About the time I started subscribing to the Sword of the Lord, John R. Rice got crosswise with Bob Jones Jr. over something. Exactly where their differences lay was never really very clear to me. But for a couple of years or so, Rice refused to carry any ads for Bob Jones University in his newspaper. That war was going on when I first encountered the fundamentalist movement. These two men, each of whom wanted to be seen as the dominant voice in the fundamentalist movement, were publicly at odds with one another. My strong feeling even then was that if fundamentalists allowed their movement to continue in that direction, they would soon be so fragmented that it would soon be impossible to speak of fundamentalism as a single, coherent movement. That is exactly what happened. And it happened sooner than I anticipated. When John Rice died in 1980, there was a war among his followers about who would become his successor and take his place as the de facto spokesperson and figurehead at the helm of the movement. Twenty-five years later, there is still no clear successor to John R. Rice as the leading figure of the fundamentalist movement. Today’s fundamentalists are more fragmented than ever. There are no clear leaders in the movement who are recognized and affirmed as leaders by the movement as a whole. Fundamentalists are not moving together in any clear direction. The fundamentalist movement is virtually dead....Excerpt from Dead Right: The Failure of Fundamentalism, by Phil Johnson, Executive Director of "Grace to You".
....it seems to me that any movement that could lionize Jack Hyles and produce hundreds of Hyles clones while deliberately exaggerating petty disagreements in order to portray almost every conservative evangelical outside the fundamentalist movement as a dangerous heretic really needs to die. And it would be my hope that whatever takes its place would be less superficial, more sober-minded, more doctrinally sound, and more faithful to Scripture than the party that always dutifully agreed with John R. Rice when he insisted that he was a great scholar....
....most fundamentalist leaders regard Charles Finney as a hero. They overlook his Pelagianism. They imitate his pragmatism. And some of them have even absorbed elements of his perfectionism. But Finney denied that the righteousness of Christ could be imputed to sinners, or that the guilt of sinners could be imputed to Christ. In other words, he denied the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. He rejected the classic Protestant understanding of justification by faith and held the view that it was the sinner’s own duty to convert himself. Yet fundamentalists have made him an icon. John R. Rice called Finney one of the greatest evangelists who ever lived. Yet the same fundamentalists who try to make a hero out of a heretic like Charles Finney will look for reasons to criticize any living Bible teacher or popular speaker who is outside the boundaries of the fundamentalist movement. They have to do that in order to justify a cultish devotion to their unbiblical application of the principle of separation.
Fundamentalism never had a leader and fundamentalist are not great followers. So that point is moot, especially based on the author's "feelings" as it were.
There were always and will always be camps among fundies.
One of the great things about Dr. Rice is that he accepted and gave a platform to so many men.
And within that was his downfall, he had grace towards those who mislead him and lied to him, like Billy Graham.
Phil Johnson's gripe with the Sword of the Lord is that later successors of John Rice exposed McArthurs false teachings on the eternal Sonship of Christ, which McArthur taught heresies about.
"On the historic, orthodox, creedal view that the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is immanent and eternal, this new Bible did indeed "let the systems go." The notations on Hebrews 1:5 and 7:3 demolished the historic creedal view that Christ is the Eternal Son of God, hence there is no eternal and immanent Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is not "new," but compared to the view of Bible doctrine expressed in the Creeds, Confessions, and Theological "standards," it is heterodox. In other writings, MacArthur has also expressed the view which makes the Trinity a "nameless" unity, as he believes the "Son" is a "role" assumed by the "second person" in the flesh, which also implies the "Father" is a "role" assumed by the "first person." MacArthur contends in his Study Bible that "Sonship" refers to Christ in the "role" of "Son" which supposedly began in a "point of time" when He was incarnated via the virgin birth. This birth constituted Him as the "Son." This is sometimes called "incarnational sonship." MacArthur uses the Syriac Pershitta translation on Hebrews 7:3 to bring the reading of the passage more in line with his theory. We view Hebrews 7:3 as one of the strongest Biblical affirmations of the Eternal Sonship of the "Son," and the MacArthur note demolishes this great truth from that passage. (Excerpted from a 7/21/97 e-mail from Bob Ross of Pilgrim Publications.) In contrast, the Bible teaches the Eternal Sonship of Christ -- that He was the Son in eternity past. To deny that the attribute of eternality is inherent in Sonship (rather than conferred by incarnation), is, in effect, a denial of the "equality" of the "Son" with God -- a very serious heresy! To make matters worse, MacArthur branded as "heretics" those who held to the historical, orthodox, Biblical view of Eternal Sonship -- he labeled the Biblical view as a "heretical idea" and he associated it with "cultists who deny Christ's deity." Based on his concept of "Sonship," MacArthur specifically denounced the Eternal Sonship of Christ as follows: "He [Christ] is no 'eternal son' always subservient to God, always less than God, always under God. ... It [Son] is his human title, and we should never get trapped in the heretical idea that Jesus Christ is eternally subservient to God" (Commentary on Hebrews, 1983, pp. 28-29). In that same Commentary, MacArthur associated Eternal Sonship with "cultists" who imply that eternality of the Son means "inferiority" to God. Also, in his The Sonship of Christ booklet (published by the IFCA), MacArthur so defined and distorted the "eternal generation" of the Son that he felt justified in branding it as being "meaningless and confusing" (p. 9). He alleged that "orthodox teachers" who hold to "eternal generation" "echo an element" of the "false belief" of "cultists who deny Christ's deity." He equated this with the idea that Christ was "created." [Excerpted and/or adapted from a 11/17/97 e-mail from Bob Ross of Pilgrim Publications.]"
Go figure, an enemy of fundamentalism tries to smear Dr. Rice.