The scientific advancements of the 19th century led to a lot of skepticism about Christian ideals and Biblical stories. This created a split that divided people according to their reaction to these scientific advancements; modernists believed the science and shifted in to more conception and open interpretation of the Bible that allowed for scientific advancement in the new world. The fundamentalists were a group created out of the backlash to this idea, that said that the Bible was fact and in order to be a true Christian you must believe in the five fundamentals of the faith. Both sides felt their way was the only way for Christianity to continue, and this created conflict.

Fosdick describes the fundamentalists much in the same way Luther described the Catholic church; they believed in the miracles of Christianity and prescribed to a type of worship that maintained those ideals, creating their five fundamentals in order to maintain them. In contrast, and the reason for the fundamentalists’ formation, were the modernists. They focused more on the ideas and teachings of Christianity and rejected to miracles that the bible used to teach them. Their focus was how to bring new and scientific knowledge into their faith.

Fundamentalists believed the Bible to be the absolute word of God, and they viewed everything in it as scientifically and historically accurate. Modernists viewed the Bible less statically, thinking that Christ was a representation of how God wanted us to live. Again, this meant that the modernists were able to reconcile their religion with the new information of the modern world. Fosdick was a modernist himself and therefore believed that trusting in science was the right path to take; he believed this was the only way for Christianity to survive in the new modern world that we are living in.

I have actually watched and read media that attempts to explain the miracles of the Bible using modern knowledge of science, and it creates a very interesting dynamic where practicing Christians seem to be contradicting themselves by searching out and explaining completely natural causes for seemingly supernatural happenings from the Bible. Ultimately I do see how the Bible’s authority can easily be diminished by these processes, because once a miracle is explained it is no longer wondrous. I think the best way for a Christian to rationalize this would be by taking a somewhat naturalist or enlightenment view on religion; the science that explains these miracles must be a work of God as well.