What Are The Fundamentals? The 1910–1915 Books Behind a Movement

Apologetics Doctrine Church History

The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth is a set of about ninety essays defending the central teachings of the Christian faith. They came out in twelve paperback volumes between 1910 and 1915 and were mailed free to pastors, missionaries, theology students, Sunday school superintendents and other Christian workers across the English-speaking world. Two California businessmen, the brothers Lyman and Milton Stewart, paid for the whole project. In 1917 the essays were gathered into four volumes, and that four-volume edition is the one you can read free in TheWay Library.

The books are also where the word "fundamentalist" comes from. Here is the short history, and what the essays actually say.

Who paid for The Fundamentals

Lyman Stewart was an oil man, one of the founders of the Union Oil Company of California, and a man who gave a great deal of his money to Christian work. He also helped found the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. His brother Milton joined him in funding the books but asked that his name be kept out of it.

R. A. Torrey, who saw the project through to the end, tells the story in the preface to the 1917 edition:

In 1909 God moved two Christian laymen to set aside a large sum of money for issuing twelve volumes that would set forth the fundamentals of the Christian faith, and which were to be sent free to ministers of the gospel, missionaries, Sunday School superintendents, and others engaged in aggressive Christian work throughout the English speaking world.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 1, Preface

The books carried no price. That was the point. The brothers wanted every Christian worker who could be reached to have a plain statement of the faith in hand, at no cost to them. By most accounts more than three million copies went out by mail.

The editors: Dixon, Meyer and Torrey

A committee oversaw the publishing, and three men served in turn as its executive secretary, which in practice meant the editor.

A. C. Dixon, a Baptist pastor who had led the Moody Church in Chicago, edited the first volumes. He left in 1911 to become pastor of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London.
Louis Meyer took his place and served until his death.
R. A. Torrey, the evangelist and Bible teacher who was then dean of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, finished the series.

Torrey's preface puts it simply: "We were able to bring out these twelve volumes according to the original plan." You can read his whole account in the Preface to Volume 1.

Who wrote the essays

The writers came from the United States, Canada, Britain, Ireland and Germany. They were pastors, professors, missionaries, Bible teachers and lay people, and they belonged to many different churches: Presbyterian, Baptist, Anglican, Methodist, Congregational and others. Some were famous in their day. Among them were the Scottish theologian James Orr, the Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield, the Bishop of Durham H. C. G. Moule, the preacher G. Campbell Morgan, and Bishop J. C. Ryle. Others came from outside the pulpit: Sir Robert Anderson had headed the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard, Howard A. Kelly was one of the founding professors of medicine at Johns Hopkins, Philip Mauro was a New York patent lawyer, and C. T. Studd had played cricket for England before he went to China as a missionary.

They did not agree on every point. What held them together was the conviction that the Bible is the Word of God and that what it teaches about Christ is not up for revision. For the full list of writers and titles, see The Fundamentals: Full Contents and Writers.

What The Fundamentals cover

The four-volume edition of 1917 arranged the essays by subject, so each volume has its own theme.

Volume 1: the Bible and its critics. The higher criticism, the authorship of the Pentateuch, one Isaiah, the date of Daniel, the early chapters of Genesis, archaeology and science. See What The Fundamentals Say About Higher Criticism.
Volume 2: Scripture, God and Christ. The inspiration of the Bible, fulfilled prophecy, the existence of God, the deity and virgin birth of Christ, His bodily resurrection, and the person of the Holy Spirit. See The Fundamentals on the Deity of Christ.
Volume 3: sin, salvation and mission. Sin and judgment, the atonement, grace, regeneration, justification by faith, then evangelism, the Sunday school, prayer and foreign missions. See The Fundamentals on Sin, Salvation and Missions.
Volume 4: the faith among its rivals. Modern philosophy, Darwinism, socialism, Millennial Dawn, Mormonism and Christian Science, along with essays on prayer, the Lord's day, money, the coming of Christ, and several personal testimonies. See The Fundamentals on Darwinism, the Cults and Personal Testimony.

The 1917 four-volume edition

When the twelve volumes were finished, the committee kept the work going for a time through the Bible Institute's magazine, The King's Business. Eventually the free copies ran out, but letters asking for them kept coming. The Bible Institute of Los Angeles held the printing plates, so it reissued the essays in four volumes "at the cheapest price possible." Torrey explains what went in:

All the articles that appeared in The Fundamentals, with the exception of a very few that did not seem to be in exact keeping with the original purpose of The Fundamentals, will be published in this series.
The Fundamentals, Vol. 1, Preface

TheWay Library follows the 1917 text. Two essays from Volume 4 are held back for now because their writers died after 1955 and the essays are still under copyright in the United Kingdom: "Modern Spiritualism Briefly Tested by Scripture" by Algernon J. Pollock and "The Hope of the Church" by John McNicol.

How "fundamentalist" came from these books

The word "fundamentalist" did not appear in the books themselves. It came a few years later. In 1920 Curtis Lee Laws, editor of the Baptist paper the Watchman-Examiner, proposed the name for those who were ready to do "battle royal for the Fundamentals." The name caught on, and it has stayed in use ever since. Whatever the word has come to mean since then, it first pointed back to these essays and the faith they defended.

The Fundamentals and the "five fundamentals"

People often mix these up, so it helps to keep them apart. In 1910, the same year the first volume of The Fundamentals appeared, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. named five doctrines it held essential for its ministers: the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth of Christ, His substitutionary atonement, His bodily resurrection, and the reality of the miracles. Later writers often called this list the "five points" or "five fundamentals."

That list came from a church assembly, not from these books. The Fundamentals never boil the faith down to five points. They range much wider, over the Bible, God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, sin, grace, evangelism, missions, prayer and the return of Christ. They do defend each of the doctrines on the Presbyterian list, though, and the overlap is one reason the two get confused.

Why read The Fundamentals today

The questions these writers answered have not gone away. Is the Bible God's Word? Did Moses write the Law? Was Jesus born of a virgin, and did He rise bodily from the grave? Can a Christian hold to the Bible and still take science seriously? The essays answer in plain, confident language, and many of them are short enough to read in one sitting.

They also show what the first "fundamentalists" were like: scholars and pastors and lay people from many churches and several countries who believed the old faith was worth defending and worth spreading. The volumes on evangelism and missions make clear that they did not want only to win arguments. They wanted people saved.

All four volumes are free to read in TheWay Library: Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3 and Volume 4. More books in the same subject are on the Apologetics page.