Quote:
Originally Posted by WT Sharpe
In 1910, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church came up with the following list which they referred to as the "Five Fundamentals" of the Christian religion:
1) The inspiration of the Bible by the Holy Spirit and the inerrancy of Scripture as a result of this.
2) The virgin birth of Christ.
3) The belief that Christ's death was the atonement for sin.
4) The bodily resurrection of Christ.
5) The historical reality of Christ's miracles.
One who accepts these is, by definition, a fundamentalist.
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Wikipedia - whatever its veracity - has this as a definition of fundamentalism:
Quote:
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Fundamentalist Christianity, also known as Christian fundamentalism or fundamentalist evangelicalism is defined by its historian George M. Marsden as "militantly anti-modernist Protestant evangelicalism." Marsden explains that fundamentalists were evangelical Christians who in the twentieth century "militantly opposed both modernism in theology and the cultural changes that modernism endorsed. Militant opposition to modernism was what most clearly set off fundamentalism
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This second, I would suggest, comes closer to what the man on the Clapham omnibus would take to be fundamentalism. The definition you gave would seem to characterize some kind of basic beliefs of Christianity - and in that sense such beliefs are fundamental, but that is not the derogatory sense in which the word "fundamentalist" is bandied about.