Mark Snoeberger is working on a series of articles called “A Fundamentalist raison d’etre” (except he knows how to put the fancy accent mark over the first ‘e’ in etre). In part 4 of his series, he highlights two issues that he believes are significant areas of concern in the conservative evangelical camp:
I am convinced that at least two doctrines deemed non-essential by the conservative evangelical majority are more essential than at first meets the eye, viz., cessationism and young earth creationism, which will be the topics of my next two posts. Ambivalence to these blind spots, in my mind, does not serve Christian unity, but rather functions to erode biblical authority. And that is something fundamentalism most definitely stands for.
I agree with him on these points.
These are some of the reasons I am so concerned about the push towards closer ties with conservative evangelicals by some professing fundamentalists.
I would like to suggest another area of concern, which is evangelical feminism. I realize that not all conservative evangelicals are egalitarians, but some outside the “togetherness boys” certainly are, or at least are very sympathetic to egalitarian views. I believe that Carson and Moo are among these. And some of the “togetherness boys” will work with those who support egalitarian points of view as I have highlighted here in the past.
The attacks on the Bible today are very subtle. They are not the full-scale frontal assaults of early 20th century modernism. They are the insidious creeping infiltration of otherwise conservative minds with openness to issues that on the surface seem to be about anything but inspiration and the authority of the Bible.
Mark adds more to this in part 5a of his series. I commend them to you as good examples of why there is still a need for old-fashioned fundamentalism.
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