… to steal a phrase.

I ran across an article about the Reformed Church in America at the Christian news site, Christian Post. Entitled “Reformed Church in America Is Imploding, Professor Says”, the article describes turmoil in a denomination I don’t know a lot about.

Several things struck me about the way the conflict was described however. Note these key paragraphs:

Amid years of contention between liberals and conservatives over issues such as the civil-rights movement, women’s ordination and evangelism with regard to social witness, Luidens says "loyalists" emerged to keep the denomination together. They were more dedicated to denominational survival than to ideological purity, he notes.

Though the two extremes were held together then, today many liberals have left the RCA in significant numbers and conservatives have shifted their target to the loyalists and continue to "rail against ‘liberalism,’" he says.

Now before anyone shrieks, ‘none of these people are fundamentalists’, let me say I am quite aware of that. But the conflict illustrates exactly what fundamentalism is all about, how it came into existence, and why a need for it still exists.

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I was listening again this week to a presentation on the state of evangelicalism by a very prominent evangelical. I think this was delivered a year or two ago, I don’t remember exactly, just have the mp3 sitting on my hard drive.

The individual and the content of the address aren’t all that important for the purpose of this post. I was interested in how the speaker was describing various movements, in distinction with the evangelical movement.

My regular readers may remember how we have had some tussles over ‘disclaimers’ in the past few months. (Not that it is disclaimers I am after!!! I still protest that I am misunderstood.) But when fundamentalists talk about the need for disclaimers, it works this way:

The fundamentalist says something positive about some teacher/preacher outside “the camp”. The fundamentalist at the same time feels obligated to issue a disclaimer, making sure everyone knows that he knows that the guy he just said something nice about is bad in some way.

In evangelicalism, the opposite seems to be true. They use reverse disclaimers.

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In my earlier assessment of the FBF National Conference, I posted the following in summary on the symposium session held on the last day of the conference:

Symposium – a good start. Maybe too long in defining terms, or too short a session. We need to have more on this line next year, to flesh out the FBF position more clearly. I thought most panel members acquitted themselves well. I’ll want to listen to this again and give some detailed analysis.

I’ve now listened twice. If any venue at the meeting had the potential for fireworks, this one did. I thought Dr. Vaughn did a good job conducting the session and several important subjects were addressed.

Of course, the announced subject was only all too briefly addressed, much to the disappointment of many. The subject, as I understood it, was Conservative Evangelicalism and Fundamentalist relationship with the same. Several observations come to mind:

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