The Fundamentals on Sin, Salvation and Missions: Volume 3 Guide
Volume 3 of The Fundamentals is about the gospel itself and about carrying it to the world. It starts with sin, because the writers believed you cannot understand salvation until you understand what it saves from. It moves on to the atonement, grace, regeneration and justification by faith. Then, for more than half its length, it turns to evangelism and missions: preaching, personal soul winning, the Sunday school, prayer and the foreign field. It is the volume that best answers the idea that these writers only wanted to win arguments. You can read Volume 3 free in TheWay Library.
Sin is a fact
Thomas Whitelaw opens with The Biblical Conception of Sin. He notes that the Bible never stops to prove that sin is real. It takes sin for granted, because every honest person already knows it:
Holy Scripture undertakes no demonstration of the reality of sin. In all its statements concerning sin, sin is presupposed as a fact which can neither be controverted nor denied, neither challenged nor obscured.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 3, Chapter I
Charles B. Williams follows with Paul's Testimony to the Doctrine of Sin, a word study of Paul's many terms for sin in Romans, and shows why the subject cannot be skipped: "the sin question is back of one's theology, soteriology, sociology, evangelism, and ethics." Sir Robert Anderson's Sin and Judgment to Come begins with the Hebrew word for sin, which means to miss the mark, as the slingers of Benjamin did not.
Judgment to come
William C. Procter's What Christ Teaches Concerning Future Retribution limits itself to the words of Jesus. That was deliberate. Those who called the doctrine of hell harsh, he says, should remember who taught it most:
It also affords a sufficient answer to those who represent the doctrine as unreasonable and dishonoring to God, and who regard those who hold it as narrow minded and hard hearted, to remind them that all the very expressions which are most fiercely denounced in the present day fell from the lips of the Saviour who died for us, and came from the heart of the "Lover of souls." Surely we have no right to seek to be broader minded than He
The Fundamentals, Vol. 3, Chapter IV
The atonement
Two essays defend the substitutionary atonement, the teaching that Christ died in the sinner's place. Franklin Johnson's The Atonement begins with the witness of church history:
The Christian world as a whole believes in a substitutionary atonement. This has been its belief ever since it began to think.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 3, Chapter V
Dyson Hague's At-One-Ment by Propitiation traces the doctrine through the Old Testament sacrifices, the New Testament, and the creeds and confessions. He calls the atonement "Christianity in epitome" and ends with a warning about a gospel that keeps the name but loses the heart:
A Christianity without a Christ Divine, an atonement vicarious, and a Bible inspired, will never carry power.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 3, Chapter VI
Grace, regeneration and justification
C. I. Scofield, editor of the Scofield Reference Bible, writes on The Grace of God. He begins with the word itself:
Grace is an English word used in the New Testament to translate the Greek word, Charis, which means "favor," without recompense or equivalent.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 3, Chapter VII
Thomas Spurgeon, son of C. H. Spurgeon, follows with Salvation by Grace, a warm and personal essay that ends by picturing free grace as a good ship carrying the believer home.
Then come two chapters on the new birth. The first is by Thomas Boston, a Scottish minister who died in 1732, the oldest writer in this volume. His Nature of Regeneration is a plain list of things people mistake for being born again: church membership, baptism, a good upbringing, a cleaned-up life. Of education he says:
Education may chain up men's lusts, but cannot change their hearts. A wolf is still a ravenous beast, though it be in chains.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 3, Chapter IX
George W. Lasher's Regeneration, Conversion, Reformation sorts out the three words. Regeneration is the new birth, worked in the soul by God. Conversion and reformation, a turning and a better life, should follow from it, but either can happen without it, and Lasher warns against counting an outward change as the new birth. H. C. G. Moule, Bishop of Durham, then writes on Justification by Faith, the doctrine he calls "weighty alike with Scripture and with history," the main theme of Romans and Galatians and the watchword of the Reformation.
Evangelism: what to preach
The second part of the volume turns outward. L. W. Munhall's The Doctrines That Must Be Emphasized in Successful Evangelism says crowds and music do not make evangelism successful. The message does. He lists the doctrines God uses to save, among them sin, redemption through Christ's blood, the resurrection, regeneration, repentance and faith, and quotes the archaeologist A. H. Sayce:
Prof. A. H. Sayce once said, "Higher criticism saves no souls."
The Fundamentals, Vol. 3, Chapter XII
Howard Crosby's Preach the Word is a charge to preachers taken from 2 Timothy 4:2:
The Divine Spirit will only accompany the Divine Word. His mighty power will act only in His own way and by His own means.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 3, Chapter XIII
Personal work, the Sunday school and prayer
John Timothy Stone's Pastoral and Personal Evangelism makes the case for winning people one at a time, the way Jesus called His first disciples:
Jesus Christ won most of His followers and chose His Apostles one by one.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 3, Chapter XIV
Charles Gallaudet Trumbull, editor of the Sunday School Times, writes on The Sunday School's True Evangelism. He argues that the Sunday school is not a side program but the church itself studying the Word to bring people to Christ, train them, and send them out.
R. A. Torrey's The Place of Prayer in Evangelism may be the most quoted chapter in the volume:
The most important human factor in effective evangelism is PRAYER. Every great awakening in the history of the Church from the time of the Apostles until today has been the result of prayer. There have been great awakenings without much preaching, and there have been great awakenings with absolutely no organization, but there has never been a true awakening without much prayer.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 3, Chapter XVI
Foreign missions
Five chapters deal with missions. Robert E. Speer, secretary of the Presbyterian foreign missions board, opens with Foreign Missions, or World-Wide Evangelism. He grounds missions in the nature of God: if there is one God, He is God of every nation, and the gospel is for all of them.
Argument in behalf of foreign missions is generally either needless or useless. It is needless with believers; with unbelievers it is useless.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 3, Chapter XVII
Charles A. Bowen's A Message from Missions to the Modern Ministry turns the usual argument around. The churches at home, he says, need the mission field more than the mission field needs them, because that is where the fire is burning:
missions are not so much in need of the home church as the home church is in need of missions.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 3, Chapter XVIII
Henry W. Frost, who led the China Inland Mission in North America, writes on What Missionary Motives Should Prevail? and on Consecration, the second of which tells how he came to surrender his own life fully to God. Arthur T. Pierson's Testimony of Foreign Missions to the Superintending Providence of God reads mission history as God's work, opening with this line:
He is also in events; the whole of mission history is a mystery until read as His story.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 3, Chapter XXIV
The church and Rome
Three chapters deal with the church. T. W. Medhurst's Is Romanism Christianity? and J. M. Foster's Rome, the Antagonist of the Nation set out the Protestant case against the Roman Catholic system as the writers saw it. Medhurst's starting point is the gospel:
Christianity, as revealed in the Sacred Writings, is salvation by Christ.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 3, Chapter XXI
Bishop J. C. Ryle's The True Church then answers the question of which church saves. The true church, he says, is made up of all true believers in Christ, whatever building they meet in:
I do not ask where you go on Sunday; I only ask, "Do you belong to the one true Church?"
The Fundamentals, Vol. 3, Chapter XXIII
The purposes of the incarnation
G. Campbell Morgan's long meditation, The Purposes of the Incarnation, asks why the Word was made flesh and answers from Scripture, ending with the hope of Christ's return. The volume closes with Tributes to Christ and the Bible, a collection of sayings about Christ and Scripture from famous men, among them Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, who were not known as active Christians.
Reading Volume 3
Volume 3 is the easiest of the four to use in a church or a class. Its chapters on prayer, personal evangelism and missions read like sermons, and many are short. A good plan is to read Whitelaw on sin, Hague on the atonement, Boston on regeneration, then Torrey on prayer and Speer on missions. That takes you from the problem to the cure to the call.
For the history behind the set, see What Are The Fundamentals? Volume 2's case for the deity of Christ is covered in The Fundamentals on the Deity of Christ, and Volume 4 in The Fundamentals on Darwinism, the Cults and Personal Testimony. Every chapter is listed in the full contents.
Volume 3 is free to read in TheWay Library.