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(RNS) — On Could 21, 1922, a liberal minister within the pulpit of New York’s First Presbyterian Church preached one of the crucial essential sermons in American historical past. It additionally value him his job.
The Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick went on to turn out to be the founding pastor of New York’s hovering Riverside Church, constructed by John D. Rockefeller Jr.; the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would at some point name him “the best preacher of this century.” Nevertheless it was the sermon he preached 100 years in the past this weekend, entitled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”, that first gained him prominence on his approach to turning into a towering determine in American Christianity.
Within the sermon, Fosdick weighed in on the intractable controversy between conservative and progressive Protestants, then generally known as fundamentalists and modernists. At a time when biblical scholarship and pure science had been seemingly calling a lot of conventional Christian theology into query, he gave voice, in a winsome and compelling method, to Christians who sought to combine their religion with these new developments.
Within the previous half-century, advances in textual criticism left biblical students with the sense that the Bible was a extra human and fewer divine composition than Christians had been taught to suppose. In the meantime Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx had upended conventional conceptions concerning the age of the earth, the human psyche and social group.
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“Multitudes of reverent Christians,” Fosdick mentioned, “have been unable to maintain this new information in a single compartment of their minds and the Christian religion in one other.”
There’s no query that the secularizing affect of late Nineteenth-century thought has conquered a lot of our Twenty first-century world. We up to date People have extra religion in science than our sacred texts, whose origins and conclusions have been impeached in lots of minds by historical past, archeology and politics.
But we are able to solely conclude that the modernists misplaced.
Liberalism accelerated so totally that, a couple of many years later, many liberal clergy disbelieved not solely the atonement and the virgin delivery of Christ, however his bodily resurrection as properly. And whereas a tiny minority of Christians persist in devotion after these foundational doctrines have been deserted, most don’t. Since at the very least the Nineteen Sixties, liberal Protestantism has been in decline.
Liberal Christian establishments even have decrease charges of intermarriage, fertility and grownup retention. This solely accelerates their decline relative to conservatives.
Even within the Thirties, theologian H. Richard Niebuhr supplied a succinct and devastating critique of liberal Protestantism: “A God with out wrath introduced males with out sin right into a kingdom with out judgment by the ministrations of a Christ and not using a cross.”
Fundamentalists — whom we all know largely as evangelicals — retreated from American public life for a time however have since reemerged with their very own establishments, media and methods. They’ve extra and bigger church buildings, seminaries and publications, even when much less prestigious than liberals’ well-endowed however anemic establishments.
By efficient cooperation with secular donors and the Republican Get together, conservative Protestants now occupy locations of affect and prominence reserved for liberals in Fosdick’s time.
Sadly, right now’s fundamentalism has retained its anti-intellectual, anti-elite and aggrieved streak, out of all proportion to the then-unimaginable success they’ve achieved in regulation, politics and institution-building. They’ve been not solely absent from, but in addition typically have run counter to, the opposite social movents of our age: civil rights, race, labor, economics and ecology.
Their co-option by an ever extra extremist Republican Get together has been so thoroughgoing that the time period “evangelical” now extra meaningfully describes a voting bloc than a theological motion.
The Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick in 1926. Picture courtesy Wikipedia/Inventive Commons
In shedding, modernists bequeathed a fantastic legacy to American society and, in profitable, fundamentalists discovered their energy however misplaced their approach, falling in with the pernicious components in American faith, politics and tradition.
After his ouster, Fosdick landed at Park Avenue Baptist Church and befriended Rockefeller, who felt Fosdick’s articulation of liberal Christianity was essential. In 1930, the 12 months Riverside opened, Fosdick appeared on the duvet of TIME, and he quickly had turned Riverside Church into the flagship of liberal Protestantism.
At the moment, mainline Protestants know Fosdick’s work principally by the favored hymn “God of Grace and God of Glory.” Although meant to be used with the stately tune “Regent Sq.,” to Fosdick’s dismay it was (and stays) extra popularly set to the Welsh tune “Cwm Rhondda.”
A stanza of the hymn is especially emblematic of his Protestant imaginative and prescient:
Lo, the hosts of evil ‘spherical us/Scorn Thy Christ, assail His methods./From the fears that lengthy have certain us/Free our hearts to religion and reward./Grant us knowledge, grant us braveness/For the dwelling of nowadays.
Although largely forgotten outdoors a subset of faith specialists, Fosdick’s identify stands for a practice and debate that has animated my private {and professional} life to a substantial extent. I’ve traversed the American Protestant panorama from proper to left, first abandoning a ministerial vocation, then a scholarly one, and at last working as a form of roving correspondent within the tradition wars.
In the long run, I joined neither the fundamentalists nor the modernists. However I respect that the battles each side struggle nonetheless maintain everlasting significance for the lives and souls of tens of millions. Maybe most extremely, skilled Christians on each side proceed to obtain help, not solely from the items of the trustworthy but in addition the patronage of partisans and ideologues who discover it advantageous to help their establishments.
However the fundamentalist-modernist controversy — which nonetheless enlivens debates, turf wars and squabbles over affect — is just not about politics or market share and even cash. It’s about theology: beliefs about God, Christ and the Bible that can not be proved with human information as a result of they’re finally issues of religion.
After 100 years, it stays a blessing to stay in a rustic the place doctrines are fervently believed in and fought for by people who find themselves keen to die, however not kill, for them. Mercifully, nobody has to do both. (Although some should lose their pulpits.)
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Fosdick is likely to be appeased to know that, on stability, although the fundamentalists gained, we are able to all affirm at the very least one timeless line from his landmark sermon:
“There are numerous opinions within the subject of recent controversy regarding which I’m not certain whether or not I’m proper or incorrect, however there’s one factor I’m certain of: courtesy and kindliness and tolerance and humility and equity are proper. Opinions could also be mistaken; love by no means is.”
A century later, that message is as true and urgently wanted as ever.
(Jacob Lupfer is a author in Jacksonville, Florida. The views expressed on this commentary don’t essentially replicate these of Faith Information Service.)
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