The Origins of Baptist Fundamentalism

We know about the origins of Fundamentalism in the North from the histories of the GARBC and the FBFI. I won't say its prior, but more like contemporaneous. Also, remember due to The Late Hostilities, a gap still remained between the Northern and Southern Baptists.

 

Baptist Fundamentalism had its start on the floor of the Northern Baptist Convention in 1920 when William Bell Riley, Senior pastor of the First Baptist Church of Minneapolis, Minnesota, stood and, in a fiery speech, denounced the Modernism and Theological Liberalism of the Northern Baptist Convention.

His speech was not unexpected as he had written a book, "The Menace of Modernism" (New York: Christian Alliance, 1917) exposing the Modernism of the NBC.

This led to the organization in 1920 of the National Federation of Fundamentalists of the Northern Baptists.

The more militant fundamentalists withdrew from the NBC in 1932 and formed the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches.

Fundamentalists organized the Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society in 1943 and in 1946 the Fundamentalist Fellowship changed its name to Conservative Baptist Fellowship and was instrumental in organizing the Conservative Baptist Association of America in 1947 and the Conservative Baptist Home Mission Society in 1948.

But disagreements arose (after all, they were Baptists!) which caused the Fellowship to organize the World Conservative Baptist Mission (now Baptist World Mission), which would only appoint missionaries who were premillennial in eschatology.

In 1967, the Conservative Baptist Fellowship broke all ties with the Conservative Baptist Association movement and took the name Fundamental Baptist Fellowship of America (now International).

Some of the members of the CBA formed the New Testament Association of Independent Baptist Churches in 1965.

The "Great Triumvirate of the Fundamental Baptists" were the previously mentioned W.B. Riley of Minneapolis, T.T. Shields of Jarvis Street Baptist Church in Toronto, Canada, and, of course, J. Frank Norris of Texas.

In around 1937 Norris organized a group of independent, premillennial Baptist churches into the Premillennial Missionary Baptist Fellowship (later the World Baptist Fellowship), to try to combat what he believed were socialist, liberal, and "modernist" tendencies within the Southern Baptist Convention.

Norris's group established the Fundamentalist Baptist Bible Institute, now called Arlington Baptist College. The famous John Birch was a graduate of Norris's school.

In 1950 a group of men broke away from Norris and formed the Baptist Bible Fellowship which now centers around the Baptist Bible College of Springfield, Missouri.