Christian Fundamentalism: Fighting Ideas With Bullets

No message is ever heard in a cultural vacuum. A person who is raised in an intellectual climate that is open to the Gospel will see it as an intellectually viable option in a way that a person who is thoroughly secularized will not. To that person, asking them to believe in the Gospel is like asking them to believe in the Tooth Fairy. In fact, the intellectual climate of Europe is almost that secularized. Evangelists can pound the ground for years and win only a handful of converts. By comparison, the intellectual climate of India is far more receptive to the Gospel, and hence evangelists are receiving more converts than the know what to do with.

Western society today is deeply post-enlightenment, where the so-called age of reason which introduced the leaven of secularism which pursues knowledge by human reason alone, uninhibited by any sort of restraint by religion or by the state. Because of this, western intellectuals do not consider theological knowledge to be possible. Instead, theology is looked upon as a matter of blind faith. The deliverance of the physical sciences alone are taken as true knowledge of the real world. Hence, this line of thought has taught us that a truly reasonable person will believe that religion is a mere hobby, and the real world is a closed system under physics, with no supernatural intervention.

But how did we get here?

Up until the American Civil War, the local church valued the life of the mind. The pastor was the most learned person in the community, and the church was where topics such as art and literature were debated. And most of the old universities were founded by believers to teach theology. But it was during the three great awakenings that faith became a matter only of the heart and not of the mind. As a result, the burnt-over district in New York which experienced massive conversion also experienced the birth of two cults: the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses, as well as the birth of heavy involvement in the occult. Nearly all of the members of these groups were pulled from Christians who had experienced purely emotional conversions during these great awakenings. In addition, Baptist and Methodist groups for the first time allowed people to be ordained who had no formal education. If you wanted to practice law or medicine, you had to undergo years of education, but not to be a pastor.

After this de-emphasis on education, the intellectual attacks attacks came on the intellectually weakened church. First in the field of philosophy from Hume and Kant, the idea came that you could not provide arguments for the existence of God. Instead, you had to have blind faith that is separated from reason. Then the historical criticism of the bible hit American shores and attacked the reliability of Scripture. Then, the Darwinian revolution came to fruition, attacking design arguments and providing a platform for atheists to launch attacks on faith. The church, having become intellectually soft, was no match for this argumentation. The church responded by emotion, and began to lose respect in the colleges and seminaries.

There was a meeting in 1917, where Christian leaders decided how to respond to the onslaught of secularism. Instead of re-emphasizing education and engaging liberals on their own turf, these Fundamentalist leaders tried to fight ideas with bullets. In this case, political pressure. The strategy was to keep the liberals from taking over the mainline denominations. In the south, it was to keep evolution out of the public schools. Both were absolute catastrophic failures.

Before the Scopes trial, the strengths of Fundamentalism were in the northern and eastern section of the United States. Fundamentalism was looked upon as a conservative, businesslike, sophisticated, and urban coalition.

The Modernist definition of Fundamentalism was: Those who for sociological reasons held on to the past in stubborn and irrational resistance to the inevitable changes in culture. In the stereotypical back woodsy, obscurantist, inveterate environment, the rural elements found themselves pitted against the sophisticated modern, intellectual urban elements and the Scopes trial apparently confirmed this definition in the eyes of the public. While this trial was technically a victory for the Fundamentalist movement (Scopes himself was convicted and fined), the real winners of this trial were the liberals and skeptics, who humiliated the fundamentalists. As a result, moderates cut their ties to fundamentalism, and the momentum that this movement was gaining in the Northern Baptist and Presbyterian denominations was now in reverse. The intellectual climate has been warped so that Bible believers were viewed as idiots, whose arguments could not be taken seriously.

My fellow believers in Jesus, this video is your wake-up call. We have worked to accelerate the spread of the gospel, and to bring the knowledge of him to all people from all nations. However, there are groups at work trying to barricade and apply the brakes to our efforts, trying to prevent us from succeeding in our mission. If we try to overcome these forces simply by working harder and harder at evangelism, it is like hitting the accelerator on a car without first taking your foot off the brake. We will burn out quickly and fail in our mission.

You see, once we concede the rational ground to the skeptics, saying “your arguments make rational sense, but we just have faith in our belief system”, we lose all footing from which to criticize the cults. So groups like Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Oprah Winfreyism can go unchecked, and as soon as we argue that their belief systems are irrational, they can argue “your system is no better.” In this way, even if atheism and the atheist arguments fail to win a single convert, they can force us into fideism, still do tremendous damage to our faith.

In the past, Fundamentalists have been able to hide themselves from atheist arguments by retreating into isolationism, living away from the liberal cities and homeschooling their children. But now, thanks to the Internet, there is no longer any place to hide. If the arguments from the unbelievers are superior to our own, then they will inevitably overcome us given enough time. We cannot run and hide for much longer. Eventually, we will have to make our stand. We will not be able to keep running and hiding for very long.

There is no time in a believer's life where his or her faith is as thoroughly destroyed as in college. You would think that given the success that professors have in deconverting Evangelical Christians, there would be apologetics-oriented Bible study groups at every secular college, training students to resist the encroachment of secularism, and helping them to strengthen the faith of their weaker brethren. Sadly, almost the opposite is true. Such apologetics groups are few and far between.

In The Matrix, members of the Resistance needed a lot of training in order to fight the war effectively. They needed to operate a lot of future technology. They needed to know how to operate technology in the Matrix. And they needed to know how to fight. Oh man did they need to become really, really good at fighting. How did fighters like Neo learn all this stuff so quickly? They plugged in and downloaded the information directly into their brains.

With today's technology, we do not have the ability to download information into our brains directly, but we do have the next best thing. Behold, I present to you the iPod: a device now relatively inexpensive that holds thousands of hours of audio. Here's how you use it. Install iTunes on your computer. You can get it from iTunes.com. Then go to Apologetics 315 and go to the Audio Resource Page. There you will find thousands of hours in theological and apologetics lectures to download. I recommend Dr. Craig's Defenders podcast, as well as Science News Flash by Reasons to Believe. Also, many seminaries such as Reformed Theological Seminary, Covenant Theological Seminary, and Concordia Theological Seminary have the audio lectures for complete courses available on iTunesU for free.

Load it up into your iPod and turn downtime into learning time. That can include driving time, mowing the lawn time, cleaning the house time, and even leveling in World of Warcraft time. Day to day, you may not think that you're making very much progress, but in the next ten years, you will spend as much time in your car as you would getting a 4 year college degree. Make sure you are listening to courses and not just sermons. Sermons generally only provide you with a basic, lay level look at the world. They do not generally answer the really tough objections. But courses do. Get in the car and listen to learn. Get home and read to succeed.

Here are some books to add to your library: The Apologetics Study Bible by Norman Geisler. It raises the concerns and issues that skeptics use to undermine the faith, and then gives answers. This should be included in your Bible studies as a reference. It also makes a good gift for young people who go off to college to study the Bible. Since most colleges take a very liberal stance against the authority of Scripture, the Apologetics Study Bible gives answers to those professors' objections.

If you are relatively new to apologetics, the best books for you are Lee Strobel's books. The Case for a Creator, The Case for Christ, and the Case for the Real Jesus. They give answers to the most common objections, and provide a foundation for further apologetics study. These are what I call “must reads” for every apologist.

I would recommend On Guard and its more advanced version: Reasonable Faith. They give a basic overview of the philosophical arguments for the existence of God, as well as arguments for the radical self-image and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. They help the reader understand why there is so much more evidence that the historical Jesus of Nazareth both claimed to be God and was raised from the dead, confirming his claims, than there is that a historical Moses ever existed.

For battling atheist and secularist objections, Scaling the Secular City is the best book I know of on the subject. It gives a tour de force on the issues that divide believers from skeptics, and shows that metaphysical naturalism simply cannot deliver the goods.

For Jewish apologetics, Michael Brown's five volume series on Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus is the gold standard, although it is a bit advanced. For those just getting into this field, Our Hands Are Stained With Blood is a good introduction. Also in this field is A Zeal For God by Eric Snow. While Michael Brown generally goes through objections made by the Ultra-Orthodox, Eric Snow spends more of his time engaging objections by liberal groups.

For Roman Catholicism, the Roman Catholic Controversy is a good introduction to the issues and differences that divide Rome from Evangelicalism. Also, the audio courses on Church History by organizations such as Reformed Theological Seminary provide a good immunization for you and your family against Catholic outreach groups. Roman Catholicism has a doctrine even more messed up than Oneness Pentecostalism or even Seventh Day Adventism, even though most Catholics, like most Mormons, are not orthodox do not even know the doctrine they are supposed to believe. Regardless, orthodox [Traditional] Roman Catholicism (such as New Oxford Review Catholicism) borders on being a cult.

Speaking of Cults, Walter Martin's book, The Kingdom of the Cults is the standard reference manual on refuting the claims of the major cults in the United States. It's a good reference manual, that will help you rescue family and friends that might be getting sucked into a cult.

On the Intelligent Design Debate, Exploring Evolution by the Discovery Institute is the best book I have found on the subject. It first tells you what the science textbooks teach about evolution, and then gives a summary of the research that contradicts the Darwinian model. This is a must have for every student who is being taught evolution in Science class.

With this kind of information you will be so far ahead of the norm, that you will be a light to fellow believers. You will be able to answer the tough objections that many believers are afraid to ask. You will be able to provide intelligent answers when people like Hawking and Mlodinow release books attacking the faith. You will be able to inform, inspire, and strengthen the faith of your fellow believers, and issue a call for apostates to return to the faith. And you will be able to shatter the confidence that skeptics have in their unbelief, and bring back the intellectual respectability of the faith, that has been lacking in the 20th century.

If we could get just 5% of the lay community to commit to this kind of learning, what do you think we could accomplish? We would undermine the efforts of college professors to deconvert our children, put the cults out of business, and we would reshape the intellectual climate so that the Gospel could be seen as intellectually viable once more.

This generation has the opportunity to become the most educated generation in the history of humanity.

Also, an army needs to be well-supplied. Where are you donating your money? Many of you already donate 10% of your money to your home congregation, but may I recommend also adding an apologetics organization to your donation list. Organizations like Reasonable Faith, ICN Ministries, and Reasons to Believe are making a huge impact on the viability of faith in Messiah. But the one I recommend most is the Discovery Institute. This organization has been the bane and scourge of the secularist movements that seek to shut down religion, relegating it to the realm of mere fairy tales. Despite being a newcomer, founded in 1996, and having a minuscule budget of $4 million per year, this think tank has made inroads to academia, bringing back the viability of the idea that there is design behind life. It is the leading voice in the Intelligent Design Movement. And if every believer in the United States alone could just give $20 to the Discovery Institute just one time, this organization that has so shaken the foundations of Darwinism on a budget of $4 million would have over a BILLION dollars in the bank. What do you think it could do with that kind of support?

How will this war end? What will be the outcome? It is in your hands, my friends. But we cannot issue this wake-up call if no one hears it. So please, send this video to your fellow believers. Post it on Facebook and Twitter. Post it on your blog, and email it to your friends. If we work together; if we are willing to fight this war, we have the numbers and we have the talent and the intellectual muscle to win. The outcome of this war is up to you. Will you help us?