian faith. Let's see if y'all can name at least three of them. Okay, okay, so you're going back to the Reformation, okay? So you have something about the Bible in there, so that's good. Okay, okay, okay, let's get the, okay, so I'll give this one, I'll give one, the inerrancy of scripture. That's number one, for those of you who are taking notes. The inerrancy of scripture. Okay. Peyton just said, what'd you say, the full deity and full humanity of Jesus, something along, that's what you said. Okay, number two, okay, is related to that. Okay, the virgin birth and the deity of Christ. Okay, why don't think the virgin birth is such a big deal? It's a miracle. We don't like those, right? That can't happen. That defies our enlightened understanding of how reality works. So it's rejected, right? So defending the virgin birth is quite a big deal for some of these reasons. Okay, what are some other things? That's two. You'll at least get one more. Otherwise, I'm closing my book and we're going home. Okay, let's hear it again. Oh, that's number three. So y'all are just working down the list. So y'all are a bunch of fundamentalists, I knew it. Okay, number three. The substitutionary atonement of Christ's death. The substitutionary atonement of Christ's death. Okay, I have two more. Y'all think I'll get a few bonuses? Okay, the return of Christ. Ah, number four. The bodily resurrection of Christ. Guess what? Another miracle. Right? Another big deal. And then the last one, which is related to some of these others, but the authenticity of Christ's miracles. That's number five. That same year, a Presbyterian businessman by the name of Lyman Stewart founded the publication of really a very substantial work called The Fundamentals, A Testimony to the Truth. Now this work, The Fundamentals, consisted of 90 essays written by 64 authors from several different denominations. So you can really see them even coming together across some of these different traditional lines and really trying to defend God's word against this attack. Well, Lyman Stewart was the one who funded the publication, but there were really 64 authors who contributed to this work. So it was probably a multi-volume kind of thing. But it was 12 installments from 1910 to 1915 that these things were coming out, really defending the fundamentals of the faith. They would expand those five fundamentals we mentioned, and they would strengthen the fundamentalist stance against modernism and against skeptical attacks on scripture. So here's a few quotes from that, from some, of course, small quotes from that work. The living word shall continue to be the discerning companion for all who resort to it for the help, which is not to be had anywhere else in the world of the dying. In going to the Bible, we never think of ourselves as going back to a book of the distant past, to a thing of antiquity, but we go to it as a book of the present, a living book. And so indeed it is, living in the power of an endless life, and able to build us up and to give us an inheritance among all them that are sanctified. Okay, this one was interesting. The next one, Luther said that he studied the Bible as he gathered apples. First, he shook the whole tree that the ripest might fall, right? Okay, then he climbed the tree and shook each limb. And when he had shaken each limb, he shook each branch and after he, and after each branch every twig, and then looked under each leaf. Let us search the Bible as a whole. Shake the whole tree. Read it as rapidly as you would any other book. Then shake every limb, studying book after book. Then shake every branch, giving attention to chapters. And when they do not break the sense, then shake every twig by careful study of the paragraphs and sentences. For you will be rewarded if you will look under every leaf by searching the meaning of words. Okay, so that's just a little bit of the flavor of some of the stuff that was coming out of this early work that this group of fundamentalists would be called. And really, that wasn't a name, just like everything else that's happened, that wasn't a name that they chose for themselves, right? Okay, it was a man by the name of Curtis Lee Lewis, I'm sorry, Curtis Lee Laws, he was actually credited for using that term first. He was an editor for the Watchmen Examiner, And in July 1st of 1920, he wrote, we suggest that all those who still cling to the great fundamentals and who mean to do battle royale for the fundamentals shall be called fundamentalists. So he was the one who coined this term for them. Okay. So hopefully that just at least gives you a flavor of where things started. Now just like everything else, we'll see that it doesn't quite stay that way. And there's really probably good reasons why we don't call ourselves fundamentalists today, just because the way that movements can kind of have a specific shelf life, okay, and they can tend to be useful. But just like everything else, this is a constantly moving thing. So let's look at the battle between fundamentalism and modernism in particular. So in the early 1900s, the ideological battle was fought really within mainline American denominations between them and between Bible-believing, I'm sorry, let me say that again. The ideological battle was fought within the mainline American denominations between Bible-believing Christians and theological liberals. this would become known as the fundamentalist modernist controversy. And this was especially hot, especially heated, really in Presbyterian circles. We already talked about Princeton, those men that we talked about were committed Presbyterians, but it would really continue on even beyond that. it really began to brew when several Presbyterian seminary professors were removed because they denied the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. So these professors denied the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, they were removed from their positions, and it really would kind of throw gasoline on the fire of this controversy that would flare up real hot. 1922, a man by the name of Harry Emerson Fawcett, who was a liberal Baptist minister, he preached a sermon at the First Presbyterian Church in New York entitled, Shall the Fundamentalist Win? And his answer to that was an adamant, no, they will not. Okay, so this was a very public controversy and one that really seeped into every corner of the American church in the early 20th century. So 14 years later in 1936, that was the year my grandfather was born, J. Gresham Machen, who was born in 1881 and died in 1937, he left the Presbyterian Church USA, okay, to establish the OPC, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. So Machen, he was one of the last theological conservatives to teach at Princeton Seminary. So just in the course of about 50 years, you saw this school, Princeton Seminary, that really started out as this bastion of theological strength, of defending the faith. Within 50 years, you saw it die. And institutions do that, they really do. You see it over and over again. It's very hard to keep an institution on the straight and narrow, so to speak. Very hard to do. So when you see it happening, praise God for it. When you look at Master Seminary, we look at other trustworthy seminaries, we should be very thankful and we should really pray for them that they do not go the way of institutions like Princeton obviously went. So J. Gresham Machen would leave because he saw that Princeton was growing increasingly favorable towards liberalism. Okay, this was a huge concern for him, obviously. This would essentially cause, this whole controversy would essentially cause If you hear the term Mainland Protestant, Mainland Protestant today, Mainline, I say Mainland, but Mainline Protestant. Can you think about your Episcopalian, the Mainline Methodist Church. These typically tend to be theologically liberal denominations that exist even to today. All of these things root back to this controversy. Who in here has heard of the Scopes Monkey Trial? You've heard of it, Scopes Monkey Trial? So this is an interesting little tidbit just to show you that this is kind of one of those moments when really the court of public opinion really began to shift against the fundamentalist Christians. Okay, so what was the Scopes Monkey Trial? And this was in 1925. So John T. Scopes, this is in Dayton, Tennessee, He was a substitute high school biology teacher in Tennessee and he was accused by teaching a theory of evolution in the public school system, which at the time violated Tennessee law. So John T. Scopes, substitute science teacher, teaching evolution. I mean, Darwin wasn't that far ahead of this, right? And he was teaching evolution in the public school, which violated Tennessee law. This caused this major uprising, and essentially this was taken to court. And a man by the name of William Jennings Bryan, who was actually a three-time presidential candidate at the time. He was the prosecutor, and the defense attorney was a man by the name of Clarence Darrow, who was also very well-known. So you have a three-time presidential candidate as the prosecutor. You have another well-known attorney as the defendant. This trial became a national scene. Okay, now what was the outcome of this trial? Well, Scopes was, he was actually found guilty, but the trial itself would generate such negative publicity for the fundamentalist and their creationist views that even though that they technically won the case, they really lost in the court of the public opinion. and you really see a shift in kind of the culture's mindset towards religion, American Christianity, you see a shift happen at this particular moment. I had a friend who was playing soccer, and he actually went to Bryan College, which was named after William Jennings Bryan, and I went there and didn't know, It's a small school, a small Christian school, but there's, I walked around on this campus and there's all this stuff kind of celebrating, you know, this whole thing, the Scopes Monkey Trial. There's like statues of monkeys and all this stuff. So it was just kind of interesting, like, oh, I've actually seen some of this firsthand. Cause evolution. Yeah. Yeah. That's why. Cause it was, you know, that's, that's just, I don't know if that, that was probably not the official name, but that was what the trial became known as was the scopes monkey trial. But, um, it really was one of those moments, those linchpin moments where kind of the court of public opinion began to shift and you started to see theological liberalism really start to take deeper root within the culture. Yeah, check it out, for sure. Very fascinating. It's like, sometimes you can win, you know, and lose, and that's kind of what happened. So, pretty interesting. But many would leave these mainline denominations at this point. Fundamentalists started new organizations, such as what we already mentioned, the OPC, the PCA, the Presbyterian Church of America is another one, the Conservative Baptist Association of America, and also the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches. I don't even know if those are around anymore, they probably are, but I'm not familiar with them. So you really start to see these divisions and these shifts start to happen. And in 1940, we're gonna start seeing kind of the idea of fundamentalism be left a little bit behind. And we're gonna see another group really come into the fore and replace it. And this is 1940, Bible-believing Christians sought to distance themselves from fundamentalism. We've already talked about some of the reasons why that was. Concerns about legalism or these other things, I think those are very legitimate. but they were concerned that the fundamentalist movement had become known for its infighting. They just were just starting to turn kind of on themselves and couldn't agree about anything. It's like they started to turn their weapons against one another in many cases, and that's not hard to imagine that that kind of thing can happen. So you saw a lot of that, but you really also saw a strong rejection of intellectualism by the fundamentalist. They pretty much gave up on the academy, so to speak. Okay, and that comes with its own host of potential problems. Yes, there's dangers, and just like we talked about scholasticism a few weeks ago, of course there's excesses, there's dangers in some of these things. But to just kind of throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak, is a danger also in itself. So there really became this anti-intellectual mindset within the fundamentalist as well that didn't see any use in being trained Kind of, you know, just me and my Bible, I can go do what I want to do, kind of thing. And so you saw a lot of that going on as well. So in 1940, a new group would begin to form, and they were going to be called New Evangelicals, or later simply they would just be referred to as Evangelicals. In 1942, they would establish an organization called the National Association of Evangelicals. Okay. So these early evangelicals openly affirmed their belief in the inspiration and the inerrancy of the Bible, the deity of Christ, his atoning death on the cross, and his bodily resurrection from the grave. Okay, so when I say the word evangelical, do you have the same kind of negative reaction that you had with the term fundamentalist? But even as you say that, it is a complicated term, right? It's not the kind of term that you just feel like, yeah, it's like, what do you mean, right? So you can already start to see that even the integrity of this term needs to be carefully defined. Okay, and one of the big things that evangelicalism sought to distance itself from the fundamentalist, and this will make sense to you, and you can probably see some of the concerns of this. The evangelicals would insist that the tone of the church needed to be much more friendly than that of earlier fundamentalists. So they would really try to largely reject kind of the hard-nosed, you know, way of doing business as the fundamentalists were, and they were going to be much more winsome. They were going to be much more kind to the broader culture and trying to win the culture to Christ. So you see that kind of shift, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be, right? So we're in the middle of that right now, I think, as we seek. But they really started trying to answer the question, How should the church engage with the world? Or how should the church engage with the culture? And they were answering that question a little bit differently than how the fundamentalists were. In the 1950s and 1960s, I'm getting into some of y'all's, some of y'all's, you know, not many, but some of, you know, these are gonna become familiar things for you as we think about this. Okay, a man by the name of Billy Graham. Who knows who Billy Graham is? Of course you do. Okay, he died in 2018. Born in 1918, so he lived, I think he died just before he reached 100. I think he was like a few, I could be wrong about that, but I'm pretty sure he was like a few days away from reaching 100 years old when he passed away. He had become a popular evangelist and would really become kind of the poster child of the evangelical movement. He grew up in fundamentalist circles, but he was very willing to partner with, in some cases, theological liberals, in others, Roman Catholics, and his evangelistic crusades. And this would, of course, cause many of the fundamentalists to want to kind of separate from Billy Graham. And others would consider Billy Graham a spokesman for the movement. Okay, so again, a complicated figure. Not here to necessarily critique him in any way, but definitely some concerns, right? 1970s and 80s, the evangelicals became increasingly engaged in politics. Okay, so when you hear the term religious right, that's a relatively new term. Really goes back to the 1970s and the 1980s as the church began to be treated, probably by politicians, as a voting block. So these kinds of things start to form really in large part in response to some of the debauchery that was really going on during some of these times. And the church began to be associated with different political platforms. And this obviously is confusing to those really inside and outside of evangelicalism. So the term evangelical comes from the Greek word which is used for the term gospel. That's in your notes. And if evangelicals are true to both their name and their heritage, they must not forget to focus on the accurate and the bold proclamation of the good news of Jesus Christ. Now the concern in their quest for influence, okay, because they wanna be, they wanna engage culture in a more winsome kind of way. In their quest for influence, evangelicals have sometimes compromised fidelity, their fidelity to the biblical truth. And too often, they measure success in terms of maybe numbers, popularity, rather than in terms of faithfulness to God. That's a real challenge that we absolutely can see if we're not careful. At the same time, we can be absolutely grateful for the many churches across the world, even to this day, that have been faithful to honor God's word and contend earnestly for the faith. And they have embraced their evangelical heritage, these churches, in the truest sense, defending the truth as they proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ to a world in need. So it's not a movement that should be completely written off, because there really are many, I mean, in many ways, I would say that we are an evangelical church. defined the way that we want to define it, right? So, it's definitely a term that you want to make sure that you're clear to define whenever you use it. So, we really come to the end of this lesson, and I want us to think about, let's see here, yep, almost done, think about kind of where we are standing firm in our current moment in this current generation. And it's just good for us to really remember and ground our convictions around the doctrinal pillars articulated by the New Testament. So the three, and we're gonna review them one more time, because this is really why I want y'all to walk away from all these weeks. We must hold fast to the authority of God's word without wavering. Okay, Scripture's not the only authority, but it is our final, our ultimate authority. And we reject the doctrine of Rome that elevates the doctrine of the church, papal authority, and puts it on equal par with Scripture, that is rejected, but the Scripture does give us other authorities that we are to submit to, right? But it is the final authority, and we hold to it without wavering. We hold to doctrines like inspiration, inerrancy, insufficiency, and that may make us unpopular, but again, we're not interested in popularity. We need to make it our obsession to be faithful, okay? If you wanna hear, I'll tell you a story, but one of the reasons why we came off the mission field was because I became obsessed with answering the question, how can I be faithful? And in me trying to answer that question, ironically, Let us off the mission field. Okay, so kind of one of those things. It happens, and I'll tell you that story later if you want to hear it, but it seems backwards, but that's really how it happened. Our goal should be faithfulness, and the choice between honoring God and pleasing men. It should be a very clear one to make. We choose to honor God rather than men. So the lesson, as I've said, it was titled, The Battle for the Bible, and historic fundamentalism contended earnestly for the truth of scripture in the face of major liberal attack. Evangelicalism's heritage goes all the way back to the Reformation, and then as we've seen even earlier. and it's similarly rooted in the commitment to the authority and the sufficiency of God's word. So simply, if we are to be faithful, we must similarly take our stand on the truth of God's word. So second, we must contend for the purity of the gospel. Okay, so the word. the work, the purity of the gospel. Sinners are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, and based on the finished work of Christ alone. And our love for Christ should motivate our witness to the world. At times, our commitment to the truth of the gospel will mean that we cannot condone, okay, or partner with groups or movements that distort the gospel. because our commitment is to the gospel. If you remember back to our lesson on Baptist history, one of the markers of a Baptist is they're associational. But they associate on the basis of a shared confession. They're not associating with churches that have different views about the fundamentals of the faith, the core doctrines that really make up Christianity. Okay, so we don't partner with, and especially in a ministry sense, with groups that distort the gospel. Because the thing that's primary is the clear articulation, the clear proclamation of the gospel. That's why we do it that way. And really, gospel clarity is what the world around us most desperately needs. And in an age when we're told that truth is relative, All belief systems, right, equally valid. It really will require some substantial gospel courage to proclaim the exclusive message of salvation through Jesus Christ. But that's the very message that people most need to hear. Okay, Acts 4.12, good verse for y'all to think about. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved. Finally, we ought to do all of this as an act of worship to the glory of God alone. So doctrinally, we look to God's word to understand who he is so that we can worship him accurately. The truth of scripture ought to govern both our private devotion and also our corporate worship. Churches should look to God's word in determining how they should conduct their services, even something as simple as that, rather than giving in to entertainment-driven trends. Really trying to grow numbers, right? As noted above, faithfulness must be the goal, not popularity. And morally, we seek to obey his commands out of love for him. We want our entire lives to be an act of acceptable worship to God. So all the way back in lesson one, we desire, after looking at 2,000 years of church history, we desire to be characterized by a right understanding of God's word, a right understanding of His work, and a right understanding of what it means to worship Him. So hopefully the past six, eight, nine, I don't even know how long, nine months that we've been doing this together, it has clarified those things for you as we do it. And as we, armed with biblical convictions that we have, we will, along with the churches throughout generations of church history, we will, by the grace of God, be able to stand firm. And it's not a strength that's in us, it's a strength that belongs to Christ. Why? Because he's the Lord of both the church, but also he's the Lord of history, right? It's really difficult, and this is kind of just one I wanna close with. It's very difficult for us to predict what's coming next, right? I think we all probably feel that in some measure. It's very difficult to predict what's coming next. And you hear people, I'm really concerned about what may come next. And I just think it's good for us to acknowledge that I don't think we have, I mean, yes, it's fine to be concerned, but we are not concerned in any way that should lead us to any kind of despair. Okay, why? Because Christ has made it clear that there will be no threat, okay, that can come against God's chosen people, even if that threat takes your life. Okay, why? To live is Christ, to die is gain, right? That's exactly right. So not to predict anything, but we talked about the enlightenment at the beginning of this lesson. I think we are kind of coming to the end of the close of this period of time that's called the enlightenment. It's hard to predict what might be coming, but I guarantee you it's gonna be interesting. I guarantee you it's gonna be challenging, and I guarantee you you don't wanna miss it. So don't crawl under a rock, okay? Don't section yourself out. you know, and cut yourself off from being a good gospel witness to the world around you. Be a student of your Bible, be a student of the world, and learn how to apply what God teaches you through his word. Apply it so that you can walk faithfully before him. That's the goal. That's what we wanna be about.