The Fundamentals
In the years just before World War I a wealthy California oilman named Lyman Stewart and a small group of like minded backers conceived a bold publishing project to restate and defend what they called the essentials of historic Christianity. Beginning in 1910 the Testimony Publishing Company of Chicago issued ninety essays across a twelve volume quarterly series that was later reissued in condensed four volume and two volume editions. The project was edited in succession by A. C. Dixon, Louis Meyer, and R. A. Torrey, and the essays were written by roughly sixty four different Protestant scholars, pastors, and apologists. The work was intentionally distributed widely and at no cost to ministers, missionaries, theological teachers, and other Protestant workers.
The declared purpose of The Fundamentals was simple and polemical. Its editors described it as a testimony to the truth and a restatement of the fundamentals of the Christian faith. But in practice the collection is both defensive and combative. Many essays directly defended the authority and inspiration of the Bible and the historic doctrines that flowed from that conviction, including the virgin birth of Christ, the deity of Christ, the substitutionary atonement, the personality and deity of the Holy Spirit, the reality of miracles, the resurrection, and the certainty of future judgment. At the same time the essays attacked the chief intellectual and religious opponents of the day: higher biblical criticism and theological liberalism, Roman Catholicism as they understood it, various new religious movements such as Christian Science and Mormonism, spiritualism, certain forms of socialism, and what the authors called evolutionary philosophies when these were posed as replacements for revealed religion.
The writing in The Fundamentals is varied in tone and quality because of its many contributors. The roster includes several leading figures of early twentieth century Protestantism and apologetics: B. B. Warfield, G. Campbell Morgan, R. A. Torrey, James Orr, C. I. Scofield, and others. Some pieces are learned apologetic treatments, for example essays on archaeology and the monuments as corroboration for Scripture. Other pieces are pastoral, devotional, or explicitly polemical. Together they present a coherent worldview: Scripture as final authority, traditional Protestant soteriology, and a clear skepticism or hostility toward modernist reinterpretations of scripture and doctrine.
The scale and method of distribution amplified the influence of the set. Millions of individual volumes were printed and mailed free to pastors, missionaries, Sunday school leaders, and other Protestant workers in the English speaking world. That diffusion meant the essays did not remain mere academic argument. They became a common touchstone for pastors and lay leaders who were resisting the spread of modernist theology inside denominational seminaries and churches. Over time historians and theologians have treated The Fundamentals as the founding document, or at least the clearest early public statement, of what became the twentieth century fundamentalist movement in the United States.
The legacy of The Fundamentals is mixed and contested. On the one hand it succeeded at galvanizing conservative Protestants, shaping institutions, and laying ideological groundwork for later conservative evangelical and fundamentalist networks, Bible institutes, and publishing efforts. On the other hand the set has been criticized for its polemical tone, its occasional anti Catholic rhetoric, its sometimes simplistic caricatures of opponents, and for helping to harden lines that later produced separation and culture war dynamics within Protestantism. Scholars map a line from The Fundamentals into later developments such as institutional separatism, the consolidation of dispensational premillennialism in many networks, and the formation of a distinct fundamentalist identity that often defined itself by what it opposed