Ignorant Fundamentalists?: Ministerial Education as a factor in the Fundamentalist/Modernist Controversy in the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec, 1927-1933

Abstract

The fundamentalists that left the Baptist Convention of Ontario and
Quebec in 1927 have been labelled ‘ignorant fundamentalists’ because
they allegedly possessed less formal education. Reprising Walter Ellis’
1974 research, a more detailed study of the education of those pastors
who remained with the Baptist Convention and those who left shows
little difference in qualifications. The ‘ignorance’ attributed to the
fundamentalists by the modernists was illustrative of differing views of
what Baptist higher education should be. While the course offerings at
McMaster University represented a desire to promote Baptist social
advancement and wider participation in Canadian society, the new
fundamentalist school begun by the separatists - Toronto Baptist
Seminary - explicitly rejected innovations in scholarly understandings
such as the teaching of evolution and the higher criticism of the Bible.
Although both modernists and fundamentalists retained their attachment
to Baptist piety, their approaches to theological education demonstrate
differing reactions to the social and intellectual changes of the early
twentieth century in Canada.