The history of the ideology of The Wesleyan Church continues. This entry is on the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the mid-twentieth century. The picture to the left is Stephen Paine, president of Houghton College (1937-1972).
Previous posts have been:
Preface to Wesleyan Ideological History
1.1 Wesley and High Protestantism
1.2 An Archaeology of Wesley's Thinking
2.1 Methodist Ideology in the Early 1800s
2.2 Founding Perspectives of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection
2.3 The Birth of the American Holiness Movement
3.1 The Holiness Revivals of the Fin de Siècle
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1. The Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy -- what was it? It was when the clash between the forces of theological liberalism coming out of the late 1800s finally came to a head with the forces of conservative, orthodox Christianity. The word liberal today is often used as a broad term of derision. But in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it referred to a somewhat clearly defined movement and group of Christians who were "free" from the moorings of historic Christianity and Scripture. (The word liberal comes from the Latin word that means "free.")
Following the Enlightenment of the 1700s, the late 1800s saw the rise of evolution in science and the rise of higher criticism in biblical studies. Many thinkers who came from the Christian tradition not only abandoned any sense of Scripture as the word of God, but they also ceased to believe in the divinity of Christ, miracles, and any sense of a need for atonement. They used frameworks from the latest thought of the time to restructure their religion.
In the early 1800s, Friedrich Schleiermacher in Germany saved theology for the German university by making religion about subjective feeling and a sense of absolute dependence on something greater than oneself. But one of the results was that Christianity ceased to be about something that was real "out there," something that was objectively real. Instead, it came to be about something going in "in here," inside me as a human being. Christianity began to lose any need to be grounded in history or external reality. It was now about inner feeling.
The pain of these trends first began to impinge upon the broader Methodist church in the late 1800s. Because the Methodists did not initially have any graduate schools or seminaries, their academics were often trained overseas in Germany or at schools that were not Wesleyan in theology. When they returned, they taught little about anything truly Wesleyan. Instead, they taught the trendy and more respectable ideas of the time.
(As a side note, when Bud Bence applied to do his doctorate at Chandler at Emory University in the late 1960s, he was told in no uncertain terms that he would need to do so in the field of church history. He wanted to study the theology of John Wesley, and the theology department at Chandler made it clear that he could only study Wesley as a historical artifact. But they would not tolerate any foolishness that might suggest Wesley's theology was actually still viable for today.)
Charles Sheldon's celebrated WWJD -- "What would Jesus do?" -- is a great example of early twentieth century liberal theology. WWJD is a noble concept. But did you know that Sheldon did not believe that Jesus was divine or that Jesus performed miracles? Rather, Sheldon believed that Jesus was a supreme ethical example, a model human. Sheldon was half right... and also quite wrong on the other half.
In the early 1900s, some of these individuals had reduced Christianity to a "social gospel." Mind you, there was nothing wrong with their concern to help people. This is a classic mistake that some orthodox Christians made in that era. Seeing that many of those who were concerned for the poor did not believe in the divinity of Christ or the Virgin Birth, they mistakenly acted like concern for the poor itself was wrong. They threw out the good with the bad.
Both parties only have half a gospel. Those who had reduced Christianity to a social gospel only had half a gospel. And those who were orthodox in belief but rejected any concern for redeeming society also only had half a gospel. I am extremely grateful that, at least in this period, Wesleyans, Pilgrims, Nazarenes, Free Methodists, and Salvationists all had a whole gospel -- they believed in the essentials of faith, personal salvation, and the importance of the church addressing those in need.
2. In response to "modernism," from 1910 to 1915 various scholars wrote in defense of orthodox Christian positions like belief in the Virgin Birth. The series was known as The Fundamentals. This was an attempt to push back against the teaching that was increasingly finding its way into the most prestigious American seminaries. In 1923, Asbury Seminary was founded for the Methodists as a ballast against the teaching coming out of Boston University. In 1929, Westminster Theological Seminary was founded as pull-out group from what was increasingly being taught at Princeton Seminary.
But the ultimate flash point was the Scopes Trial of 1925, in which a Tennessee teacher was fired for teaching the theory of evolution. In a nationally publicized circus, Clarence Darrow humiliated William Jennings Bryan before the nation for his literal interpretations of Genesis. The trial was so stressful that Bryan would die five days after it ended. Fundamentalism had lost its first main battle. It would lose a second in 1933 when Prohibition was revoked.
Then again, liberalism would face its own crushing blow with World War II. One of the core features of theological liberalism was an optimistic view of human nature and human progress. It had the flavor of a postmillennial outlook and expected the world to get better and better. WW2 and the Holocaust rather confirmed that humanity was just as depraved as it had ever been. And, as astute as German scholarship may have been, it went right along with the immense darkness of Nazi Germany.
The "prophecies" of Nietzsche had come true. A world without God is not a dreamy world of human goodness and progress. It is rather a world in which anything is permissible, and humans are free to pursue whatever they can get away with. It was a world without any objective meaning.
3. So, what did these controversies have to do with the Pilgrims and Wesleyan Methodists? Almost nothing. Don't get me wrong. My Pilgrim grandparents made jokes about the idea that we evolved from monkeys. But these weren't hot issues in Wesleyan circles. No statements or actions were taken about any of these things in the first half of the twentieth century by Wesleyans. They were not part of any General Conference resolution. They were largely irrelevant to the forebears of The Wesleyan Church.
Why? Because no Pilgrims and Wesleyans believed these things. They largely weren't going off to seminary. They didn't have teachers at their Bible colleges who had gone off to Germany to study with F. C. Baur or Julius Wellhausen. Houghton, Central, and Marion College didn't have any professors who had studied with Bordon Parker Bowne at Boston University. The issues of modernism just weren't their issues. They were concerned about whether you kept the Sabbath or wore jewelry. They were concerned about whether you testified to an experience of entire sanctification.
As interpreters, the Pilgrims especially were what we might call "pre-modern" interpreters of the Bible. Like the Pentecostal movement that came out of the holiness movement, they were not wired to read the Bible in its historical context. Rather, they heard words directly from the Lord in the words of the Bible.
Let me give you an example from 1970. My family was trying to decide whether the Lord wanted us to move to Florida with my father's job. We prayed. We read the Bible, asking the Lord to show us what we should do. Judges 1:15 in the King James jumped out at one of my sisters, "Thou hast given me a south land." She felt like the Lord was saying, "I want you to move to Florida."
I would be careful about being too critical of this kind of interpretation. It is not unlike some of the exegesis used in the New Testament. For example, in Acts 1:20, Peter hears God saying to replace Judas as a disciple based on the words of Psalm 109:8, an imprecatory psalm originally about the enemies of the psalmist, calling for their demise. Peter lifts the words out of context and applies them directly to his situation in a way that was not part of the psalm's first meaning.
My point is that the Pilgrims heavily interpreted the Bible in a non-contextual or "spiritual" way. They had a largely "pre-modern" hermeneutic or paradigm of interpretation. They were open to allegory while high Protestants had tried to shut it down back in the days of Martin Luther. They tried to hear fresh words from the Spirit every day in their daily devotions. They did not try or really know how to read the Bible in its historical-cultural context.
The Wesleyan Methodists in general were more scholarly than the Pilgrims, but these issues still were not the issues they were focused on in the 1920s and 30s. Perhaps if there had been a General Conference in 1925, something might have been said about evolution. But since the Scope's Trial happened in the middle of the stretch between 1924 and 1928, the controversy had died down by the next General Conference.
By contrast, those who had actually been fighting these battles largely stopped fighting in the public sphere. They had lost the war for the public imagination.
3. But that would not last long. After WW2, some new kids on the block chastised their predecessors for giving up. Harold Ockenga would start a new movement he called "neo" evangelicalism. Public activism would be a key feature of this movement. But the movement would have a different flavor. It would be good news rather than having the flavor of a war against evil.
Soon a young preacher named Billy Graham would become associated with this movement. He might very well have gone unknown except that, in a spur-of-the-moment decision, William Randolph Hearst put his money and newspapers behind him. Suddenly, a relatively insignificant rally in LA became national news, and a movement was born. Hearst would pay for every pastor in America to regularly receive a copy of a new magazine, Christianity Today, having an immense impact on American Christianity. C. F. H. Henry would be the editor.
I have a bit of a bone to pick with the way the history of this stretch is often told by people like George Marsden and Mark Noll. I can't blame them entirely because they built their reading of the history in part out of the way the leaders of the movement told the story, people like Harold Ockenga. When Noll identifies who the "fundamentalists" were before the neo-evangelicals rose, he identifies "dispensationalists, holiness folk, and Pentecostals."
Wrong. We were never in that game. The "fundamentalists" these new evangelicals should have criticized for retreating were intellectuals of the early 1900s like J. Gresham Machen, and they were overwhelmingly Calvinist. (This telling of the history of evangelicalism is similar to the skew Donald Dayton faced in relation to the 1800s. The Princeton Calvinists of the 1800s were not evangelicals in the sense of Wesley or Whitefield. Finney and Moody were.) Holiness folk and Pentecostals were never in the modernist war such that they might retreat.
The neo-evangelicals had a different post-war flavor from the real fundamentalist fighters before them. But they were in direct continuity ideologically with the "fundamentalists" they were now being condescending about. The difference is that they were riding a wave of post-WW2 optimism -- fertile soil for revival and the return of God and hope to American culture. It was the context that changed, not their ideology.
Get our name out of your mouth. We were never fighting that battle. Your "parents" were.
4. What is fundamentalism? Let's bring some clarity here. The Pilgrims and Wesleyans were largely "pre-modern." That is, they read the words of Scripture without a strong view to its historical context. They read the Bible devotionally. When we talk about lectio divina today, it is essentially a return to reading the Bible this way. You read the words. You chew on them. You meditate on them. You let the Spirit speak to you however he wants to.
Modernism promoted reading the Bible in its historical context. There's nothing wrong with this. After all, the Bible says it was written to people who've been dead for thousands of years. If you want to know what the Bible first meant, you have to read it the way its first readers read it. And that means you have to read it in its literary and historical context.
The problem is that these two readings are completely different hermeneutics. When Augustine and those throughout Christian history affirmed the truthfulness of the Bible, they felt a freedom to hear the words in accordance with Christian tradition. Similarly, when the Pilgrims and Wesleyans read the Bible, they could hear whatever they thought the Spirit was telling them in the words.
Modernism changed the ball game. Now, the words of the Bible took on a more fixed and definite meaning. Context locked down the possibilities to a much larger extent. Now, for the Bible to be truthful, its original meaning had to be true, not just its words. Before, only the words had to be true. Now, after studying the literary and historical context, the resulting interpretation had to be true. This is a significant paradigm shift. [1]
Similarly, we now have the rise of archaeology and science to contend with. What if someone excavates Jericho and argues that there is no evidence for an Israelite invasion in the years 1500-1200, as happened with Kathleen Kenyon in the 1950s? The game has wildly changed from believing the words are true to coordinating the discoveries and evidence of the modern world with the words of the Bible.
Further, the criteria of truthfulness have subtly changed in the meantime. The truth of Scripture is no longer a matter of whether it is theologically true. Ironically, accepting the standards of modernism, fundamentalism now insists that the Bible can only be true if it reasonably matches modern understandings of history and science. Ironically, fundamentalism has adopted the paradigm of the modern world in its way of approaching Scripture.
Again, the Pilgrims and Wesleyans were blissfully making their way along with their "Pentecostal" modes of interpretation. These debates were largely taking place on the side, bypassing us. We were not the original fundamentalists. The forebears of the neo-evangelicals were.
So a fundamentalist is not simply someone who believes in the essentials of Christian faith. Fundamentalism has a flavor. It is combative. It is in a fight against modernism. It is anti-modernist while, ironically, using the very tools of modernism to fight against it.
Pilgrims and Wesleyans of the early twentieth century largely were not fundamentalists. We were revivalists, trying to get people saved and sanctified. We weren't in that debate.
5. The neo-evangelicals of the late 1940s were a mixture of elements. There is what I might call the intellectual half, and there is what I might call the evangelistic half. Billy Graham was the face of the evangelistic half. He was the one in continuity with the evangelicals of the past. John Wesley, George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Finney, D. L. Moody, and Billy Graham. These all go together. Let's get as many people saved as possible.
I might add that, although the General Board of the Pilgrim church stopped to pray when they heard about Billy Graham's LA revival, he was always "other" in my family. He was that Baptist preacher who thought it was enough to get those people to pray a sinner's prayer and then, because of eternal security, never do anything more with them. We criticized him for, at least in the early days, not having any real system for discipleship to plug new converts into churches.
It was the same with Jerry Falwell in the 1980s. He was always "other." He had nothing to do with us. (He had a lot to do with the culture, as we will argue in a later post.)
The other half of neo-evangelicalism was the intellectual part. It was heavily Calvinist and was in the ideological tradition of A. A. Hodge, B. B. Warfield, and J. Gresham Machen. They drew a word straight from the Princeton Calvinists of the 1800s: inerrancy. Again, although it sounds like you're saying the same thing as all the prior Christians who affirmed the truthfulness of Scripture, the word now has a distinctly new connotation. The word now assumes the fundamentalist side in all the debates of the previous century against modernism. Its use assumes the standards of history and science that were on the playing field of previous debates.
Again, these debates were largely foreign to Pilgrims and Wesleyans. We simply weren't fighting these battles. At least most of us weren't. There was one Wesleyan who was deeply involved in these things. He was a Wheaton grad. When Houghton hired him as a professor in the 1930s, some wondered if he was Wesleyan enough. His name was Stephen Paine.
6. Paine brought all these issues to Houghton College and the Wesleyan Methodist Church. Paine had been in the swirl of all these movements. In fact, in 1960 he ran as the presidential candidate for the Prohibition Party. From 1966-68, Paine served as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, one of the organizations formed by the neo-evangelicals in the late 1940s. After retirement, he was the lead editor of the New International Version, which finally came out fully in 1984. Paine was a neo-evangelical's evangelical.
As a former Pilgrim, I suppose it is no surprise that Houghton always seemed to be on the edges of the Wesleyan Church to me. But I think that was also true of the Wesleyan Methodist Church too. For example, Paine expressed near the end of his presidency that he wished he had not spent so much time trying to appease the Allegheny district on matters like dress and standards. It was all for naught anyway, since that group didn't even end up going with the merger.
But note the contrast. Paine wanted to be in the center of evangelical debates. The WMs were arguing over dress and standards.
In 1955, Paine brought a motion to the Wesleyan Methodist Church that the statement on Scripture be revised. He proposed that the phrase, "inerrant in the original manuscripts" be added to the Articles of Religion. Of course, the WMs had no problem with this addition. Certainly they believed the Bible was without error.
Similarly, when the Wesleyans and Pilgrims merged, the Pilgrims gladly voted for inerrancy to be in the new denomination's Discipline. The term had not been in their Manual. But of course, who wouldn't agree that the Bible is without error?
My historical point is that what was going on in Stephen Paine's mind was not the same as what was going on in the minds of the Wesleyan Methodists and Pilgrims. He was in a war, and the word carried immense assumptions for him. It had a history for him that it did not really have for the rest of the church. For him, it was ensconced in decades' long debates.
Note also his addition of "in the original manuscripts." As a Greek scholar, Paine did not think that the King James Version was accurate to the original manuscripts of the New Testament at a number of points. (Note: he would be quite different from the Wesleyans and Pilgrims at this point too, since everyone used the KJV at that time.) Neo-evangelicalism rejected "higher criticism" like Wellhausen's JEDP, but it did not reject what they called "lower criticism" to determine what the original text might have said.
7. When Bud Bence tells the history of The Wesleyan Church, he talks about forks in the road where the trends of the time led the church to pick between options. [2] For example, Orange Scott and Luther Lee picked abolition at that fork in the road. Coming mainly from a Wesleyan Methodist perspective, Bence identifies the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy as one of those forks where the Wesleyans picked fundamentalism.
I would say that was true of a few intellectuals in the WM church at the time. And it has had some ripple effects on the church. But I would argue that most of those debates happened in parallel to us.
They did bring a polarization in some circles. Asbury Seminary had been founded by Henry Clay Morrison in 1923 largely to provide the Methodists with an orthodox option to the other Methodist seminaries of the time. (As a side note, my mother once heard Morrison preach in Kentucky in the 1930s during the year her family spent at Kingswood.) That means Asbury was founded in the wake of that battle. But Morrison was also wanting to promote holiness revivalism, which respectable Methodism had rejected.
There is almost always collateral damage in battle. Asbury's was Professor Claude Thompson. [3] Thompson was no modernist. He was in fact a strong supporter of Wesley's theology, and he had studied with a strong supporter of Wesleyan theology at Drew University -- although he had his own set of accusations. Thompson joined the faculty of Asbury Seminary in 1947.
But this was also the moment when neo-evangelicalism was on the rise. Although no one could point to any clear point where Thompson was teaching heresy, he smelled fishy to the new kids on the block. He was not a dispensationalist. He did not use the new term inerrancy with all that it now implied. Although he had the support of the trustees and the faculty, six faculty threatened to resign if he was not fired. Stephen Paine caught wind and also sought reassurances of Thompson's bona fides -- which he received -- from President McPheeters.
Initially, McPheeters tried repeatedly to assure all these internal and external voices that Thompson was not a modernist. But eventually, Thompson did the Christ-like thing and -- for the good of the school -- resigned in 1950. It was a wound he carried for the rest of his life because teaching at Asbury was his dream. Asbury would lose its accreditation with the Association of Theological Schools over the debacle as well as its status as a Methodist-approved seminary. Only when McPheeters resigned in 1962 did Asbury regain its accreditation.
You could argue that, in this moment, Asbury shifted for a time from being a Wesleyan-holiness seminary to being a neo-evangelical seminary. The neo-evangelical movement had a strong Calvinist-fundamentalist flavor to it. At its founding, Asbury had more of a holiness, revivalist flavor.
When I came to Asbury in the late 1980s, David McKenna was president of the seminary. Asbury's statement of faith read that the Bible was "without error in all it affirms," as it still does. Beyond that, McKenna refused for Asbury to get embroiled in debates over inerrancy. Ken Collins has recently presented the ongoing flavor of Asbury on this issue in a recent issue of Firebrand. [4] He suggests that Asbury's statement has more in common with the Lausanne Covenant rather than the Chicago Statement of 1978.
I once argued that the Wesleyans have never really defined the term, which I think is wise. Asbury's sense that the Bible is "without error in all it affirms" is nice because it both affirms the truthfulness of Scripture and yet allows us to do the hard work of determining what Scripture affirms. Stephen Paine and those who went after Claude Thompson had very specific ideas about what the Bible affirms, and they insisted everyone else must agree with their conclusions.
I had Harold Kuhn for a class at Asbury in the late 80s. He seemed like a nice guy. I enjoyed the class on biblical theology. He was the ringleader of those who went after Thompson in 1950. I'd like to think that, four decades later, he had some remorse for crucifying someone who, by most accounts, was more Christlike than he was. I suspect McPheeters would rather have taken his resignation.
[1] For more on pre-modern hermeneutics, see Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (Yale University, 1980).
[2] Elesha Coffman takes a similar approach in Turning Points in American Church History: How Pivotal Events Shaped a Nation and a Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2024).
[3] I take some of this information from Darius Salter's work, The Demise of the American Holiness Movement: A Historical, Theological, Biblical, and Cultural Exploration (First Fruits, 2020), 212-15.
[4] Kenneth Collins, "Should Wesleyans Embrace a Doctrine of Inerrancy?" Firebrand. June 4, 2024.
