Harry Emerson Fosdick

Harry Emerson Fosdick (1868-1969), Protestant preacher, was perhaps the single most influential leader in 20th century American Liberal Christianity. Although not a theologian he was often seen as the chief exemplar of the new liberal theology, he was hailed by The New Republic as "the prophet of modernism." Based in New York City, he rose to national prominence through his undoctrinaire evangelicalism and ability to use radio and the press, especially books and magazine articles that appealed to a wide readership. He was a friend and collaborator with John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and advised his brother Raymond Fosdick, who headed the Rockefeller Foundation.

Time magazine Sept. 21, 1925

Fosdick supported many liberal political and social causes, especially opposition to war. Fosdick stressed both personal growth and social change. As a pragmatist, he strove to make religion compatible with secular society.

Educated at Colgate University and Union Theological Seminary, he was on the Union faculty 1915-46. Fosdick was ordained to the Northern Baptist ministry in 1903, but joined the Presbyterians when he was called by the newly formed First Presbyterian Church on Fifth Avenue in New York City.

Fosdick in 1913 published the book The Assurance of Immortality and he would later state that his ideas provided a way for Christians to prevent themselves from commiting "intellectual suicide."

He became chief minister of the new Riverside Church, designing its architecture to resemble a thirteenth-century Gothic cathedral in Chartres, France, and filling it with busts of spiritual and secular heroes, from Aquinas to Einstein.

Fosdick originally supported eugenics, but became increasingly critical of it. For Fosdick, the idea that eugenicists were an enlightened cadre leading the dull masses revealed a dangerous hubris. He concluded, "The question is not whether changes will occur." Fosdick and other liberal religious leaders already agreed that scientific advances made social changes inevitable. The question was "how they will occur, under whose aegis and superintendence, by whose guidance and direction, and how much better the world will be when they are here." He remained a strong advocate of birth control for married couples. During the Great Depression Fosdick was highly critical of unfettered capitalism, but he believed the American people could achieve a more just economic order without embracing leftwing radicalism; he dreaded Communism as the very devil.

Battling the Fundamentalists

When he visited Christian missions in China in 1921, Fosdick discovered Fundamentalists were engaged in an aggressive campaign against the liberals, even to the extent of trying to force their retirement. He saw similar troubles when he returned to the United States. This led to a 1922 sermon circulated under the title, "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" Pleading for tolerance, Fosdick also presented the case for the liberal position on the major issues of the Virgin Birth, the second coming, and biblical interpretation. The sermon became one of the most important pulpit statements of the 1920s, causing a minor pamphlet war, and it thrust Fosdick onto center stage as the archetypal liberal. Conservative attacks on him knew no bounds.

Different views of the role of Christianity in the face of the secularization of American culture fueled the conflict between the liberal modernist and conservative fundamentalist factions inside the Presbyterian Church during the 1920s and 1930s. Modernists, led by Fosdick, Henry Sloane Coffin, and Robert E. Speer, promoted inclusiveness and denied the inerrancy of scripture, while fundamentalists such as J. Gresham Machen, Clarence Macartney, and William Jennings Bryan defended traditional doctrine. The fundamentalist cause, popularly identified with antievolutionism, was damaged in the view of most Presbyterians by the Scopes Trial in 1925. In 1929, fundamentalist leaders Machen and Macartney left their positions at the Princeton Theological Seminary to found the Westminster Theological Seminary to defend the traditional orthodoxy.

In his sermon "The Peril of Worshiping Jesus," Fosdick complained that too many people would rather put Jesus "up on some high altar, pray to him, sing to him, do anything for him" than do his will in the troubled present age.

Further reading

• Miller, Robert Moats. Harry Emerson Fosdick: Preacher, Pastor, Prophet (1985), the standard scholarly biography excerpts and text search
• Potter, Richard H. "Popular Religion of the 1930's as Reflected in the Best Sellers of Harry Emerson Fosdick." Journal of Popular Culture 1970 3(4): 712-728.

External links

• Hymns of the Living Church (1910)
• The American hymnal (1914)
• The Assurance of Immortality (1913)
• The Challenge of the Present Crisis (1917)
• The Manhood of the Master (1913)
• Christianity and Progress (1922)
• The Meaning of Prayer (1915)
• The Meaning of Service (1920)