For our monthly men’s meeting, I am doing a historical/theological survey of fundamentalism to equip them with a better understanding of who we are and why we are what we are.
For today’s meeting, I was perusing Beale’s In Pursuit of Purity. The first sentence gives a definition of fundamentalism that I find quite satisfactory.
“Ideally, a Christian Fundamentalist is one who desires to reach out in love and compassion to people, believes and defends the whole Bible as the absolute, inerrant, and authoritative Word of God, and stands committed to the doctrine and practice of holiness.”
Is there anything missing from this definition? Beale doesn’t use the word ‘militant’ or its derivatives and he doesn’t mention ‘separation’, but he does say ‘defends’ and use the phrase ‘committed to the doctrine and practice of holiness’. Are these terms sufficient to carry the meaning of the term Christian fundamentalist?
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