A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Their extensive travels had an impact throughout the anglophone world; those involved were much influenced by the growing Evangelical enthusiasm for a ‘dispensationalist’ view of God’s purposes in history (see pp. 911–12). From dispensationalism grew another ‘ism’: ‘Fundamentalism’ was a name derived from twelve volumes of essays issued in the USA by a combination of British and American conservative writers between 1910 and 1915, entitled The Fundamentals. Central to these essays was an emphasis on five main points: the impossibility of the biblical text being mistaken in its literal meaning (‘verbal inerrancy’), the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Birth, the idea that Jesus died on the Cross in the place of sinners (an atonement theory technically known as penal substitution) and the proposition that Christ was physically resurrected to return again in flesh. Fundamentalists created organizations to promote this case: in 1919 the World’s Christian Fundamentals Organization was founded, expanding through its use of mass rallies from a mainly Baptist base to affect most Protestant Churches. Fundamentalism is a distinctively Protestant idea, because it centres on the Reformation