Terra Extraneus has a nice three part series entitled Why I am No Longer a Christian Fundamentalist. Well worth the read.
But the word ‘fundamentalist’ has acquired a broader subtext of additional connotations: separation, exclusion, judgmentalism, intolerance, militancy, racism, hard-heartedness, arrogance. Am I all of those things, simply because I continue to believe in God, in Christ, and in the Bible? I sure hope not.
However, fundamentalism soon strayed from its noble beginnings by tacking on many non-fundamentals as every bit as important as the true essentials of the faith. By the 1920s, it was common for fundamentalists to espouse a host of ‘non-fundamentals’ as just as important or even more important than the short list of doctrines which they had originally identified as fundamentals of the faith. That tendency, which I will call ‘Non-Fundamental Fundamentalism,’ continues to this day.
Many secondary doctrines and matters of opinion found their way to the essentials list of the Non-Fundamental Fundamentalists. I will discuss teetotalism, preservation of the white race, and separatism in subsequent articles of this series. In this article, I will discuss two primary non-essentials which early on became intertwined with the very definition of Christian fundamentalism: dispensationalism and premillennialism.
Check out the whole series.
A great new article on engines (FAMOUS RAPTURE WATCHERS) proves that all Christian leaders before 1830 believed just the opposite to what today’s fundies and evanjellyfishes believe in regard to the “rapture” !
Lou