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Lewis Sperry Chafer and the Roots of Nondenominational Fundamentalism in the South

2007; Southern Historical Association; Volume: 73; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/27649569

2325-6893

B. Dwain Waldrep,

Pentecostalism and Christianity Studies

ON THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 1935, SIXTY-FIVE MEMBERS OF THE FIRST Presbyterian Church of Memphis separated from their congregation and founded the nondenominational Evangelical Community Church. Many of those who left had previously served at First Presbyterian as eiders, deacons, Sunday school teachers, and leaders within the church's various organizations. Within a month they were joined by approximately sixty evangelicals from other mainline Memphis congregations. The events that produced this division had their beginning in 1928, when First Presbyterian's new pastor, Albert C. Dudley, arrived from Chicago and began to introduce his congregants to northern fundamentalist Bible teachers such as Lewis Sperry Chafer through a series of Bible conferences. Dudley's actions positioned the First Presbyterian Church and its southern evangelical constituency squarely within the broader world of northern fundamentalism that had been unsettling northern mainline denominations for decades. (1) Conventional interpretations of fundamentalism in the South have portrayed it as a cohesive movement marked by militant antimodernism. Viewing the movement from this perspective, with its focus on the more extreme fundamentalists, historians failed to see the emergence and development of the less militant and critical form of southern fundamentalism associated with Dudley and Chafer's work in Memphis. This article advances our understanding of southern fundamentalism by bringing to light widespread southern interest in Chafer's moderate variety of fundamentalism, which was shaped by the northern millenarian movement. (2) After positioning Chafer within the broader world of northern fundamentalism, particularly his association with Dwight L. Moody and Cyrus Ingerson Scofield, this article examines Dudley and Chafer's work in Memphis as a case study that illustrates broader trends. Chafer brought to the South Scofield's theology and moderate fundamentalist style, which Chafer then institutionalized in 1924 by founding Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) in Dallas, Texas. (3) As the Memphis narrative reveals, Chafer and DTS, with support from sympathetic pastors like Dudley and congregations like the one in Memphis, spawned independent nondenominational churches and influential interdenominational parachurch agencies that challenged--and continue to challenge--dominant southern religious structures. Fundamentalism, as historian George M. Marsden has demonstrated, represented a patchwork coalition of representatives of other movements and was a changing federation of co-belligerents united by their fierce opposition to modernist attempts to bring Christianity into line with modern thought. (4) Between roughly 1870 and 1930, modernists, who were embracing new ideas, and fundamentalists, who rejected many of them, struggled for control of the theological direction and political machinery of mainline denominations, with conflict especially prevalent among Northern Baptists and Northern Presbyterians (i.e., members of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America). These competing parties also generated interdenominational parachurch organizations to support their causes. One of the most significant for the fundamentalists was the World's Christian Fundamentals Association (WCFA) led by William Bell Riley, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Minneapolis, Minnesota. In The Menace of Modernism (1917), Riley lamented the strength of modernist belief in America's educational institutions and argued that it seriously undermined America's Christian culture. Thus, fundamentalists sought to counter or, if possible, destroy modernism's growing influence in American life. (5) Although fundamentalism was not a monolithic movement, all fundamentalists opposed modernist influences upon Christian theology and within American culture. As intra-fundamentalist quarrels revealed, however, they were divided by theological issues, particularly in eschatology and ecclesiology; by their attitudes toward the opposition (militant versus irenic); and by the strategies they framed for defeating the enemy (belligerent discourse and confrontational political tactics designed to neutralize and expel modernists versus promoting orthodoxy through traditional and novel ways to deprive modernists of their audience and weaken their denominational influence). …