Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Were the early "fundamentalists" creationists? Babinski on the history of evangelical responses to evolution

We are inclined to identify fundamentalism with opposition to evolution in all its guises, but as this article by Ed Babinski suggests, evangelicals and even the authors of "The Fundamentals" have not always been anti-evolutionists.

Even when the twelve-volume paperback series, The Fundamentals, was published between 1910 and 1915 (an interdenominational work that launched this century's "fundamentalist" movement), it contained cautiously pro-evolution stances of conservative Christian theologians like George Frederick Wright, James Orr, and R. A. Torrey. It was only in the eighth collection of Fundamentals papers that this cautious advocacy of evolution was matched by two decisively and aggressively anti-Darwin statements, one by someone who remained anonymous and another by the relatively unknown Henry Beach, both of whom lacked the theological and scientific standing of the senior evangelicals already mentioned.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

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God bless you

Anonymous said...

You're probably aware of this article by Mark Noll at BioLogos on the topic, but if not, it's useful for this discussion.

http://biologos.org/uploads/projects/Noll_scholarly_essay.pdf