"The terms fundamentalism and traditionalism are unfortunately interchanged in common discourse. For the purposes of this chapter it is important to make a clear distinction between them. Traditionalism, as I use the term here, involves a strong and positive relationship with one’s religious tradition: its rituals, its narratives, its way of interpreting experience, its practices of moral and theological discernment. Traditionalism, as it is expressed in Protestantism, is capable of preserving the central characteristics of Protestantism that developed in the European context of struggle against hierarchical authority. Traditionalism need not become fundamentalist. Fundamentalism, on the other hand, is inimical to that heritage. As a reaction against modern worldviews, fundamentalism is itself an outgrowth of modernity. The development of both the social and physical sciences, as well as growing cross-cultural experiences that revealed the existence of large, ancient, complex alternative religions presented a challenge to all Christian denominations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The “liberal” Protestant response emphasized confidence in human reason and its new knowledges with the expectation that reason and faith need not be adversarial. The fundamentalist response that developed near the end of the nineteenth century was, and is, a reaction of fear as modernity produced multiple alternative knowledge sources that challenged any narrowly defined religious control over how people will understand their world. As I described earlier, a central characteristic of the Protestant Reformation was the recognition that all things human, including the human experience of religion, were finite and fallible. The reformers argued that no guarantee of absolute truth could reside in the magisterium of the western church, nor in its traditions. The fear that drives fundamentalism, however, required the reimposition of an absolute truth that will stand, unchanging, against all contending sources of knowledge. In the mid-seventeenth century, the need to counter the knowledge claims of modern science with an unquestionable source of religious truth led to a new theology of biblical inerrancy. Although the reformers made no claim to biblical inerrancy, nor would they given their schooling in Christian humanism, certainly the temptation of such a claim can be traced to the way in which they tied their claims to biblical texts. Protestants, in denying the simple authority of tradition of a church hierarchy, are left with the unending task of relating a culturally based scripture with always new, culturally produced texts."