Teaching fundamentals is essential in sports. Fundamentals are also critically important in matters of faith.
Lyman Stewart (1840-1923) and his brother Milton owned the largest oil company in California, Union Oil, now Unocal. After working himself to exhaustion. Lyman’s doctor prescribed a six-month hiatus to regain his health. He did so, but ever the entrepreneur, Lyman imagined a literary project to stem the tide of modernism in the early twentieth century. He was alarmed by the corrosive influence of theological liberalism and declining confidence in the Bible, given the popularity of Darwin’s theory of human origins. The result was The Fundamentals, a collection of ninety essays written in 1910-1915 by sixty-four authors on core Christian doctrines such as the authority of Scripture and the deity of Christ. Lyman wrote in the forward that the essays were intended to serve as “a new statement of the fundamentals of Christianity.” The brothers remained anonymous in this ambitious enterprise, identifying themselves only as “two Christian laymen.” They covered the printing and distribution costs of three million copies of this twelve-volume collection to every pastor, seminary professor and missionary in America. It gave impetus to a movement called fundamentalism, minus the negative stereotypes associated with it in common culture today. Lyman and editors were careful to strike a conciliatory attitude, rejecting any essay that struck a belligerent tone.
Lyman wrote to Milton, “We must admit that we, you and I, are now old men. We have been so busy, so occupied with the affairs of this life, that old age has crept upon us unawares, and it is time we were taking seriously the real business of the Christian life…The Holy Spirit has given us this admonition, ‘Charge them that are rich in this world, that they not be high minded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things, to enjoy, that they do good, that they be rich in good works, ready to distribute, willing to communicate, laying up in store for themselves a good foundation, against the time to come, that they may lay hold on eternal life'” (1 Tim. 6.17-19).
Today’s prayer, attributed to Barnabas mentioned in Scripture, was likely a second century liturgy commemorating this exemplary biblical leader and seeking God’s direction in the right exercise of our gifts and abilities: