You’re such a Fundamentalist!

Have you ever been called a fundamentalist? This is a term that has been slung around in a negative context and in most cases in this day and age it is a term used to degrade those who hold a strong religious belief. In our modern society most people use the term strictly to define a movement or attitude stressing strict and literal adherence to a set of basic principles, mostly religious principles of any kind. But that was not necessarily always the case.

At one point to be called a fundamentalist meant that you were part of the Protestantism movement that emphasized the literal interpreted Bible as fundamental to Christian life and teaching. Anyone who was a part of this movement or anyone who gave adherence to such belief was called a fundamentalist.

In 1895 at the Niagra Bible Conference the founding fathers of fundamentalism met. There messages were focused around the doctrines of Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Bible, missions, and prophecy. Just some of the premise of what the fundamentalist believes is as follows:

1. The Inerrancy of Scripture
2. The Deity of Christ
3. The Virgin Birth
4. Substitutionary Atonement
5. Bodily resurrection
6 Heaven and Hell

This period of time was also the era that the term “soul winning” was coined by various fundamentalists. So a fundamentalist, according to those who coined the name, is a soul winning believer who believes in the inerrancy of scripture, who believes that Jesus Christ was in fact God in the flesh, who believes that Jesus was born of a virgin and died on the cross in our place as our substitute, who believes that Jesus then physically rose from the dead and who believes that Jesus has created both heaven and hell as two very real places.

So what does that make me? A Bible believing, Reformed, truth loving, conservative, fundamentalist???

Just some food for thought.