This paper discusses the importance of the concept of Biblical inerrancy in the Fundamentalist movement during the twentieth century. Questions of how to interpret the Bible have served to splinter not only liberals and conservatives within American Protestantism, but have splintered even conservative American Protestantism into warring factions of Fundamentalists and moderates.
The publication of DarwinÆs Origin of Species in 1859 sparked an intellectual crisis for Christians that no educated person could ignore. The focus of the crisis was on the reliability of the opening chapters of Genesis, but the wider issue was whether the Bible could be trusted at all. German higher criticism, which questioned the historicity of many Biblical stories, had been developing for some decades and had become highly sophisticated by the time it became known in the United States after the Civil War. The absolute integrity of the Bible was crucial for American EvangelicalsÆ whole way of thought in the late nineteenth century. When this cornerstone was disturbed, major changes had to be made in the entire evangelical edifice.
To define terms, Marsden offers the following:
[A]n American fundamentalist is an evangelical who is militant in opposition to liberal theology in the churches or to changes in cultural values . . . [They] are not just religious conservatives, they are conservatives who are willing to take a stand and to fight.
ôEvangelicalö became the common name for the revival movements that swept through the English-speaking world and elsewhere during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and whose style of preaching largely shaped American Protestantism.
[E]vangelicalism today includes any Christians traditional enough to affirm the basic beliefs of the old nineteenth-century evangelical consensus . . . [which] include (1) the Reformation doctrine of the final authority of the Bible, (2) the real historical charact...