Early Biblical Fundamentalism’s Xenophobic Rejection of the Subject in European Philosophy: How Rejecting the Knowing Subject Formed Fundamentalism’s Way of Thinking

Abstract

This article is part of a wider project that addresses gaps in the scholarly knowledge of the philosophical and theological foundations of the Biblical Fundamentalism that originated in North America. Through exploring the relevant literature, including primary sources from within Fundamentalism, the article examines the anti-European sentiment in early Fundamentalism and how this sentiment led to a rejection of philosophical values associated with Europe, especially with Germany. The article will show that anti-European, especially anti-German, sentiment bolstered Fundamentalism’s rejection of subjectivity in thinking, and even its rejection of human subjects themselves. In the place of subjectivity associated with European philosophy, Fundamentalism embraced an extreme objectivity that claimed the heritage of Reid and Bacon but eliminated subjectivity from the Fundamentalist horizon. This article thus shows how Fundamentalism radically opposes God and human beings, and faith and philosophy, with the resulting way of thinking that can be characterised as “naïve realism”, an approach to thinking that excludes the active thinking subject and does not allow for critical judgement or personal understanding.

1. Introduction

Despite Biblical Fundamentalism’s considerable membership and influence, the academy seems to have often neglected scholarly theological or philosophical analysis of the movement. While some have lamented the lack of scholarly attention given to Fundamentalism, there have been notable exceptions, such as Wood and Watt’s collection (Wood and Watt 2014) and, most importantly, the University of Chicago’s Fundamentalism Project (edited by Marty and Appleby, 1987–1995). However, even that significant project was notable for the absence of “humanists and theologians” from the project (Waugh 1997, pp. 162–63). Indeed, as Huff notes, despite Fundamentalism being one of the most important religious movements of the twentieth century, “interreligious dialogue tends to operate as if it did not exist”. He observes, for example, that Fundamentalism has not seen the level of respectful dialogue given to the non-Christian religions of Asia (Huff 2000, pp. 94–95).

An additional oversight that the project, of which this article is a part, aims to rectify is that when Fundamentalism has been subjected to serious academic investigation, its philosophical roots have very often been overlooked (Harris 1998, p. 95). To give an example, Harris notes that Barr’s (1980) influential study of Fundamentalism made no specific reference the Scottish Common Sense realist philosophy that characterised Princeton in the nineteenth century, and which later came to dominate Fundamentalist thinking. Since George Marsden wrote his seminal work, the historical role of common sense philosophy in forming Fundamentalism has become well-known (Marsden 2022). However, as Harris also notes, the content of and ideas behind the common sense philosophy that underpins Fundamentalism has not been studied as deeply as one would have hoped. She observes that this is “partly because the effects of the philosophy [on Fundamentalism] have been general rather than precise” (Harris 1998, pp. 94–95).

It has been common to see the movement subjected to scorn and derision rather than penetrating analysis and intelligent critique. Some Catholic responses to Fundamentalism have typified this approach, seeming to favour condescension over understanding. To give an important example, the Pontifical Biblical Commission (1993) responded in a balanced and measured way to different methods of Biblical interpretation such as liberation theology and feminist theology. In contrast, when the Commission covered Fundamentalism, it stood aloof from the movement with manifest revulsion, and it made no effort to explain the intellectual foundations of Fundamentalism. Instead, it dismissed Fundamentalism as having no systematic approach to Biblical interpretation. It claimed (erroneously) that Fundamentalists interpret the Bible literalistically, with no effort given to understand the historical background of Scripture. It also asserted erroneously that Fundamentalists reject any critical research (Shea 1993, p. 279). The Pontifical Biblical Commission (1993) ended its attack by claiming that Fundamentalism is a pious but dangerous illusion and that it “actually invites people to a kind of intellectual suicide”.

To rectify the oversight of an academic study of Fundamentalism, this author is pursuing a study of the philosophical values behind early Fundamentalism. A deep investigation into Fundamentalism finds it committed to a common sense philosophy, especially the philosophy associated with Thomas Reid, and that it embraced a “Baconian” scientific-philosophical method. Driving these values, however, is a militant, even xenophobic, rejection of certain philosophical values associated with the Continent, especially Germany.

The anti-German sentiment that was influential in early Fundamentalism ties in with Marsden’s functional definition of a Fundamentalist as “an evangelical who is angry about something”. The definition was taken up and embraced by Jerry Falwell (Marsden 1991, p. 1). Dobson, Hindson, and Falwell further support this functional definition, noting that Fundamentalism is characterised by its militant resistance to theological liberalism, modernism, and cultural change. They see it as a movement in “furious” battle against liberalism in order to win back their culture (Dobson et al. 1986, pp. 1–5). Indeed, Crawford notes that, from its early times, Fundamentalism was characterised by its contentious and combative militance (Wood and Watt 2014, p. 39). Marsden augments this functional definition by referring to Fundamentalism as a movement originally from within Evangelicalism that “is militant in opposition to liberal theology in the churches or to changes in cultural values or mores….” Fundamentalism thus emerged when certain Evangelicals found themselves ready to fight liberal theology and cultural influences that were believed to threaten key Evangelical doctrines. Moreover, one thing that distinguishes American Fundamentalism from conservative Evangelicalism in other countries is that Evangelicalism had been the de facto normative faith of the United States (Marsden 1991, pp. 1–2). The onslaught of liberalism was viewed not only as a theological challenge to Evangelicalism but also as an assault on American values. Fundamentalism emerged from an attack on faith and its place in North American society (Marty and Appleby 1995, p. 404). American Evangelicals believed themselves to be the victims of catastrophic betrayal and alienation from society’s mainstream. Within a few decades, these Evangelicals went from being the mainstream establishment of American society to being social outcasts.

In that light, Fundamentalism has been long associated with a militant rejection of perceived foreign and hostile values that challenge conservative Evangelical faith. Among these are the philosophical values that were seen as foreign, coming from the Continent, specifically Germany, and this article will cover those values as rejected by Fundamentalism. This article will specifically explore the Fundamentalist rejection of the subject associated with European philosophical values, especially those associated with Germany, explain the common sense and hyper-objective values that emerged in opposition to European philosophy, and use these to show how Fundamentalism can be identified as a philosophy described as “common sense realism” or “naïve realism”. That is, the early history of Fundamentalism reveals an anti-German xenophobia. This anti-German sentiment correlates with the early Fundamentalist rejection of key philosophical values, especially those associated with the affirmation of the knowing subject. Thus, this article proceeds from anti-German sentiment and early Fundamentalism’s rejection of “German fancies” to explore how the rejection of philosophical values associated with Germany led to the formation of Fundamentalism’s own philosophical values. The article will draw on the seminal work of George Marsden. While his work is mostly historical, his accounts will be used to illuminate and clarify the emergence of philosophical values in early Fundamentalism.

To put this study into other words, Fundamentalism has often been associated with anti-intellectualism. In his criticism of more extreme Fundamentalism, Packer notes that the movement has tended towards an anti-intellectual standpoint (Packer [1958] 1992, pp. 32–33, 36). This most often resulted from the limited scholarly resources available to Fundamentalists and their desire to defend their beliefs, no matter what science, philosophy, or scholarship may be saying. Because modern scholarship seemed at variance with Fundamentalist belief, Fundamentalists took the option of shunning reason and philosophical argument, assuming that being involved in such reason would lead to the corruption of faith. This bleak assessment seems accurate. However, it deals with the surface manifestations of Fundamentalism. It is also important to appreciate that part of the foundation of the Fundamentalist rejection of learning has been not just a general hostility towards liberal learning but also a theological xenophobia that rejected Continental learning, especially German scholarship. That is, early Fundamentalism did not involve a wholesale rejection of learning, but it rejected certain Enlightenment values that were associated with the Continent, especially Germany. As we shall see below, this was reflected especially in Fundamentalism’s rejection of Enlightenment values regarding the knowing subject in philosophy.

2. Anti-German Xenophobia

At the time of World War I, during Fundamentalism’s formative years, American preachers treated the German Kaiser as if he was “His Satanic Majesty—the incarnation of evil”. While praying in the US House of Representatives, Evangelist Billy Sunday spoke of Germany and declared, “Thou knowest, O Lord, that no nation so infamous, vile, greedy, sensuous, bloodthirsty ever disgraced the pages of history” (Ferrell 1985, p. 205). Sunday also proclaimed that, “If you turn Hell upside down … you will find ‘Made in Germany’ stamped on the bottom” (Adams 1933, p. 79).

Such preaching reflects the fact that Fundamentalism has often been characterised by who or what it is against, rather than what it is for. In the years leading to Fundamentalism’s formation, we see a strong stream of theological xenophobia. As early as the 1870s, American Evangelicals had embraced the vision of the United States as a Christian nation that stood in opposition to the perceived evils of Europe, which included transcendentalism, socialism, spiritualism, and phrenology (Marsden 2022, p. 19). The level of this xenophobia and its irony can be seen in the fact that Fundamentalism’s great nemesis, Charles Darwin (1958, pp. 56–71), was an English gentleman and a Cambridge divinity graduate. Despite the enormous harm done to Fundamentalism by Darwin, Fundamentalists never aimed the same level of hostility towards the Anglosphere as they directed towards Germany.

Indeed, a study of Fundamentalism’s history suggests that the perceived unbelief and complexity of Darwinism was a perceived minority position in Anglosphere scholarship, whereas liberalism, subjectivity, complexity, anti-supernaturalism, and speculative philosophies were regarded as the result of “closed-minded” thinking that typified German scholarship. Rueben Torrey, for example, proclaimed that the correct meaning of the Bible was the straightforward one that could be understood by the “plain man” using one’s common sense. Undesirable readings of the Bible were seen as the result of esoteric, mystical, and complicated scholarship, which was associated with German professors rather than Americans (Hofstadter [1963] 1964, p. 133; Marsden 2022, pp. 22, 72).

3. “German Fancies”

Fundamentalists followed the view typified by Charles Hodge and Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield of the Princeton Theological Seminary. They conceived the Bible as a “storehouse of facts” that could be readily apprehended by common sense. Negatively, Fundamentalists followed them in rejecting German “theoretical” understandings and “deeper meanings” that relied on complexity and subjectivity (Marty and Appleby 1991, p. 15). Early Fundamentalists, as well as conservative Evangelicals, put their faith in common sense thinking, which they hoped would resist the onslaught of German philosophy. By embracing Locke, Butler, and especially Reid’s Common Sense philosophy, they hoped to prevail against “the vagaries of Prussian or German Rationalists” (Harris 1998, p. 130). If we turn to the influential collection, The Fundamentals (1917), Dyson Hague’s “History of the Higher Criticism” has a section dedicated specifically to what he called “German Fancies” (The Fundamentals, Volume I, Torrey and Dixon 1917, p. 12). He highlighted the Fundamentalists’ belief that the worst of the modern Biblical critics were German. Hague also accused Germans of being scholars who replaced the plain meaning of Scripture with subjective conjectures, hypotheses, and speculations. Hague wrote that “for hypothesis-weaving and speculation, the German theological professor is unsurpassed”.

In contrast, Hague tied himself to an avowedly Anglo-Saxon tradition that rejected speculative and hypothetical thinking. In rejecting hypothetical thinking, he appealed to Isaac Newton, who stated “‘Non fingo hypotheses’: I do not frame hypotheses.” Hague continued that “it is notorious that some of the most learned German thinkers are men who lack in a singular degree the faculty of common sense and knowledge of human nature” (The Fundamentals, Vol. I, Torrey and Dixon 1917, p. 12).

It is interesting that Fundamentalism persisted in the belief that evolutionary thought was rooted in such a “German” way of thinking, despite Darwin’s obvious English background. A good example in The Fundamentals is Henry Beach’s paper on the “Decadence of Darwinism”. Beach argued that evolutionary theory is problematic, hypothetical, based on speculation, and not at all a proven fact. Beach claimed that “it would be mischievous to teach it in our schools”. It was only the rash sorts of people, especially the Germans, who would advocate such hypothetical theories (The Fundamentals, Vol. IV, Torrey and Dixon 1917, p. 71).

4. Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Philosophical Tradition

The Fundamentalists’ opposition to Continental intellectual values helps to clarify the way that they approached the Christian faith with solidly nineteenth-century American ideas about truth and morality (Marsden 2022, pp. 279–80). As seen in Barr’s work, Fundamentalism has been tied specifically to nineteenth-century rationalism. While Barr did not explicate the Scottish common sense philosophical realist tradition that was a foundation for Fundamentalist thinking, he did make the point that Fundamentalism is strongest in countries dominated by an Anglo-Saxon culture. It rejects the Continental philosophical contributions to the philosophy of knowing that emphasised the active, thinking subject. In its place, Fundamentalism embraced a rationalist way of knowing that was hyper-objective, in which truth is “out there” to be had, and that one should simply apprehend assertions that are out there to be seen with common sense (Barr 1980, p. 72; Harris 1998, p. 94).

This point highlights the first important contrast between the European philosophy rejected by Fundamentalists and the Anglo-American philosophy they adopted. They rejected the Continental position that the apprehension of truth may depend on the knowing person’s subjectivity and faculties. In contrast, Fundamentalist thinkers like B. B. Warfield and Machen applied a “common sense” philosophy in which the plain apprehension of rational facts, without subjective thinking, would yield knowledge of objective truths such as the self-evident proof of the Bible’s reliability and authority.

Such common sense philosophy appealed to Fundamentalists because it had already been embraced by people of faith, and the wider population, of the United States. Such a philosophy appealed to nineteenth-century Americans because it grounded a certain scientific approach to reality that the universe was governed by rational laws guaranteed by an omniscient, omnibenevolent Creator. This common sense approach to philosophy also assumed that the first principles of morality would be known easily or intuitively, without the intervention of ideas (Marsden 2022, p. 15). It was against that background that the Declaration of Independence was able to affirm that certain truths were “self-evident”, and that certain unalienable rights were endowed by the Creator.

5. Reid and Baconism

Rather than taking on a European philosophy that emphasised the knowing subject, Fundamentalists embraced a common sense philosophy that was most notably inherited from the Scots, the most prominent of whom was Thomas Reid (Reid 1852; Nichols [2000] 2014). This philosophical approach had come to America most prominently through the Scottish presidents of Princeton College, John Witherspoon and James McCosh. Witherspoon had been brought to Princeton specifically to oppose the idealist philosophy associated with Berkley (Harris 1998, pp. 126–27).

In that common sense tradition, Fundamentalists embraced Reid’s rejection of the philosophies of Rene Descartes, David Hume, and others. Reid declared that “I despise Philosophy and renounce its guidance—let my soul dwell with Common sense” (Reid 1852, p. 101). Reid believed that these philosophers made the mind some sort of mediator between real objects and mental ideas, which had some sort of separate reality. Reid held that reality could be known, without process or cogitation, instead knowing by immediate, direct “judgements of nature”. He proposed that God had created the human mind to grasp reality directly (Reid 1852, p. 110). Thus, in opposition to idealist ways of knowing, Reid proposed that people do not perceive ideas of objects but that they perceive objects themselves (Harris 1998, pp. 97–98). Reid proposed it as self-evident that humanity had a “common sense” about it which could not be questioned or called into suspicion. As Reid explains,

If there are certain principles, as I think there are, which the constitution of our nature leads us to believe, and which we are under a necessity to take for granted in the common concerns of life, without being able to give a reason for them; these are what we call the principles of common sense; and what is manifestly contrary to them, is what we call absurd.

(Reid 1852, p. 108)

Peterková asks if Reid meant common sense as the “judgment of ordinary people, or judgment which we have in common with other people?” She argues that Reid meant that common sense referred to self-evident propositions that could be doubted by no reasonable person (Peterková 2015). Moreover, Reid also referred common sense to judgement, as the judgement common to all rational human beings. Indeed, Reid argued that common sense acts on propositions that “are no sooner understood than they are believed”. Reid further argued that belief acts on propositions and that there are some propositions that are not supported by other propositions, and that these are “self-evident propositions” (Reid 1852, p. 434). It should be noted that “proposition” is mentioned in The Fundamentals, but not in the same way as used by later Fundamentalists. However, we see in a certain adaptation of Reid’s Common Sense philosophy as the judgement of propositions the later Fundamentalist emphasis on revelation as propositional, as is all common sense. Packer serves as a good example when he discusses faith in terms of its intellectual and cognitive aspects. He regards faith as an intellectual certainty, a cognitive, certain apprehension of what is absolutely true, as revealed by God. For Packer, faith is simply an intellectual assent to truths that God has given as propositional revelation (Packer [1958] 1992, pp. 115–18).

Having said that, Harris observes that the influence of common sense philosophy on Fundamentalism has been “general rather than precise” (Harris 1998, p. 95). This raises the question of whether Fundamentalists understood Reid correctly or whether theirs was an oversimplified account of Reid. That question is beyond the scope of this paper and should be committed to future research. What can be said with confidence is that in the name of Reid, Fundamentalists rejected the knowing subject, which was associated with European philosophy, and they adopted a common sense approach to philosophy. I note that, in terms of the positive content of Reid, the question is complicated further because Reid and Bacon were apparently known by Fundamentalists through the mediation of different scholars rather than direct reading, Thus, what was understood by “common sense philosophy” or the Baconian method, was not obtained directly from Reid and Bacon but by mediation. At the same time that early Fundamentalists took on a common sense philosophy that they associated with Reid, they embraced what was regarded as the “Baconian” ideal. The Fundamentalists’ version of the Baconian method was to consider science as (i) the observation of the facts available to common sense, (ii) the classification of such facts, and (iii) the noting of generalisations that could be expressed as scientific laws. What was vital to the Fundamentalists was that the “Baconian” interpreter of Scripture was not to impose subjective hypotheses or theories but to reach the facts by classification and generalisation of what was observed. This understanding of the Baconian method aligned with Reid, who believed that true philosophising came from observing facts, using induction to “collect the laws of nature”, and then applying those laws to explain natural phenomena (Reid 1852, pp. 271–72; Harris 1998, p. 100). Fundamentalism thus emanated from a Baconian tradition of seeing what was there to be seen, not seeing what was not there, and then classifying what one saw. Thus, Evangelicals (and later the Fundamentalists) adhered to the idea of science as being observations of facts, not “speculations or hypotheses”, and they then applied that same method to the reading of Scripture (Marsden 2022, pp. 6, 15–16, 70). We see a very good example of this approach in a statement made by Arthur T. Pierson (Marsden 2022, p. 65).

I like Biblical theology that does not start with the superficial Aristotelian method of reason, that does not begin with an hypothesis, and then warp the facts and the philosophy to fit the crook of our dogma, but a Baconian system, which first gathers the teachings of the word of God, and then seeks to deduce some general law upon which the facts can be arranged.

Marsden also makes a valuable reference to Curtis Lee Laws, the man who coined the term “Fundamentalist”, who held that the objective truth of Scripture was analogous to the truth of the laws of physics—Biblical truth was known by common sense, and the infallibility of the Bible was ultimately the infallibility of common sense. Thus, one’s knowledge of the truth of Scripture came by intuitive confirmation, not scientific demonstration (Marsden 2022, pp. 135–36).

In other words, by rejecting Continental philosophical ideals, and by combining this Baconian view of science with the method of the Scottish common sense philosophers, Fundamentalists aligned themselves to the view that in knowing reality, what was important was induction formed upon observation. The theological result of this philosophic outlook was reflected in the view of ultra-conservatives at Princeton that one could have direct knowledge of God through the means of observing God’s revelation in the Bible. They also argued that if God was loving, providential, and wanting to inform his creatures of his will, perfect, infallible, and incapable of error, then it seemed clear that in the Bible there could be no error and that its message was there to be seen by those who approached it with the right open-minded spirit. The result of this approach was to turn the Bible into a storehouse of facts, which meant in turn that theology was reduced to studying, classifying, and expounding those clearly stated facts.

This sort of common sense philosophy, married to the Baconian ideal, had clear implications for the Fundamentalist inability to appropriate Darwin’s natural selection, which relied on insight into unseen relations between species. There is also the critical question of whether Fundamentalism embraced a genuinely Baconian method. However, whether Fundamentalists understood Bacon fully or accurately, it remains that in Bacon’s name they rejected metaphysics and philosophical theories that placed emphasis on the role of the human subject and the active subjective intellect in knowing objects, including sacred Scripture (Lightner [1986] 1995, p. 8; Packer [1958] 1992, pp. 131, 171–72). By rejecting human subjectivity and putting truth in the object, rather than the subject’s mind, Fundamentalists not only eliminated critical realism’s judgement of truth or falsity, but they also excluded the power of human understanding and insight.

6. Baconian Common Sense

In advancing a Baconian/common sense approach to knowing, we can see how Fundamentalists believed, as Spurgeon wrote, that “Cottage dames” are often wiser to the things of God than savants and scientists (The Fundamentals, Vol. III, Torrey and Dixon 1917, p. 111). Indeed, this holds true whether one is talking about science, philosophy, or complex theology. For example, The Fundamentals contains a damning assessment of the Catholic doctrine on the Eucharist. The doctrine was wrong, wrote J. M. Foster, because it “depends upon the acceptance of a metaphysical definition”, which is expressed in the terms of complex metaphysics (The Fundamentals, Vol. III, Torrey and Dixon 1917, p. 307). Indeed, those metaphysics draw a distinction between the visible qualities of an object and the invisible reality behind it. In the name of common sense and Baconian thinking, Fundamentalism rejected the speculative metaphysics of the invisible and affirmed only that which can be perceived by our senses.

In its early days, Fundamentalism thus firmly rejected philosophy that was seen as speculative, complex, or “theoretical”. Such a philosophy, as J. J. Reeve claimed, is responsible for a faulty understanding of our world as well as a hostile attitude towards the Bible and religion (The Fundamentals, Vol. I, Torrey and Dixon 1917, p. 348).

It is in the light of rejecting complex philosophical interpretations that Pierson made the classic Fundamentalist declaration that Biblical interpretation should not employ complex, subjective, or speculative philosophy but instead should use a “Baconian” method of gathering the evident facts of the Word of God and moving from that point to draw conclusions (Marsden 2022, p. 65).

While Pierson’s statement accurately represented Fundamentalist thinking, we may ask if it fairly represented Baconian method. After all, Bacon himself had contrasted his observation-based scientific method with the Aristotelian authority-based method that began from first principles and then proceeded to deduce objective necessity from those principles (Lonergan 2004, pp. 166–68). Bacon thought such an approach paid insufficient attention to the world that we could observe with our senses (Bacon 1973, 1:n5/p. 26). Indeed, the modern method of science, which had been heralded by Bacon, pursues “theories invented, corrected and corroborated over an indefinite period through appeal to experience” (Meynell 1991, p. 234). It seems therefore, that even though Fundamentalists adopted the name of Bacon for their anti-subjective method, Fundamentalism’s reliance on text-based evidence and knowledge deduced from authority is not aligned with Bacon’s inductive method that embraced observation and experience.

7. Rejection of Key Enlightenment Values

The foregoing shows that Fundamentalism has had an ambivalent relationship with philosophy. On the one hand, early Fundamentalists condemned philosophy, but on the other hand, they extolled right thinking, and they embraced common sense philosophy and Baconian thinking. By considering both sides of this relationship, we see that Fundamentalism is not utterly anti-intellectual. Most certainly, Fundamentalists are neither ignorant, nor are they the “gaping primates” indicated by Mencken’s mockery (Mencken 1926, p. 65). Instead, by their anti-Continental philosophical method, Fundamentalists have embraced a deliberate stand against key philosophical values of the Enlightenment (Marsden 2022, pp. 6–7).

We can thus consider, on the one hand, Fundamentalism’s rejection of certain philosophies and Fundamentalism’s praise of good philosophical thinking.

First, Crosby rejected “philosophy” because of human depravity. Citing St Paul’s warning against human traditions, philosophy, and vain deceit (Colossians 2:8), Crosby argued that, through human nature, “the evil principle is ever at work”. Because human nature is constant in its depravity, he posited that “[w]hether it appear in the form of hierarchical assumption, or in the character of rational inquiry and scientific research, the evil principle hides, mutilates, or contradicts the Holy Scripture”. Even when Christians attempt to use philosophy to bolster Christian doctrine, Crosby held that “Christian philosophy” led inevitably to Gnosticism, Origenism, and myriad other heresies. Human depravity meant that philosophy, however well-intentioned, could only understate the evil of sin, inflate the powers of humanity, and compromise the need for salvation in Christ (The Fundamentals, Vol. III, Torrey and Dixon 1917, pp. 168–69).

If we consider carefully the myriad rejections of “philosophy” by Fundamentalists, we find that these were particular types of philosophy, namely the speculative, complex, and the hypothetical, which Fundamentalists associated with the Continent. At the same time, there has been an acknowledgement by Fundamentalists of philosophy that is beneficial to Christianity, even though the Fundamentalists did not call it “philosophy”. Thus, Dyson Hague praised the work of Justin Martyr, Chrysostom, and Augustine. While rejecting the label “philosophy”, Hague claimed that these thinkers engaged in “embroidery of the oriental imagination, and a plethora of metaphor” (The Fundamentals, Vol. III, Torrey and Dixon 1917, pp. 86–87).

Early Fundamentalists thus simultaneously embraced philosophy and rejected it. This point is crucial. Fundamentalists rejected philosophies, but not all of them. Their enthusiasm for Reid’s Common Sense (as they understood it) and the “Baconian” method showed an affinity for certain philosophies. But, as Ammerman notes (Marty and Appleby 1991, p. 9), Fundamentalists rejected the philosophies of the Enlightenment. These Continental philosophies went beyond mere sense perception to affirming and analysing the role of the human subjective thinker. Chief among these philosophers was the German philosopher Immanuel Kant who argued that “objective truth is always filtered through subjective experience and perception”. Kant’s “Copernican revolution” in philosophy emphasised not only the known object but the knowing human subject. That is, in Kant, phenomenal mental impressions are distinct from noumenal things in themselves. The human mind constructs truth, according to Kant, because our minds have to process what is encountered through the senses. Because of the role of the human mind in “constructing truth”, the processes of the human knowing subject are vital to understanding knowing and how truth is perceived through such subjective knowing (Harris 1998, p. 99).

It should be clarified, though, that Fundamentalists were not utterly opposed to the Enlightenment. After all, they embraced a version of that Baconian method, which was associated with the Enlightenment. As Bendroth notes, Fundamentalism “grew out of a Protestant tradition already deeply rooted in Enlightenment ideals, particularly the assumption that religious truth is accessible to anyone equipped with normal human “common sense” (Wood and Watt 2014, p. 61). However, Fundamentalists did reject other pivotal philosophical values of the Enlightenment. The most important of these would seem to be the role of the active subject in knowing reality.

Thus, while being open to some pre-Enlightenment philosophies, Fundamentalists rejected key parts of Enlightenment philosophy. They opted for less subjective approaches to knowing, such as Reid’s Common Sense philosophy, which was seen as both democratic and anti-elitist, and presumed knowledge of objects directly, without the mediation or interference of ideas (Marsden 2022, p. 15).

In short, then, Fundamentalism’s adoption of common sense and Baconian knowing was essentially a rejection of the subjectivity of the knowing human person emphasised in Continental philosophy. It represents an extreme objectivity in which the knowing person is not as important as the known object.

8. Rejection of Subjectivity

It behoves us now to articulate more about Fundamentalism’s rejection of subjectivity. At the same time that Fundamentalists claimed a Baconian heritage for their way of thinking, they also rejected metaphysics and philosophical theories that emphasised the role of the knower in knowing objects, including sacred Scripture. This was a key part of Fundamentalism’s rejection of liberalism, because it was believed that liberalism operated under the mantle of such “subjectivism”. This point reflects Marsden’s observation that the Princeton notion of truth conceived truth as that which was out there to be seen in the external world. Truth was not any function of a subject’s mental activity (Marsden 2022, p. 143). Importantly, this common sense philosophy held that the person can only discover objective truth, which is constant for all times, places, and persons. As Reid put the point, “the truth of a proposition” is utterly independent of whether we believe or not (Reid 1852, p. 649; Harris 1998, p. 117).

The Fundamentalist rejection of “subjectivism” was thus not just a reflex reaction to liberalism. Instead, it has been a stand upon theological belief in human depravity. Because human nature is depraved, Fundamentalists, then and now, simply do not trust human reason. Morris typifies later Fundamentalist belief by assuring his readers that “ungodly” human reason is subjective, unreliable, and prone to poor judgement. For Morris, one has only two possibilities. One can take on a naïve, unquestioning faith, or one can employ human reason, which, according to Morris, leads only to “a miscellaneous aggregation of existential insights and relativistic irrelevancies” (Morris 1971, p. 8).

Packer outlines a similar position. He argues that depraved human nature makes human reason intrinsically inimical to Christian faith. Instead of relying on subjective philosophy, Packer argues that “the logic of faith” requires that the objective propositions of the Bible should always correct secular opinion. He posits reason only as a villainous abuse of the mind that seeks to rewrite the Bible into line with secular views. He believes that human reason’s fallen character renders it a rationalistic effort that perverts Christian faith by bringing it into line with subjectivist assumptions (Packer [1958] 1992, p. 130).

Moreover, subjective thinking is so anathema to Fundamentalism that Packer proposes that “Christian reason” will not raise critical questions of the Bible’s historical truth or otherwise. Such questions would be an act of unbelief. For Packer, it is quite faithless to assume that we can treat Scripture with the same critical rigor with which we approach other documents and writings. Marsden notes that this reason is why Fundamentalists took on their “naïve realist” view of Scripture and demonised those who disagreed with them. That is, Fundamentalists believed that their subjectivism had infected them with an anti-Godly bias (Marsden 2022, pp. 68–69).

So, as Marsden (2022, p. 22) notes, most traditional Evangelicals were so tied to the ideals of objective science and objective religion that they had no choice but to take either one or the other, rather than the Enlightenment reconciliation in which subjectivism was more entrenched. Thus, when Fundamentalism emerged from conservative Evangelicalism, it embraced a radical philosophy of objectivity and utterly rejected human subjectivity.

It is worth noting that Fundamentalism has not been alone in such a push against subjectivity. From the Catholic side, Bernard Lonergan wrote of a Catholicism that was so fixated on the objectivity of truth as to leave out human subjects and their needs (Lonergan 2016, pp. 61–62). His work in accounting for the subject is important with regard to Fundamentalism. Lonergan asks if truth is “so objective as to get along without minds”, or whether objectivity is the fruit of authentic subjectivity. Ultimately, he answers that “...we see objectivity is conceived as the fruit of authentic subjectivity, and to be genuinely in love with God is the very height of authentic subjectivity” (Lonergan 2004, p. 204). In case Lonergan’s point is misunderstood, it does not mean that there are no realities independent of the mind. That is, Lonergan does not mean that there is no objective truth. Instead, it means that the way that objective truth is understood and known relies upon the knowing activities of an active subject. That is, when knowers act with authentic subjectivity, they come to understand and affirm that which is objectively real.

Against that vision, some Catholics, as well as Fundamentalists, have not treated the subject in a naïve or neutral way, but the subject has been rejected in an active, somewhat misanthropic way. This is because of belief in the depraved, damnable nature of human nature (Calvin 1989, II, iii.). Thus, we are able to propose a key factor in defining Fundamentalism. It is a movement that rejects human subjectivity for the sake of rejecting depraved human nature and for affirming the reliability of objects like the Bible.

This rejection of Enlightenment subjectivity has led to the oversight of insight that Lonergan warned against and leads easily into a false sense of certainty, in which people can be certain of concepts but lack subjective judgement of their veracity (Lonergan 2016, pp. 64–65).

This point helps to explain why Fundamentalist thinking today still leads to a certain stagnation of truth. Philosopher Thomas V Daly SJ was adamant that “truth is that which stands up to persistent questions” (Ogilvie 2019, p. 163). Yet questions do not exist independently of a human subject. They are the fruit of subjectivity. As has been seen above, the Fundamentalist mistrust of human subjectivity often leads to the neglect of the knowing subject’s questions. This can leave truth static and truncated. That is, where there is a rejection of the knowing subject, there is no room for growth in the understanding of the doctrines of faith. Another perspective on this point is that by rejecting subjectivity, by focussing on “objective” propositions and concepts, and by suppressing subjective questions, Fundamentalism has fallen into a sort of ahistorical immobilism. This is not unique to Fundamentalism. As has already been noted, by treating knowledge as if it is almost independent of the human mind, Catholic theology of the past has similarly suffered a lack of development and growth. As conceptualism disregards insight, it cannot account for the development of concepts. As Lonergan explains, by themselves, concepts are immobile, but what does change is human understanding, and when understanding changes, then defining changes or develops. But such growth in understanding requires an affirmation of the human subject (Lonergan 2016, pp. 64–65).

Lastly, by rejecting the knowing subject, Fundamentalism features an inability to appreciate the self-critical conditions for knowing. Faced with the question, “What is truth?” the Fundamentalist can only look to an object like the Bible and say, “it is true”. But how can we know that someone has, in their own mind, achieved truth, greater understanding, or a correct judgement of value? Answering those questions requires an awareness and affirmation of the knowing subject. The rejection of subjectivity thus explains why it is difficult to have reasonable arguments with Fundamentalists. With no appreciation of the critical conditions for knowledge and understanding, Fundamentalists are left only with the assertions of what are believed to be objective truths.

9. The Outcome: Fundamentalism’s Common Sense Realism

In its formative years, Fundamentalism was marked by an anti-European, anti-German xenophobia that included a rejection of European philosophical values. Most notably, Fundamentalists identified this rejection as the rejection of “German fancies” that included speculation, hypothesis, and complex thinking (The Fundamentals, Volume I, Torrey and Dixon 1917, p. 12). Interesting, and a subject for further research, is that some of this hypothetical thinking that was claimed to oppose “hypothesis against fact” was associated with British scholars like Berkeley and Locke (Reid 1852, pp. 131–32; Harris 1998, p. 108). Despite this, the greater hostility of Fundamentalists was reserved for the Continent, especially Germany. At a deeper level, though, it is evident that the rejection of European philosophy was primarily concerned with a rejection of subjectivity. This was due, in large part, to Fundamentalist theology that saw human nature as depraved and inimical to God. Fundamentalists thus thought that the knowing human subject was unreliable and incapable of knowing truth.

In the place of European subjectivity in knowing, Fundamentalists put their faith in the common sense knowing of objective truths. They called this a “Baconian” method, even though, as noted above, Bacon himself may not have approved of such an identification.

By understanding Fundamentalism’s origins in a rejection of European philosophy, one can explain Fundamentalism as based on a philosophy of common sense realism.

Richard McBrien describes Fundamentalism as a form of “naïve realism” (McBrien 1994, p. 1194. However, we prefer the less value-laden term “common sense realism”. Through such an approach, the typical Fundamentalist will point to a Bible text and say that all that is needed is a good look at the text and then expect that the person of faith will instantly apprehend what it means. This apprehension is what Lonergan would call the “already out there now real”, something apprehended in a single action of looking at objective reality, without the subjective activities of understanding, judgement, and decision of value (Lonergan 1992, pp. 254–57).

Benjamin Warfield illustrated common sense realism very well. He argued that the Bible is an “oracular” book, in which whatever the Bible says, God says. Warfield effectively rejected the active knowing of a subject who at one time experiences data, at another time asks questions of intelligibility, and at another asks questions of truth or reality. Instead of encouraging an active subject who strives to know, Warfield described a passive mind that apprehends an objective “fact” by way of reading the Bible and yielding to the duty of the Christian to “unquestioningly receive its statements of fact, bow before its enunciations of duty, tremble before its threatenings, and rest upon its promises” (Warfield 1948, pp. 106–7). This ties in closely with Reid’s Common Sense approach, in which the propositions of common sense are understood and believed simultaneously, without any intervening effort to subject the mind to critical reflection (Peterková 2015). That is, common sense philosophy is a sort of immediate knowledge or belief, without the structure of experience, understanding, and judgement to which Lonergan draws our attention (Lonergan 1988, pp. 203–21).

Fundamentalism’s rejection of subjectivity thus ignored the distinction, emphasised by Aquinas and Lonergan, between questions of truth—“is it?” and intelligibility—“what is it?” Fundamentalist objectivity has been fixated on “is it?” questions of fact, but common sense realism neglects “what is it?” questions of intelligibility. That point is made clear in Bryan’s statement, in which he claimed to have abandoned theological or philosophical understanding by saying that, “if we will try to live up to that which we can understand, we will be kept so busy doing good that we will not have time to worry about the things that we do not understand” (Marsden 2022, p. 169).

To put this into other words, Fundamentalism’s anti-subjective common sense realism has not distinguished between judgement and understanding. By neglecting the distinctiveness of understanding, Fundamentalists have neglected intelligibility. But by also neglecting distinct judgement, they have missed out on vital self-criticism. As Meyer notes, good judgement is neither universal nor commonplace. The heart of the hermeneutic problem is in the need to identify and bring to realisation those factors in oneself that facilitate insight and good judgement (Meyer 1989, p. 81). By ignoring the subjective element of judgement, which is personal and subjective, we understand, then, why modern Fundamentalists often reject critical judgement in favour of assertion based on authority.

The Fundamentalist rejection of the subjectivity emphasised in European philosophy, and the belief that human reason is depraved, illustrated the acknowledgement made by later Fundamentalist leaders Dobson and Hindson, that there is often “little capacity for self-criticism” within Fundamentalism (Dobson et al. 1986, p. 149).

This means that, if one may paraphrase Lonergan, common sense realism means that truth for the Fundamentalist is so objective as to persist without human minds. On the one hand, Fundamentalists believe that true believers do not need critical scholarship. Packer tells us that with the assistance of God’s spirit, everyone, whether educated or not, will come to the knowledge that God wants them to acquire (Packer 1993, p. 123). Again, this is because the emphasis in Fundamentalism is not on the actively knowing human subject but upon the known object that one is meant to apprehend simply and without active thinking.

To conclude, McBrien seems correct in labelling Fundamentalism as a form of “naive realism” (McBrien 1994, p. 1194). Fundamentalist thinking is incursive, rather than discursive. It does not distinguish, or even analyse, understanding and judgement. Tied to its rejection of the abilities of the human person, Fundamentalist common sense realism involves a “reality projection”, which includes essence projection. I would caution again, though, that “naïve realism” is a term that is easily misunderstood, though, because those unfamiliar with technical philosophy believe that the word “naïve” implies stupidity. So, even though the term is accurate, its pejorative connotations mean that “common sense realism” should be the preferred term. It explains that through this sort of approach to knowing, all one does in the knowing process is to take a look at something. It is opposed to “critical realism”, or discursive knowledge, as described by Lonergan (1988, pp. 214–15). That is, while common sense realism considers knowing to be a single act, like looking, critical realism holds that human knowing is a compound of different activities, namely, perceiving or experiencing something; asking questions about, or inquiring into, the object; coming to an understanding of that thing; asking the critical question, “is my understanding correct?”; and passing judgement on the correctness or falsehood of one’s understanding.

Fundamentalism, in rejecting subjectivity and the knower’s ability to experience, understand, and judge, regards knowing as a single act of confrontation with God’s word. A Biblical Fundamentalist will point to the Bible text and say that all that is needed is a good look at the text and the person of faith will apprehend what it means (McBrien 1994, p. 1194). In other words, Fundamentalist realism proposes that we can know objects directly by observing facts and without the interference of ideas, speculations, or hypotheses (Marsden 2022, pp. 15–16, 21).

10. Conclusions

The subjectivity recognised by European philosophy, especially through the work of Kant, was rejected by early Fundamentalist thinkers. This rejection has continued into the present, with Fundamentalists holding to a radical objectivity of knowledge. That is, the role of the knowing subject has been rejected in favour of the objectively known. For Fundamentalists, objective truth has been known through a simple encounter of common sense with facts or propositions. Those philosophical values were taken from the Common Sense philosophy of Thomas Reid and given the label of “Baconian” thinking, even though, as pointed out above, it is possible to question such an identification with Bacon’s method. Having said that, it is important to note that, for Reid, belief always finds its objects in propositions. Moreover, common sense philosophy relies on self-evident propositions that can be known by every person with common sense (Peterková 2015). This common sense philosophy thus rejected the role of the active subject in human knowing, rejected the distinction of understanding and judgement, and also laid the ground for Fundamentalism’s later emphasis on revelation as propositional.

By rejecting the subject, early Fundamentalism opened itself to the radical objectivist position in which God’s objective truth is contrasted (and held to be in conflict) with the subjective human mind. That is, Fundamentalism has valued the radical objectivity of the known while it has rejected the subjectivity of the knower.

This rejection was, in significant part, due to the anti-German sentiment highlighted in this article. It also aligned well with the theological misanthropy and emphasis on propositional revelation found in later Fundamentalism. As Packer claims, when humans are left to work out what the actions of God mean, they inevitably get it wrong (Packer [1958] 1992, pp. 91–93). Such a neo-Calvinist despair of depraved human nature’s ability to work out what God may have meant in the Scriptures thus highlights the common sense approach and Fundamentalists’ insistence that revelation is propositional and, thus, that when one reads Scripture, one must read the Bible not just to access God’s revealing works, but one must find God’s revealing propositions.

This writer would argue that, by rejecting subjectivity, Fundamentalists can yield to the oversight of insight against which Lonergan warned us (Lonergan 2016, pp. 64–65). That is, by finding it easy to be certain of concepts, and by emphasising propositional revelation and doctrinal certainty, Fundamentalists can neglect the intervening act that comes from active understanding. Fundamentalism can thus result in a form of conceptualism, in which there is a strong affirmation of concepts and a sceptical disregard for active, insightful understanding insights.

It would be an oversimplification to state that the rejection of European philosophy was the only factor in the formation of Fundamentalist thinking. However, it was a key element in early Fundamentalist thought, and it was pivotal in the emergence of Fundamentalism’s common sense realism, which we have explained in this article. Among other insights that one can gain from further research, one trusts that this article helps to explain why early Fundamentalism found much more success in the Anglo-American world than in cultures more aligned with Europe.

For further research, it would also be interesting to compare the North American experience with that of Europe. One would especially have in mind the Swiss theologian Louis Gaussen, some of whose work seems to align very much with the Fundamentalism that emerged in North America. He argued that the words of Scripture themselves were inspired, not only the general message, and so they did not contain error (Gaussen 1842, pp. 209–10). He rejected science where it did not support Christian faith, and he rejected “vain hypotheses”. Yet Gaussen shows a key difference between the European thinking and the North American thinking that led to the formation of Fundamentalism. While American scholars like Warfield believed that the inspiration of Scripture could be proven by induction and that inerrancy extended into factual accuracy, Gaussen gave more credibility to the evidence provided by experience. That is, he believed that faith would provide the necessary assurance for believers who had difficulties with Biblical texts (Harris 1998, pp. 124–26). Gaussen thus had more confidence in the faith and knowing abilities of the human subject. On the subject of efficacious grace, he drew a parallel with the inspiration of Scripture, where in some ways humans are active, and in other ways they are entirely active. In some ways, God does everything, but at the same time, humans do all (Gaussen 1842, p. 37). We see that such European “proto-fundamentalism” differs from what emerged in North America. The Americans did not share the European confidence in human abilities, and, in fact, human abilities were condemned by the Americans. At the same time, the Americans held to an extrinsic theology of grace, which opposes grace with nature. The extent to which this extrinsic theology of grace came from Calvin, whether it was faithful to Calvin, and its consequences are beyond the range of this paper but will be important questions for further research.

In addition, we aim to further research the influence of common sense philosophy on the Fundamentalist philosophy of science. Harris makes the point that common sense philosophy was used to fight “Romantic theories of development”, which were related to Hegel (Harris 1998, p. 130). In future work being undertaken by this author, it will be interesting to see how this anti-development approach of Fundamentalism, which had some of its origins in opposing Romantic philosophy, came to be weaponised in the fight against Darwinism.

More productive research could focus on what Reid and the common sense philosophers actually wrote, as opposed to the general ideas that Fundamentalists took from them. It seems that Fundamentalists appropriated from Reid a hostility towards idealist philosophies, but they did not sufficiently appreciate what he was for, so more study needs to be done. The same goes for Bacon. Fundamentalists invoked him against hypotheses and speculation, yet in their opposition to modern science, they seemed just as guilty as the medieval scholastics who were accused by Bacon of having their wits confined to certain written texts and insufficiently open to observation of the world (Bacon 1973, 1n5/p. 26; Ogilvie 2001, pp. 30–31).

Finally, it is hoped that this article will prompt further research on the analogous approaches to the knowing subject in Fundamentalism and Catholicism. While the article has focussed on the early Fundamentalist philosophical values that rejected the knowing subject, Catholicism has not been immune from similar ideas about knowing. Indeed, Bernard Lonergan argued that Catholic scholars of the past had treated truth as being “so objective as to get along without minds”, and he wrote of a Catholicism that so insisted on the objectivity of truth as to leave out human subjects and their needs (Lonergan 2004, p. 204; Lonergan 2016, pp. 61–62). Despite the disdain shown by some Catholics for Fundamentalism, it appears that the intellectual histories of each may have more in common that the other suspects. One trusts that this may be the source of further research and indeed dialogue between Fundamentalists and Catholics.