Fundamental Baptist Quotes

Since Jimmy Carter, religious fundamentalists play a major role in elections. He was the first president who made a point of exhibiting himself as a born again Christian. That sparked a little light in the minds of political campaign managers: Pretend to be a religious fanatic and you can pick up a third of the vote right away. Nobody asked whether Lyndon Johnson went to church every day. Bill Clinton is probably about as religious as I am, meaning zero, but his managers made a point of making sure that every Sunday morning he was in the Baptist church singing hymns.

76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces

You didn't learn the Bible as a Fundamentalist. You learned fragments of Old Testament legalism mixed with Behaviorism & Nietzschean ethics

To live as God meant us to live, we must trust him, and—to no small extent—trust those made in his image. Everyone in the Bible from Adam and Eve to the rogue rulers in the book of Revelation showed their evil fundamentally by denying God’s authority and usurping it as their own.

what those men did to you, none of that was God. That was abuse. That god, the one they believe in, that’s a fictitious and false god. He doesn’t exist. God is a God of love and compassion and humility. And you should FIRE that god from your childhood! Just fire him!

One of the greatest accusations against us by the cult was that we were “broad brushing” all the IFB churches, but with an estimated eight to ten thousand survivors speaking out on the Internet, telling the same stories from their experiences within IFB churches from all over the country, we finally put that accusation to rest. Dozens of public and private Facebook groups and blogs are now highlighting their abuses. That was precisely what the mob bosses feared: We could prove the entire cult was rife with sexual abuse cover-ups and we had a mountain of evidence to back up our assertions. To my knowledge there is no religious cult anywhere with more people speaking out through social media about their physical, emotional, sexual, and spiritual abuse than the former members of the IFB.

Karl Popper urges us to be constantly on our guard against the fashionable disease of our time: the assumption that things cannot be taken at their face value, that an apparent syllogism must be the rationale of an irrational motive, that a human avowal must conceal some self-seeking baseness. (Freud assures us that Leonardo’s John the Baptist is a homosexual symbol, his upward-pointing index finger seeking to penetrate the fundament of the universe; art historians know that it is a centuries-old cliché of Christian iconography.)

But as I reflected on what the president could have done or said differently, I also remembered what it felt like in the weeks following 9/11. When, for a few glorious weeks, we were all united as Americans. For a brief time, it didn’t seem to matter if you were black, white, or brown. We were all brothers and sisters because we were Americans. We shared certain values, a certain past, a certain goal. We haven’t really seen that since. Charlottesville, I knew, had the same potential to unite us. But Trump’s response derailed that opportunity. America didn’t need a stock statement. The country was pleading for a serious discussion about race, about our fundamental need to completely stamp out the Klan and neo-Nazis. I couldn’t help but think of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing and the Charleston church shooting. Emmett Till and Jimmie Lee Jackson. Black Codes and the Southern Manifesto. Trump, I felt, had betrayed black America. And Jewish America. And American decency.

In a sense the rise of Anabaptism was no surprise. Most revolutionary movements produce a wing of radicals who feel called of God to reform the reformation. And that is what Anabaptism was, a voice calling the moderate reformers to strike even more deeply at the foundations of the old order. Like most counterculture movements, the Anabaptists lacked cohesiveness. No single body of doctrine and no unifying organization prevailed among them. Even the name Anabaptist was pinned on them by their enemies. It meant rebaptizer and was intended to associate the radicals with heretics in the early church and subject them to severe persecution. The move succeeded famously. Actually, the Anabaptists rejected all thoughts of rebaptism because they never considered the ceremonial sprinkling they received in infancy as valid baptism. They much preferred Baptists as a designation. To most of them, however, the fundamental issue was not baptism. It was the nature of the church and its relation to civil governments. They had come to their convictions like most other Protestants: through Scripture. Luther had taught that common people have a right to search the Bible for themselves. It had been his guide to salvation; why not theirs? As a result, little groups of Anabaptist believers gathered about their Bibles. They discovered a different world in the pages of the New Testament. They found no state-church alliance, no Christendom. Instead they discovered that the apostolic churches were companies of committed believers, communities of men and women who had freely and personally chosen to follow Jesus. And for the sixteenth century, that was a revolutionary idea. In spite of Luther’s stress on personal religion, Lutheran churches were established churches. They retained an ordained clergy who considered the whole population of a given territory members of their church. The churches looked to the state for salary and support. Official Protestantism seemed to differ little from official Catholicism. Anabaptists wanted to change all that. Their goal was the “restitution” of apostolic Christianity, a return to churches of true believers. In the early church, they said, men and women who had experienced personal spiritual regeneration were the only fit subjects for baptism. The apostolic churches knew nothing of the practice of baptizing infants. That tradition was simply a convenient device for perpetuating Christendom: nominal but spiritually impotent Christian society. The true church, the radicals insisted, is always a community of saints, dedicated disciples in a wicked world. Like the missionary monks of the Middle Ages, the Anabaptists wanted to shape society by their example of radical discipleship—if necessary, even by death. They steadfastly refused to be a part of worldly power including bearing arms, holding political office, and taking oaths. In the sixteenth century this independence from social and civic society was seen as inflammatory, revolutionary, or even treasonous.

In the first years after the Revolutionary War, Baptist evangelicals in the South as well as throughout the country were deeply opposed to slavery. They believed that all were equal in the sight of God, criticized the categories of race and class, and embraced the cause of freedom for African Americans.

The Baptist teaching that all are equal in the sight of God seemed to run right up against the notion that any human being had a right to own another.

As the Protestant denominations—Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist and others—were carried into the slave states of the South, into the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas, their churches, pastors, and congregants were dipped in the culture and economy of the South, and increasingly found it necessary to defend and justify the practice of human bondage.

The revival movement was responsible for a tremendous spread of Christianity among slaves in the South. Slaves came in their thousands to camp meetings organized mainly by Baptists and Methodists, where they listened to the same sermons, succumbed to the same transports of emotion, and pledged themselves to the same spiritual renewal as white revivalists. At times white slave owners were known to undergo conversion at a revival meeting and then decide to free their slaves.

And even those who claim to read the Bible literally and to lead their lives according to its precepts are, in actual practice, highly selective about which parts of the Bible they live by and which they don't. Jesus' condemnations of wealth and war are generally ignored; so are Levitical prohibitions on eating pork, wearing mixed fabrics and so forth. Though legalistic Christians accuse nonlegalistic Christians of selective interpretation and relativistic morality (of adjusting the Bible, in short, to suit their own lifestyles and prejudices), what is usually happening is that nonlegalists are, as the Baptist tradition puts it, reading the Bible with Jesus as their criterion, while the legalists are, without any philosophical consistency whatsoever, embracing those laws and doctrines that affirm their own predilections and prejudices and ignoring the rest.

Immediately after the war, blacks separated from white churches to start their own thriving churches. Tens of thousands of freedmen joined the new black Baptist churches, which quickly became the most important centers of community life in black townships and rural villages. Whites accused these churches of being spawning grounds for social and political discontent, which they undoubtedly were. Black resistance to the Klan’s violence and the attempts by white politicians to deprive blacks of civil rights and access to education was centered in the black churches. Individual white Baptists were ambivalent toward black Baptists. Many were suspicious of the danger they thought the blacks posed to white interests, and many still viewed the blacks as little better than jungle animals who were aping their betters. However, many white Baptists, although they had supported or fought for the Confederacy, seemed to genuinely desire the education and uplifting of blacks.

The first Baptist missionaries had reached Texas in 1812 in company with the first white American settlers who crossed the Red River. By 1848, there still were only 950 Baptists in the state, 250 of them black slaves. Baptists were a somewhat radical sect in those days. They believed that blacks and whites were all the children of God, equal in the sight and judgment of God, and equally deserving of salvation, so Baptist missionaries were sent out to both the slaves and to the whites.

However, many of the Baptists in attendance were impressed with Hitler’s conservative politics and crusades for “social morality.” After his return to the U.S. from Berlin, Boston’s John Bradbury said: “It was a great relief to be in a country where salacious sex literature cannot be sold, where putrid motion pictures and gangster films cannot be shown. The new Germany has burned great masses of corrupting books and magazines along with its bonfires of Jewish and communistic libraries.” And the Fifth Baptist World Congress itself pronounced that “Chancellor Hitler gives to the temperance movement the prestige of his personal example since he neither uses intoxicants nor smokes.”[134]

M. E. Dodd, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, expressed his belief that Hitler’s moves against German Jews were unfortunately necessary because they had used their strengths “for self-aggrandizement to the injury of the German people,” and he charged that “since the war some 200,000 Jews from Russia and other Eastern places had come to Germany. Most of these were Communist agitators against the government.

Most Texas Klan supporters saw no contradiction between the politics of the Klan and the fundamentalist theology of the Baptist churches many of them attended on Sunday mornings.

In the Baptist faith, you choose to be baptized when you are ready. It’s for believers only, and it’s up to you. You don’t just baptize an infant and make the decision for them, which is kind of cool because for a religion that can be painted as so confining, individual choice is a fundamental part of being Baptist.

Fundamentalism then has become a rather specific self-designation. Though outsiders to the movement sometimes use the term broadly to designate any militant conservative, those who call themselves fundamentalists are predominantly separatist Baptist dispensationalists.

The Baptists believed that before the arrival of the new covenant, the covenant of grace was not formally given, but only announced and promised (revealed). This distinction is fundamental to the federalism of the 1689 Confession. Nehemiah Coxe, the likely editor of this confession of faith, firmly maintains this distinction between the revelation and the administration:

In other words: forgiving is about abandoning the notion that you have to harbor a lifelong grudge against someone. If you do, you can never really be happy. That is why forgiveness is so important. And it calls for a fundamental change in the way you view a person you could forgive. Rather than viewing that person as one who victimized you, you must view him or her as one who will help you get closer to your heart.

One of the more notable features of the life of our Lord, as recorded in Scripture, is the fact that references to the outside world are overwhelmingly political. When Jesus was born, Augustus was Caesar (Luke 2:1) and Quirinius was governor of Syria (Luke 2:2). Herod the Great was ruler in Judea (Luke 1:5) and wielded his power to the grief of many mothers in Bethlehem. Tiberius was Caesar when John the Baptist began his ministry (Luke 3:1–2), and Luke includes a number of interesting names when he dates the arrival of the forerunner of the Messiah. Tiberius was still emperor when Jesus died, and this political orientation is sealed by the fact that Pontius Pilate was included in the Apostles’ Creed. The New Testament is silent when it comes to the other outside celebrities. We are told very little about their poets, their actors, their singers. We know little of their architects from the pages of the New Testament, even though they had magnificent architects. No, Scripture focuses on the political rulers, and this is because it is where the fundamental challenge was mounted.

Everyone in the United States of America had an opinion on the Westboro Baptist Church and anyone who said they didn't was lying.

am not writing for scientists. I only note in passing that for scientific gatekeepers to continue to enforce atheism as a fundamental dogma is as counterproductive now as it once was for scientists stuck in Catholic orthodoxy to insist against evidence that the earth was flat. Truth cannot be suppressed forever, so the academic dam is certain to break. And when it does, the revelations soon to follow about who and what and where we are will change all humanity for the better. It isn’t only scientific oxen that we will be goring here, but some religious folks will be incensed. I am sorry about that. If you prefer to believe whatever it is that your own religion teaches, all I ask is that you be open-minded whenever your own death starts to happen. As you will see, one way to give yourself unnecessary grief is to insist on a certain kind of afterlife. But otherwise, the good news is that the afterlife is not a guessing-game. Catholics and Baptists both get into heaven. And Jews and Buddhists. And everybody else.

From dispensationalism grew another ‘ism’: ‘Fundamentalism’ was a name derived from twelve volumes of essays issued in the USA by a combination of British and American conservative writers between 1910 and 1915, entitled The Fundamentals. Central to these essays was an emphasis on five main points: the impossibility of the biblical text being mistaken in its literal meaning (‘verbal inerrancy’), the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Birth, the idea that Jesus died on the Cross in the place of sinners (an atonement theory technically known as penal substitution) and the proposition that Christ was physically resurrected to return again in flesh. Fundamentalists created organizations to promote this case: in 1919 the World’s Christian Fundamentals Organization was founded, expanding through its use of mass rallies from a mainly Baptist base to affect most Protestant Churches.