Politically Correcting The Fundamentals

Both Wright and Orr wrote an essay for The Fundamentals. In those essays they outlined their theistic evolutionary views. Read what happens in these enlighten days ...

The few articles that dealt with the question of the relationship between religion and science show at this point within the emerging Fundamentalist movement, there was an allowance for a position that argued for the compatibility of certain forms of evolutionary theory and the biblical record. George Frederick Wright, a geologist from Oberlin College, Ohio, argued that evolution need not exclude God’s Creative work: “If anything is to be evolved in an orderly manner from the resident forces of primordial matter it must first have been involved through the creative act of the Divine Being”(Marsden, 1980: 122). Similarly, James Orr, a professor of theology at the United Free Church College in Glasgow, argued that “‘Evolution,’ in short, is coming to be recognized as but a new name for ‘creation,’ only that the creative power works from within, instead of, as in the old conception, in an external, plastic fashion. It is, however, creation none the less” (The Fundamentals, Vol 4: 103). These views were edited out of the Orr and Wright articles in the 1958 and 1990 editions of The Fundamentals, making their articles more in line with the complete rejection of any form of evolution teaching that came to characterize Fundamentalism after the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in 1925.

I suggest you look for an old copy of The Fundamentals. One printed prior to 1958.

Richard W Foley, “The Fundamentals” in Brenda E. Brasher (ed), Encyclopedia of Fundamentalism (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 187. (article pp.186-188)

Note
• Marsden , 1980 is George M Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
• The Fundamentals, Vol4 - The Fundamentals: A Testimony of Truth, 12 Vols. (Chicago: Testimony Publishing, 1910-1925).