Fundamentalist Religion

The following quote from Kirsopp Lake (1872-1946) is important and enlightening because it is a frank admission by a liberal scholar that fundamentalism rather than liberalism is the closer representative of the historic teachings of Christianity.

“...it is a mistake, often made by educated persons who happen to have but little knowledge of historical theology, to suppose that Fundamentalism is a new and strange form of thought. It is nothing of the kind: it is the partial and uneducated survival of a theology which was once universally held by all Christians. How many were there, for instance, in Christian churches in the eighteenth century who doubted the infallible inspiration of all Scripture? A few, perhaps, but very few. No, the Fundamentalist may be wrong; I think that he is. But it is we who have departed from the tradition, not he, and I am sorry for the fate of anyone who tries to argue with a Fundamentalist on the basis of authority. The Bible and the corpus theologicum of the Church is on the Fundamentalist side.” (The Religion of Yesterday and To-morrow, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925, pp. 61-62)

Oh, that the modern liberal would learn to admit as much as Kirsopp Lake! Yes, it is the liberal who has departed from traditional Christian theology. Let them not pretend otherwise.

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[i] Lake goes on to look down on Fundamentalism as not “the intelligent survival of the old theology.” It is, however, the survivor rather than the position of liberals. Kirsopp Lake (1872-1946) was a church historian, New Testament scholar, textual critic, Greek Palaeographer, and a professor at Harvard Divinity School. Born in England, he came to the United States in 1913 and taught at Harvard from 1914 until his retirement in 1938. Not only did he reject the fundamental theology of the Bible, he rejected its fundamental morals as well. In 1932 he divorced his wife and married a former student, with whom he had a child four years earlier. 
Of the name “Fundamentalist” Lake wrote, “This name is commonly used in America; it is not, I think, widely known elsewhere, but it is easy to understand, and I do not know any word to take its place which would be equally intelligible on both sides of the Atlantic.”
corpus theologicum means the body of theology.