Scope:
In contrast to the Protestant thinkers viewed modern philosophy and historical studies with suspicion. Catholic antimodernists were particularly successful in their push for greater authority for the pope, realized in the 1870 declaration of the doctrine of papal infallibility, and in their effort to establish the premodern thought of Thomas Aquinas as the "foundation upon which the whole science of natural and divine things is based." Protestant resistance to modernism took shape in evangelical and especially fundamentalist ideas. Prominent among these were, first, the doctrine of "dispensational premillennialism," a view of the end times as revealed in the Book of Revelation that implied a condemnation of modern culture. Protestant antimodernism was also seen in the doctrines of biblical inspiration and inerrancy, which put evangelicals at odds with developments in historical biblical criticism and with the emerging theory of evolution.
Outline
I. The liberal theologies examined in the previous lecture have two main points in common.
A. All of them, in one way or another, veered away from a strict Enlightenment rationalism that would treat biblical literature and theological doctrine primarily in terms of propositional
claims about the nature of the world and cosmos.
B. They also tried to address questions about the Bible and the Christian tradition that were emerging at the time by affirming historical study.
1. In doing so, we find that each of them continued to explain changes in history and the direction of history from a perspective in which Christianity is at the heart of the development of Western civilization and culture toward a consummation.
2. This optimism, perhaps more than anything, is the hallmark of Christian liberalism, particularly the Protestant variety.
C. But many Christians in the 19th century were suspicious of the liberalizing and secularizing trends of modern culture and society.
1. Thinkers who fall into this category by and large reject efforts to adapt Christianity to modernity and see their task as one of defending traditional Christianity and criticizing the human-centered pretensions of modern thought.
2. They saw biblical criticism as a threat and were outraged when Darwin's Origin of the Specieswas published in the second half of the 19th century. Particularly offensive were Darwin's astonishing claims that the world is far older than the Bible allows and that human beings are descended from other species rather than created as a unique species in the image of God. Further, Darwin's theory of natural selection seemed to necessitate, for many, the rejection of a history guided by God.
II. For Catholics, antimodernist thought was embodied chiefly in Ultramontanism, a movement for the absolute authority of the pope that reached its acme in 1870 when papal infallibility became official church doctrine.
A. In the centuries leading up to the modern period, the authority of the Catholic Church lay firmly in the grasp of the pope, even though during much of the Middle Ages, the pope had to fight on at least two fronts to establish and protect his authority.
1. On one front, the pope faced the concilarists, those who thought the bishops should have more power.
2. Popes also vied for temporal power against the various kingdoms of Europe.
B. In the modern period, the threats to the power of the church and the papacy came mostly from secularizing trends in nation-states.
C. It was in this context that the movement of Ultramontanism arose to defend the authority of pope and assert the doctrine
of papal infallibility.
1. This doctrine had been around for centuries but had never been formally asserted by the church.
2. It became popular in the 19th century in the face of growing secularization.
D. A series of events led up to the approval of the doctrine.
1. In 1854,Pope Pius declared the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary without consulting the bishops. 2. In 1864, he published a "Syllabus of Errors," which condemned secularism and political liberalism in stunning detail.
E. In 1869, the pope called to order the First Vatican Council where, despite some serious opposition, the bishops overwhelmingly supported the dogma of the primacy and infallibility of the pope.
1. The basic theological claim behind the doctrine of infallibility was based on Matthew 16:18.
2. Catholic critics of the idea appealed to the history of the church, arguing that in the early church, major councils, such as Nicea, were called not by the pope but by emperors; that there were no claims to papal infallibility for the first 13 centuries of the tradition; and that many of the claims of the early popes had since been
overturned by the church.
III. On the Protestant side, the most important antimodernist movement was American fundamentalism.
A. Although fundamentalism proper did not emerge until the beginning of the 20 century, its roots go back to
developments in 19th-century evangelicalism.
1. Through much of the 19th century, many evangelicals
had a fairly progressive sense of the moral regeneration that comes with the rebirth in Christ and were at the forefront of the abolition movement and the women's suffrage movement.
2. Some evangelicals, however, found themselves alienated from certain aspects of American culture by a number of factors: internal conflicts within the movement; perceived threats posed by liberal theology, biblical criticism, and Darwinism; and perceptions that immigration and urbanization were threatening traditional values.
B. A crucial factor in the emergence of fundamentalism was the development of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy in the course of the 19'" century.
1. Inerrancy, rather than a traditional Christian doctrine, stemmed from the effort to make biblical theology a
science grounded in an empiricist philosophy.
2. These facts were to be found in the Bible and were to be believed because they come from God.
3. The writers of the Bible were guided by God in what they wrote, even to some extent in the words they used, such that their writings would be free from any error.
C. A second factor was Darwin's theory of evolution.
1. The main problem with Darwinism, for many Christians, was not the idea of evolution itself but Darwin's claim that the mechanism for evolution was natural selection.
2. For such thinkers as Hodge, natural selection contradicted the biblical claim that God created each species and had a design for creation as a whole.
D. A third factor was the emergence of dispensational premillennialism, the idea that Christ would come only after the anti-Christ had conquered the world, would do battle with the anti-Christ, and would then reign for 1,000 years.
E. The term "fundamentalism" is derived from a declaration that came out of the Presbyterian assembly in which five doctrines were approved against the threat of liberal theology.
Suggested Reading:
Livingston, Modern Christian Thought Volume 1.
Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture.
Questions to Consider:
1. What was the basic issue in the debate between the concilarists and the Ultramontanists of the Catholic Church in the second
half of the 19th century?
2. What were some of the social and theological factors that led to the emergence of Christian fundamentalism?
Lecture Fourteen — Transcript
19th-Century Christian Antimodernists
In our last lecture, we explored a range of Protestant and Catholic thinkers to show how they attempted to show modern reason and historical consciousness as integral to Christian faith — and not tools of anti-religious suspicion. But what about those Christians who were suspicious of the liberalizing and secularizing trends of modern culture and society? What about those Catholics who, even more so than the members of the Oxford Group, were convinced that these trends were destroying the power of the Church, and thus the keys to human salvation? What about those Protestants who feared that modern biblical criticism and modern science more generally were undermining the authority of the Bible, and for whom modern society was degenerating into immorality and relativism? Where liberal Christians affirmed and even deified the direction of history, it seemed to these critics of modern religion and modern society that history was headed in the wrong direction and that history, as understood by the modernists, undermined Christian faith.
These religious critics of modernity will be the subject of this lecture. In particular, I will discuss Catholic Ultramontanism — a movement dedicated to establishing the absolute authority of the pope and that was instrumental in empowering Pope Pious IX to declare most aspects of modernity as anathema to Catholic doctrine. I will discuss the development of conservative Protestant Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, movements characterized by increasing alienation from modern society and culture. At the start, however, I do want to stress that although it is tempting to call all of the figures and movements I discuss in this lecture simply anti-modern or traditionalist, things are not so simple. What we will see, especially in the case of the Protestants, is that even as they portray themselves as defenders of the tradition against the corrosive acids of modernity, their own versions of Christianity were shaped in significant ways by modern ideas and ideologies.
I'll begin with the Roman Catholics. As we have seen, the story of modernity is, in significant part, the story of the rejection of Church authority. In places such as England and France, in particular, this meant that the rejection of the authority of the Catholic Church, for the centuries leading up to the modern period, the authority of the Catholic Church lay firmly in the grasp of the pope — even though during much of the Middle Ages the pope had to fight on at least two fronts in establishing and protecting his authority. On the one hand, there were many in the Church that claimed that Church authority rightly rested not with the pope alone, but also with the bishops. This position was referred to as Conciliarism in reference to the kinds of Church councils that had produced the great creeds of the Church in the early centuries of Christendom, such as the councils of Nicea and Chalcedon. Although the Conciliarists were often a force for reform in the Middle Ages, they were never really able to significantly reduce the power of the pope.
On the other hand, there was the question of the tension between spiritual and temporal authority, between the power of the pope and the power of European monarchs and other political leaders. In the modern period, though, as we saw with the Oxford Group, it was the nation state that was perceived by the Church to be the main threat to its power and doctrine. In this context,the movement of Ultramontanism arose to defend the authority of the pope and assert the doctrine of papal infallibility. This doctrine, as we've seen, had been around for centuries, but had never been formally asserted by the Church. But in the 19th century, largely in response to the growing secularism of European society, infallibility became an increasingly popular idea among Catholics — and by the middle of the 19th century, the pope, Pius IX, used this popularity to consolidate his power. In 1854, the pope declared the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This is the doctrine that Mary, the Mother of Jesus, was conceived without original sin — which meant, of course, that not only the Father, God, but also the Mother of Jesus were without sin. More crucial in this context, though, was the fact that Pious declared this dogma without consulting the bishops, and thus asserted his power to act independently of such traditional consultation.
In 1864, Pious published an Encyclical, a letter sent out to the bishops signaling an issue of high priority — though not the most authoritative form of papal pronouncement. In this Encyclical, he appended the infamous Syllabus of Errors, which condemned secularism and political liberalism in stunning detail. Contained in the syllabus were condemnations of — among other things — freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and the sovereignty of the people. It also rejected the idea that, to quote "the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself to and agree with progress, liberalism and civilization as lately introduced." So not only is the Pope asserting his power, and so the power of the Church, but is doing so against what he perceived to be the pernicious effects of modern Western culture.
Finally, in 1869, the pope called to order the First Vatican Council, where — despite some serious opposition — the bishops overwhelmingly supported the dogma of the primacy and infallibility of the pope. This was articulated in a document called "Pastor Aeternus," which read, in part:
We teach and define that it is a dogma divinely revealed: that the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when in discharge of the office of Pastor and Doctor of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the Universal church, by the divine assistance promised him in Blessed Peter, is possessed of that infallibility with which the Divine Redeemer willed that his church should be endowed for defining doctrine regarding faith or morals.
This doctrine of infallibility was based, first of all, in the biblical texts in which Jesus seemed to appoint the Apostle Peter as the head of his Church — as in Matthew 16:18, where Jesus says to Peter: "That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." For the defenders of papal infallibility, these kinds of passages supported at least three ideas — first, that Jesus gave Peter the gift of divine sovereignty, which implies infallibility; second, that the Church is both a temporal and spiritual monarchy, with the Pope as king; third, that Jesus gave this gift not just to Peter, but also to his successors.
It is important to note that the document specifies that papal infallibility is in force only when the pope speaks "ex cathedra" that is, as it says in the passage I just read, when the pope "defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the Universal church." Thus, it's only a narrowly prescribed set of pronouncements, not all papal communications, and certainly not the personal opinions of the pope. These are not to be considered infallible — it's only when the pope speaks ex cathedra. Still, there was significant opposition to the doctrine — primarily from critics who appealed more and more to the history of the Church and argued that the early Church councils, such as Nicea, were not called by the pope, but by emperors, that there were no claims to papal infallibility for the first 13 centuries of the tradition, and that many of the claims of the early popes have since been overturned by the Church. But despite these objections, the Ultramontanists carried the day — and with this victory and with the pope's radical stand against the modern world, it would be almost another century, until the next Vatican Council in the 1960s, before the Catholic hierarchy would seek to reconcile the Church with modernity.
Let me now turn, for the rest of this lecture, to Protestant criticisms of modernity. In my discussion of Horace Bushnell, I talked about the development of Evangelical theology in the United States in the 19'" century and made the point that starting in the 1820s this form of Christianity became more and more dominant in the United States. However, especially in our contemporary context, where the Evangelical revival of the last decades of the 20'" century is so often identified with right-wing politics, it is important to note that through much of the 19th century, Evangelical Christianity in the United States included a broad, multifaceted range of ideas and movements — some of which were rather theologically and socially progressive. For much of the 19th century, evangelicals, based on their sense of the moral regeneration that comes with rebirth in Christ, tended — like most liberal Christians — to be optimistic about the power of humans to do good and to change society for the better. They tended to affirm ideas about modern progress, and some Evangelicals were at the forefront of the Abolition Movement and the Women's Suffrage Movement.
However, by the end of the century, Evangelical Christianity had also spawned the movement called "Fundamentalism," which had a very different take on society and the modern world. So, how did this happen? We can point to a number of factors. First, we must note that even as this optimistic Evangelicalism was playing a major role in the life of Protestant Christians during the 19th century, old-time Protestants were still influential — particularly in academic circles.
These theologians were particularly important in articulating Evangelical responses to biblical criticism and later to Darwinism, both of which were interpreted as threats to genuine Christianity and symptoms of a dangerous secularization of the intellectual and cultural elites in the United States. As we will see in a moment, these dangers had a role in turning many Evangelicals away from optimistic social engagement, Social factors also played a role here. There was concern about the growing religious pluralism in the United States that was largely a product of immigration particularly, at first, of Catholics from Ireland. With increasing urbanization and industrialization, there was a sense that traditional forms of life were being undermined. First, the Civil War, and then a bit later World War I, destroyed for many — Christian or not—easy faith in the ethical and social progress of modern Western civilization.
In sum, by 1920, many Protestants found themselves alienated from dominant trends and ideals of American culture and came to stress more and more a soul-saving, culture-denying Christianity. To see how this played out, let me focus on two religious developments that were central to the emergence of a conservative Evangelicalism and, in the early 20th century, Fundamentalism. First, in the course of the 19th century, traditional Calvinist thinkers, particularly a group of Presbyterian theologians at Princeton Seminary, developed an approach to the Bible that — against the trends of higher biblical criticism—claimed that the Bible was the inerrant word of God. Second, a Christian version of history called "Dispensational Premillennialism" grabbed the imagination of many socially alienated Evangelicals. Before I look at these issues in some detail, however, I want to note that these developments did not necessarily go hand in hand — that, more generally, conservative and Evangelical Protestantism in the 19th century was quite varied, with lots of ideas and movements vying with one another in trying to articulate a genuine Christian vision. As we will see, however, some convergence did take place in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, as a number of Protestant groups came together in
rejection of liberal theology and secularism.
I turn now to the question of biblical inerrancy. As the Second Great Awakening spread through the United States in the 1820s, more traditional Calvinists in the U.S. expressed criticisms of the Evangelical focus on religious experience. They were concerned about what they called the "subjectivism of Evangelical Christianity," the fact that religious truth was viewed as an interior matter of individual experience. They were also concerned that an overemphasis on pietistic experience led to an erratic enthusiasm and to false teachings. At Princeton, Charles Hodge, whose writings spanned the middle of the 19th century, and his successor, Benjamin Warfield, devoted themselves to battling liberalism, biblical criticism, and religious enthusiasm by constructing a more objective form of theology based on the authority of the Bible.
The first point to make about this approach to the Bible is that it was based upon a rigorously intellectual rejection of biblical criticism. In fact, it was directed against both aspects of higher criticism and also against what it perceived as the anti-intellectual nature of Evangelical experientialism. Its intellectual basis was a form of empiricism articulated by the 18th-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid. Reid had argued, against other forms of empiricism, that we do, in fact, perceive objects and not just discrete sense impressions that we somehow construct as objects. He says that we know this because we have, by our very nature, an "irresistible conviction" that this is the case.
The importance of this epistemology for Hodge and the Fundamentalists is that it grounded an understanding of science as the accumulation of facts — attested to by what Reid called "ordinary common sense" — so his was a philosophical defense of ordinary common sense. As Hodge and later Fundamentalists saw — and, indeed, as even many contemporary defenders of conservative Christianity see it today — science was given definitive shape by the thinkers of the scientific revolution, such as Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton. This is science understood as the accumulation and demonstration of facts. But through the epistemological work of Kant, and then increasingly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the view of science was changing as more and more scientists and philosophers came to emphasize the absolutely central role in the scientific method of hypothesis, and theory, and interpretation. On this view, facts and interpretation are much more closely connected than in the more traditional, fact-based view of early modernity. Theories for the thinkers of the 19th and 20th century guide research and are judged not so much by being proven true and turned into fact — but on the basis of whether they make possible productive thinking and questioning, new research.
Hodge, however, wanted to construct theology as a modern science based in Reid's empiricism and in the older model of science, where theology would only differ from natural science in that its facts would be derived from the Bible — not from the observation of nature. The theologian must articulate the truths of Christianity for Hodge, its claims about sin and salvation and about the nature of Jesus by beginning with these facts in the Bible and reasoning inductively from those facts to the Christian doctrines. Here's the most crucial point in all of this: For Hodge, to realize this vision of theology as science, he had to understand the Bible as consisting of propositions of facts. We can thus contrast this view of the Bible with Bushnell's claim that the Bible should be read primarily as a kind of poetry and in Bushnell's explicit rejection of the idea that the Bible is a "magazine of propositions." Further, for Hodge's idea of theology as science to work, he had to show that the facts attested to in the Bible were true — that the Bible was inerrant because it had its source in God. More specifically, he argued, the writers of the Bible — through human beings — were inspired by God.
This idea of inspiration must be taken in Hodge's technical theological sense to mean that the writers of the Bible were guided by God in what they wrote, even to some extent in the words they used — and if this was the case, than the idea was that their writings would be free from any error. Hodge's younger colleague at Princeton, Benjamin Warfield, would later refine this idea by arguing for what he called "plenary verbal inspiration" — which means, first, that all of the Bible, not just certain books or verses, all of the Bible is inspired, and that both the words and the thoughts of the biblical writers, when it comes to the teachings of the Bible, are guaranteed by God to be without error. Even as other scholars pointed out seemingly contradictory claims made in the Bible about various matters, Hodge and Warfield continued to argue that even if there are some discrepancies in the Bible, they did not amount to much and did not affect issues of major importance. Even as the discoveries of scientists, including Darwin, became available, Hodge and Warfield argued that nothing that the Bible claimed about nature went against the findings of the sciences, and that those findings that did seem to contradict claims in the Bible were simply "theories" or "hypotheses" that eventually would be shown to be mistaken. They did argue, though, in order to help combat these claims, that what is inerrant is only the original biblical texts — that is, those copies actually written by the writers themselves, not the copies that were the result of a long chain of transcription that had resulted in errors creeping into the texts we now possess. It's in the context of thinking about biblical inerrancy that I want to talk briefly about the challenge presented to religious thinkers of the 19th century by Darwin's theory of evolution.
As I've said, defenders of biblical inerrancy were not against science per se — and even to some extent could accept some findings from higher biblical criticism or even — as I'll explain — the idea of evolution, but rather they rejected certain directions that scientific thought of the 19th century was taking. As the historian Claude Welch has pointed out with admirable clarity, the problem with Darwin, for defenders of biblical inerrancy such as Hodge, was not the idea of evolution per se, but rather the idea of natural selection which Hodge and others took to involve a rejection of the idea that the world was guided by God's providence or design. Welch puts it like this:
What was decisive in Darwin's contribution ... was the way in which the principle of natural selection, in conformity with the "law of common descent" was developed into a powerful, coherent, and inclusive model to account for the origin of the species.... [This model held] that new species come into being from preexisting varieties by an irregularly adaptive divergence, in which the main agent in the conversion of varieties into species is natural selection.... Darwin's scheme needed no god or principle of teleology or design.
For Hodge, the idea that natural selection and the related idea that new species developed from older species directly contradicted the book of Genesis — where God, as they read it, intentionally and directly created each kind of animal and plant. Darwin was not, of course, the first to come up with the idea of evolution or the idea that species develop over time. It had been around for decades before he published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Many Christians, even conservative Christians, could accept the idea that God achieved his purposes over a long period of time, for this did not contradict the idea that each species was intended and designed by God — even if they were not all created at once "in the beginning." I should remark here that claiming that the Bible is inerrant is not necessarily to claim that it should be read in its most literal sense. Thus, it was not unusual in the 19th century for Christians to claim that the six days of the biblical creation story did not mean six 24-hour periods — but, in fact, meant six much-longer spans of time. Hodge himself, even as he rejected the idea that species evolved from other species, could accept the idea that not all species necessarily appeared at the beginning, or that they appeared on earth as if magically from nowhere. He wrote:
each species was specially created, not ex nihilo, [from nothing] nor without the intervention of secondary causes, but nevertheless originally, or not derived evolved, or developed from preexisting species. These distinct species ... separately originated, are permanent. They never pass from one into the other ... if at any time since the original creation new species have appeared on the earth, they owe their existence to the immediate intervention of God.
The response to Darwin among Christians was varied, in part because many could accept the idea of evolution and did not understand the deep naturalism implied by the theory — but Hodge did understand this, and for him and others, Darwin threatened to remove God and God's plan from our understanding of the world. I'll return to this and the conflict between religion and science from the point of view of the Fundamentalists in a few moments.
In addition to claims about the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible, Fundamentalist theology was also shaped by a doctrine of history called "Premillennialism." Millennialism is a version of the biblical vision of history—particularly as it is inflected by the New Testament book, Revelations, which tells of the battle of the forces of the Christ and the Antichrist at Armageddon and the coming Kingdom of God. Behind this is a view of history as a battle between God and Satan. The millennium refers to the 1,000 years mentioned in Revelation 20, when Satan would be cast into a pit and would, as the Bible says, "deceive the nations no more." Two forms of Millennialism emerged in the course of the Christian tradition: Post and Premillennialism. For Postmillennialists, this 1,000 years would be the last epoch of history, during which the Holy Spirit would be poured out around the world as all the nations accepted the Gospel. Then, Christ would return to bring history to an end, and God would create, as it says in the book of Revelation, "a new heaven and a new earth." Premillennialists, by contrast, tended to read the Bible more literally and believed that Christ would come only after the Antichrist had conquered the world — would do battle with the Antichrist and then reign for 1,000 years. So, the basic difference is that Post-millennialism means that Christ comes after the millennium, and Premillennialism means that Christ comes before the millennium.
Why is this difference important? Postmillennialism is in significant respects more optimistic about human history and thought, for it sees the millennium as made possible by human action in history. Postmillennialists thought that we were nearing the end of the reign of the Antichrist, represented by the power of the Catholic Church and Islam. They believed that with the success of Protestant missions around the world and with the kind of faith in ethical progress we saw in someone like Ritschl, that we were nearing the time of the millennium — which would be largely a human achievement — so there was reason for human beings to work to improve the world. By contrast, Premillennialists, believing that the 1,000 years would come only after the Apocalypse and the return of Christ, did not think that human historical activity could bring us any closer to the millennium. Thus, for them, our task was not to make the world better — it was not to improve life on earth — it was, rather, to save souls in preparation for Christ's return.
After the Civil War — when, as I've said, many Evangelicals started to feel more alienated from American culture and when the threats of both biblicial criticism and Darwinism were seen to be challenging Christianity — this Premillennialist view became more and more attractive. Both biblical inerrancy and Premillennial Dispensationalism were crucial elements of the Fundamentalism that took self-conscious form during the first two decades of the 20th century. In 1903, conservative Presbyterians, led by the scholars from Princeton and other biblical teachers who supported biblical inerrancy, formed the Bible League of North America — dedicated to a defense of the faith. Soon many Dispensationalists joined the group. This alliance reflected the fact that although there were significant theological differences between them, conservative Presbyterians and Premillennialist Evangelicals understood the importance of uniting in opposition to what they perceived as the growing power of a liberal theology that had succumbed to modernist trends and were threatening Christianity and the Bible.
Then, in 1910, the Presbyterian Assembly brought up on formal charges of heresy some prominent Presbyterian scholars who disagreed with the claims of the Princeton school on the issue of inerrancy. The Assembly produced a declaration that laid out five points of doctrine: one, the inerrancy of scripture; two, the Virgin Birth of Christ; three, Christ's substitutionary atonement — that is, that Christ was sacrificed to pay for our sins; fourth, his bodily resurrection; and fifth, the historical authenticity of biblical miracles. Nineteen-ten also saw the publication of the first in a series of 12 pamphlets called "The Fundamentals." These were financed by an oil tycoon named Lyman Stewart, and they were dedicated to defending the truth of Christianity. These became the rallying point for the emerging coalition of critics of theological liberalism and the source of the name "Fundamentalism." By 1920, the five doctrines that had been declared by the Presbyterian Assembly in 1910 had been renamed "The Fundamentals" — and, reflecting the general cultural pessimism that followed World War I, they were revised so that the doctrine of Premillennialism was substituted for the affirmation of miracles.
Returning for a moment to "The Fundamentals" pamphlets, one of their main targets was the higher criticism, which they castigated as closed-minded speculation. They saw that it resulted only in tenuous hypotheses, rather than facts, and that it excluded as a matter of principle — not out of any proof — the possibility of miracle and God's supernatural intervention. The pamphlets defended what they saw as real science, but, again, we see that the two visions of what counts as science were being pitted against one another — one that stressed facts and the possibility of divine intervention, and one that was rigorously naturalistic and saw science progressing through hypothesis and theory, rather than simply fact and induction. By way of concluding and, very briefly, summarizing, it is worth pointing out that unlike Catholic Ultramontanism, which in most respects was decidedly anti-modern, Protestant Fundamentalism — though claiming to defend traditional Christianity — was distinctly modern in crucial respects. The Fundamentalists were not rejecting modernity wholesale, but were rejecting certain directions modernity had taken in the 19th century and were dependent on early modern theological and scientific ideas.
Although Christians had for millennia viewed the Bible as the revealed Word of God and so as absolute truth, Christian theologians from the very earliest centuries of the tradition had developed complex methods of interpreting the Bible and had identified many layers of meaning — from the literal, to the metaphorical, to the mystical. From this perspective, the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, as formulated by the Princeton theologians and adopted by the Fundamentalists that focused on the plain propositional sense of the text — this is a modern doctrine, and it was strongly shaped by early modern conceptions of science.
