Reflecting on the centennial of the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy, Theopolis contributor Tim Nichols asked me and Dr. Leithart what the five fundamentals of the faith were today. His thoughts went something like this:
Back in the early 20th century, in response to a ruinous drift away from the historic Christian faith, a broad-based movement in American Christianity argued for a vigorous defense and careful exposition of what they termed the “Five Fundamentals” of the Christian faith:
1. The inspiration and infallibility of the Bible
2. The virgin birth of Jesus Christ
3. Substitutionary atonement through Christ’s death on the cross
4. The bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ
5. The historicity of Jesus’ miracles
Of course these are not the five most important truths of Christianity for all time as though we had a prioritized list that fell from heaven on golden plates. These five truths are foundational elements of Christianity that were under attack at that historical moment. At other times, such a list might have included the deity of Christ (AD 325), the full deity and humanity of Christ (451), justification by faith (1517), if not all five solas, the necessity for individual new birth (1741), the true nature of the Holy Spirit’s ongoing ministry (1906), or biblical inerrancy (1978).
Having exhausted one attack on the vital core of the Christian faith, our crafty enemy will try another, and another, and another. While we know our struggle is not with flesh and blood, our enemy never seems to lack for apparently well-taught people who appear to reject all the old heresies and compromises but swallow the new ones whole. They aren’t entirely new ideas; instead, the heresies are brought back under a new name with a new brand and fashionable new ideas. These are the same folks Jesus derided for laying wreaths on the tombs of the dead prophets while persecuting the living ones. They have failed to learn the lessons of the past because they understand the old heresies as bad ideas and not as temptations.
The liquor ad always pictures the girl dancing at a party on Friday night, never the same girl passed out in a gutter early Saturday morning. However ugly they may look in hindsight, temptations always look good at the time: that’s what makes them tempting! The old heresies usually don’t look all that appealing today, but we need to learn to see how the temptation worked then. What were the social pressures, the prevailing philosophies, the material circumstances that made the heresy look like such a good idea that we had to convene a council over it?
And so part of the pastoral task is to teach history so that we learn the lessons of the past. Another part is, having learned those lessons ourselves, to articulate continually the unchanging fundamentals of the Christian faith in a way that clearly cuts against the current set of temptations. There is an ever-present danger of being ready to win the battles of the past but woefully unprepared for the temptations of the present. So while I happily affirm and defend the creed of Nicaea, the definition of Chalcedon, the five solas of the Reformation, the five fundamentals of the early 20th century, and so on, if I stop there, I am not doing my job.
The need of the hour is to articulate the unchanging Christian faith in a way that cuts against today’s temptations. If you were to articulate five fundamentals of the Christian faith today to speak to the current set of temptations what would they be?
We thought Nichols’ question was a good one, so we asked journalist Rod Dreher, academic and philosopher Colin Redemer, Baptist pastor and historian Caleb Morell, and law professor Eric Enlow what they considered the emerging Fundamentals for a new day.
If you, dear reader, scintillated by the below submissions, write your own list of five, consider submitting for publication review to jack m waters [at] gmail [dot] com.
—Jack Waters, Executive Editor
Rod Dreher, Journalist
1. Christian anthropology is central. In the early church, the main theological conflicts were about the person of Christ. Today, the question is: Who is Man? What are the limits of our God-given human nature? What does the biblical model of human nature tell us about what we can and cannot do to and with our bodies? What threats does technology, especially artificial intelligence, pose to human nature? Christians will not know what threatens to abolish man if they don’t have a clear idea of what man is.
2. Christianity is an embodied faith. Today, the abstracted, intellectual approach to the Christian faith that modernity has produced is not sufficient to keep most Christian anchored in authentic Christian tradition. What we do with our bodies—not only in worship, but in everyday life—matters as much as what we think with our heads.
3. Christianity must return to the numinous and mysterious. The Enlightenment account of reality, broadly speaking, is too limited. Not only can it not explain paranormal phenomena that many people encounter in their lives, but there is something about human nature that craves a sense of transcendence. This is why so many young people today are turning to the occult. Christianity, especially pre-modern Christianity, has something substantive and important to say about this.
4. Christians must be intentionally countercultural. In the post-Christian West, it is more important now for Christians to shore up their own faith communities than it is to reach out to convert others. Both evangelism and discipleship are necessary, but discipleship is by far the more urgent challenge. There is no escaping the world, but if Christians are going to be faithful representatives of Christ to the unbelieving world, they have to know who they are. The Benedict Option, therefore, is less an option than an imperative.
5. Christians should embrace practical ecumenism. The theological differences among the churches (Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox) are important conceptually, but practically they have ceased to mean as much as they did when the world was still recognizably Christian. “Small-o orthodox” Christians (those from the various churches who still recognize that God’s revealed truth is authoritative) should not surrender their confessional distinctives; that would be false ecumenism. Rather, they should work to downplay them for the sake of standing by each other when facing attacks from the secular world, such as defending religious liberty, working together on pro-life initiatives, defending homeschooling, and the like.
Rod Dreher is an American writer who lives in Budapest. His books include Living In Wonder (2024), Live Not By Lies (2020), and The Benedict Option (2017).
Colin Chan Redemer, Political Philosopher
- The Word became Flesh in Jesus (Jn 1:14).
- Jesus is fully man (Matt 1; 4:2; Phil 2:7–9; Heb 2:17).
- He lived and died as testified in the gospels (Prov 30:5–6; Matt 27; Mk 15; Lk 23; Jn 19; 2 Tim 3:16–17; 2 Pet 1:20–21)
- He was bodily resurrected from the dead (1 Cor 15).
- He is truly present with us in the Eucharistic Celebration (Jn 6:53–58; 1 Cor 11:23–29).
“Behold, the man” says Pontius Pilate to the crowd as he presents a beaten broken body which, nevertheless, wears a crown (Jn 19:5). This man is the final answer about what constitutes a “human” and whether we are worth preserving (Ps 8:4–8). When Jesus tells Nicodemus that “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life,” we often miss the first and most obvious part: God loved the world (Jn 3:16). To the ancient Greco-Roman, this was a revelation: “gods” were objects to be loved and not persons who loved (Jer 10:5; 1 Ki 18:20–40; 1 Cor 12:2; cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1071–1075). They knew that man was a lover, but they did not know why (Ps 42:1). Our love for the world, care for humanity, yearning for just governance, and fruitful sustaining of a world for our descendants rely on belief in God who took on flesh out of love (1 Jn 4:19).
His love compels our loving response, which is to be sacramentally remembered to Christ’s body, the church (Rom 6:10). While there are doctrinal and dogmatic fundamentals which we must not lose track of, we are in particular danger of believing mere intellect will suffice to respond to the chaos of a world bent on transcending itself by its technical powers (Col 2:6–15). Gnostics believe they can escape the body and the world (1 Tim 6:20–21; Rev 21). The wise answer to many voices is silence (Matt 7:6). When Monica, Augustine’s mother, begged an elder to meet with her young son and refute him because of his errors he declined, for Augustine was not yet “suitably disposed” to hear the response (Matt 13:10–17).
Monica was advised to continue weeping over her lost son out of love for him (Jn 11:35). She had to wait for him to hear a word (Rom 10:17). Finally the word tolle lege came and touched his ears, and his eyes read scripture, and his heart blazed with the love that made the world (Rom 10:18). He was baptized and communed and accepted as a body into the body of Christ (Eph 1–6). I suspect our moment of anthropological crisis will similarly be resolved when we embrace fruitful life with Jesus in the church through Word and sacrament (Jn 15:1–8). He is the man, and we will not be ourselves until we behold him rightly (Mk 8:22–25).
Colin Chan Redemer is a Teaching Professor at St. Mary’s College of California, Managing Director at Beck & Stone, and Director of Education at American Reformer. He also serves as a Fellow of the Henning Institute and is a board member for the Classical Learning Test. He has recently republished Thomas Traherne’s Protestant virtue ethics Made Like the Maker.
Caleb Morell, Pastor & Historian
The fundamental truths of Christianity do not change, but the points of contest do. To articulate “fundamentals” today is to identify those doctrines and realities that stand most squarely in the path of our culture’s rebellion.
1. God reveals himself in both Scripture and nature. His Word is our final and sufficient authority which proclaims salvation through Christ alone. Yet God also speaks through creation, making known his eternal power and moral law on the conscience of every human being (Rom 1:19–20; 2:14–15). Thus, the same God who justifies sinners by faith in Christ also holds all men accountable to his creational design.
2. God is the author of life from conception to death. Life is not a human possession but a divine gift entrusted to our stewardship and never to be discarded. The assault on unborn children, the genetic engineering of embryos, and the growing normalization of euthanasia are direct denials of God’s prerogative as Creator and Lord.
3. God created humanity male and female. This binary is neither social construct nor evolutionary accident. It is a fixed and good reality of creation, expressive of God’s wisdom and essential to human flourishing. Attempts to erase or redefine male and female strike at the created order itself.
4. Marriage and sex is only between a man and a woman for life. This covenant union is the foundation of family and society, a living parable of Christ and the church. Sexual autonomy and the redefinition of marriage are not merely moral lapses but rejections of God’s covenantal design.
5. The Bible teaches a pattern of male authority in the church and home. Rooted in creation and reaffirmed in redemption, this order is not arbitrary or oppressive but a reflection of God’s wise and good purposes. To abandon it is to cut against the grain of both nature and Scripture.
Taken together, these five fundamentals underscore a simple truth: the church’s present battle is not merely over doctrine but over reality itself. The God who saves us in Christ is the same God who made the world and ordered it well. To confess him today requires the courage to affirm both.
Caleb Morell is an Assistant Pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. and author of A Light on the Hill: The Surprising Story of How a Local Church in the Nation’s Capital Influenced Evangelicalism (Crossway, 2025).
Eric Enlow, Professor of Law
Theological “modernism,” a timeless tendency to distort Christianity into compatibility with contemporary worldly wisdom, is always with us. As a Christian law professor, I see the 20th century modernist-fundamentalist dispute recapitulated in the struggle among liberal and conservative Christians over legal principles, especially in relation to the image of God.
Twentieth century modernists, who were embarrassed by Scripture, promoted a science-friendly naturalized deism. Liberal Christians now promote a naturalized “imago deism,” abstracting away the biblical revelation about justice which embarrasses them before leftist elites. They transform imago Dei to human dignity and dignity to individual rights. Government must respect the image of God in man, they say, but for some reason not God. A stand against “imago deism” requires modern legal “fundamentalists” to maintain five biblical points:
1. The principal legal significance of man being made in God’s image, the only juristic deduction from it, is to punish murderers. Biblical reasoning must preserve the duty to punish such evil as the primary legal meaning of the imago Dei, not “human dignity.”
2. If governments must respect the image of God, then a fortiori they must respect God himself. The image of God means the government recognizes each individual’s legal personality and rights. It must also recognize the legal personality of God and his right to worship. God must be recognized as a legal person, the duties owed to him generative for all others, his rights normative for all others.
3. The image of God is not only in individual persons; the whole family, especially the married couple, is also an image of God. As at common law, it must be recognized as a united legal person no more justly destroyed without fault than an individual man. The whole family, with its plentiful divine significance, must be recognized as a legal person, including husband, wife, parents, children and other members of the household, an oikonomos indissoluble into individuals.
4. Churches also bear a social image of God. Liberals derive religious freedom from individual “dignity” to deny that churches have natural corporate legal personality. They derive the rights of churches from individual rights. This is inverted. Individual rights derive from the rights of the whole, which is the Body of Christ.
5. Magistrates’ official personality comes from God. Rulers are also images of God rather than artificial constructions of the positivist creative power of “Democracy” in some fantasy of social contractarianism. Their rights and duties primarily arise from their duty to image God.
Eric Enlow teaches law and Christian jurisprudence at Liberty University School of Law. He is also the dean emeritus of Handong International Law School in South Korea.