So yesterday we left our heroes - Machen, Scofield, Sunday, and the rest - in an awkward coalition whose primary commonality was a shared disdain for the liberalism - which was termed “modernism” in their day - that had taken over northern churches. And we said the theology that emerged was essentially the basic points on which they could agree.
That’s the basic idea, with an important siderail - where they disagreed, the revivalist view often won out. Why? Because they were the dominant group. So where Machen and the dispensationalists differed, the dispensational view won out. Part of the problem was that the major educational institutions of Machen’s tradition were largely wiped out by modernism. They took some steps to address it, but in the interval, the institutions of the other factions - like Moody and Biola - became dominant. So when young Christian men went to school to study for pastoral ministry, they landed at the revivalists’ institutions much of the time.
What was characteristic of this theology that came to be dominant from the 1930s-1970s in American evangelicalism? Here I’m going to highlight three basic theological tenets and two characteristics.
1) Inerrancy - They saw the Bible as the inerrant and authoritative word of God.
2) The exclusivity of Christ - Faith in Jesus was the only means of salvation.
3) Dispensational premillenialism - This view sees Israel and the Church as being completely separate peoples of God. Israel is God’s Old Testament work to whom certain promises have not yet been fulfilled. The Church is God’s New Testament work whose time in the limelight is essentially an intermission before God finishes his work with Israel beginning in the Tribulation. From this view came several key points - the idea that the church’s time was short and therefore evangelization was the foremost priority, the idea that the world will be destroyed and therefore social issues are not important, and the idea that Old Testament ethical standards are not meant for the Church.
4) A suspicion of the academic - Beginning with the creation/evolution debates, mid 20th century evangelicalism was generally suspicious of the academy. Going back to their southern revivalist roots and the low view of the church inherent in Baptist and Methodist theology, it was thought that people only needed to read the Bible and take it literally to discern truth.
5) An essentially adversarial relationship to the non-Christian western world. While mid 20th century evangelicalism had a very sympathetic relationship with non-Christians abroad, seeing them as essentially lost and needy people they could help, they saw non-Christians in the United States in very adversarial terms. There’s a variety of factors contributing to this - the fundamentalist/modernist riff, the Scopes Monkey Trial, the Red Scares, and their reading of certain biblical texts.
This was the general consensus amongst most evangelicals until the late 1960s and early 1970s when the rapidly changing world prompted a crisis in evangelicalism, which caused a significant shift beginning in the mid to late 1970s. We’ll pick up there tomorrow.