FOSDICK, HARRY EMERSON 1878-1969

Minister

Modernist Preacher

Through his collected sermons, his public stands on issues, and his radio services, Harry Emerson Fosdick became not only the best-known preacher of his day but also a representative of the modernist forces that struggled with Fundamentalists during the 1920s.

Early Career

In 1919 the dwindling congregations of the First Presbyterian Church in New York City, the University Place Presbyterian Church, and the Madison Square Presbyterian Church agreed to merge to concentrate their combined resources and efforts. Fosdick, a graduate of Colgate College and Union Theological Seminary in New York and already widely known for his sermons, was asked to become the congregation's preaching minster. The fact that he was and would remain a Baptist in this Presbyterian church was considered irrelevant.

Success and Publicity

Fosdick's services attracted large crowds, and the experiment seemed a splendid success. In 1922 Fosdick entered the growing war between the increasingly militant Fundamentalists and the modernists. In his sermon "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" he condemned the exclusionary practices of the Fundamentalists and pleaded for a church where individual beliefs on issues such as the virgin birth of Jesus, the inerrancy of the Scriptures, and the question of the Second Coming of Christ were left to individual interpretation while all Christians worked together for the common good. The sermon attracted extensive publicity, particularly after public-relations man Ivy Lee republished it as "New Knowledge and Christian Faith" and distributed it to the nation's Protestant clergy.

Contention

The line between Fundamentalists and modernists was now drawn in the northern Presbyterian Church. Fundamentalists and their conservatives allies, particularly the faculty of the denomination's Princeton Theological Seminary at Princeton University, responded with outrage. Not only was Fosdick unsound in doctrine, he was an interloper in one of the denomination's leading congregations. For the next two years the issue of Fosdick and his place in the denomination was fought at meetings of the various governing bodies of the Presbyterian Church, including the annual meetings of the General Assembly, the church's governing body. Here Fosdick's rejection of the Five Points of Fundamentalist belief was condemned by a large minority of the delegates, but church governance would not allow the annual body to remove him from his congregation.

Resignation

The New York Presbytery tried to protect Fosdick, as did First Presbyterian Church, which adamantly refused his offer to resign. In 1925 a seeming compromise was reached: the New York Presbytery proposed that Fosdick join the denomination and regularize his relationship with the church and his congregation. On the surface this would resolve the issue of Fosdick's denominational loyalties; but as a Presbyterian, he would also be subject to denominational control, and some sort of heresy trial was likely if he accepted that route. Fosdick concluded that the Fundamentalists would eventually expel him, and he resigned from First Presbyterian in March 1925.

Moving On

Fosdick was more than a symbol—he was a brilliant preacher. As the controversy whirled, a new pulpit was found for him. He was offered the ministry of the Park Avenue Baptist Church, also in New York City, a congregation that included some of the nation's leading businessmen, including John D. Rockefeller Jr. The congregation had completed an expensive new sanctuary in 1922. In negotiations with the directors of the church, Fosdick insisted that the church modify its requirement that only those who had been baptized by immersion be accepted for membership, a tenet that had long been a key principle of Baptists. Park Avenue Baptist agreed to open admission, and the offer was sweetened when Rockefeller offered to provide much of the funding for a sanctuary in Morningside Heights, outside the silk-stocking district of the city, to create a church inclusive in class as well as in doctrine.

Becoming Established

Fosdick later recalled that in his talks with Rockefeller in regard to the move, he speculated about the effects of his relationship with one of the world's richest men. Rockefeller responded, "Do you think more people will criticize you on account of my wealth, than will criticize me on account of your theology?" The agreement to create an interdenominational Protestant church was made. The building on Park Avenue was sold, and the money from the sale, combined with a generous gift from Rockefeller, led to the construction of the great Riverside Church in Morningside Heights in New York. The new sanctuary was officially opened in 1930 and remained Fosdick's home and the location of the studio for his popular radio services until his retirement.

Sources:

Harry Emerson Fosdick, The Living of These Days (New York: Harper & Row, 1956);

Robert Moats Miller, Harry Emerson Fosdick: Preacher, Pastor, Prophet(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

FOSDICK, HARRY EMERSON 1878-1969

Minister and professor

Prominent Protestant

Harry Emerson Fosdick was one of the major voices of liberal Protestantism in the middle of the twentieth century. As pastor of the spectacular, nondenominational Riverside Church in New York City and as the leading Protestant speaker on radio, he helped to define the personality and meaning of mainline Protestantism for thirty years.

Early Recognition

Fosdick was born in upstate New York and entered the Baptist ministry after graduating from Union Theological Seminary in New York. His talents and abilities were quickly recognized. He became professor of practical theology at Union in 1911 and taught there until he retired in 1946. In 1918, even though he was a Baptist, he was called to the pulpit of the First Presbyterian Church in New York City. In 1922 he attracted national notoriety when he preached a sermon called "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?," which entered him in the battle between modernists and fundamentalists that splintered many Protestant denominations in the 1920s. The furor over the sermon led to efforts to move him from a Presbyterian pulpit. While his congregation supported Fosdick, he decided to accept an offer to pastor the Park Avenue Baptist Church. That congregation then decided to move to a new sanctuary to be built on Riverside Heights near Union and Columbia University. The Riverside Church, which was generously supported by John D. Rockefeller Jr., was dedicated in 1930.

Riverside

The Riverside Church was one of the largest churches in the nation, with more than two thousand members and a staff of seventy. The structure contained facilities for its varied urban ministry as well as a. radio studio for the production of Fosdick's radio sermons. With the support of a professional staff and its extensive facilities, the congregation played an active role in the affairs of the neighborhood and city,

Radio Preacher

Fosdick engaged in a vigorous ministry during the decade. One of his most effective ways of influencing people was through his nationally broadcast program, The National Vesper Hour. It was estimated that he reached more people than any other preacher in his nineteen years of broadcasts over NBC's Red Network. Some suggested that a reason for the decline in church attendance in the 1930s was because people stayed home from their local congregations to hear Fosdick.

Critic of Modernism

Though Fosdick entered the battle against fundamentalism in 1922, he also challenged the supremacy of modernism in a widely discussed 1935 sermon, "Shall the Church Go Beyond Modernism?" While he still insisted that modernism had played an essential role in the development of current Christianity, he asserted that religion must go beyond it. This meant advancing beyond a modernist emphasis on intellectualism, which seemed to attempt to adjust Christianity to the world. "Our modern world cries out … for souls maladjusted to it, not most of all for accommodators and adjusters but for intellectual and ethical challengers." People must realize, he said, that "Sin is real… and it leads men and nations to damnation.…" Modernism, he claimed, had watered down the essential truth of religion, the reality of God. Finally, he said, modernism had lost its ethical standards and its ability to attack the problems people face. "What Christ does to modern culture is to challenge it."

Away from Liberalism

Fosdick's sermon reflected the growing influence in Protestant theological circles of the new theology being introduced by Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Americans such as Reinhold Niebuhr and his brother, H. Richard. But equally important in challenging the accommodating qualities of American Protestantism were the questions raised by the Depression and by war and the threat of war. What did the spreading totalitarian regimes of Adolf Hitler's Germany, Benito Mussolini's Italy, and Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union say about humanity and the historical moment? For Fosdick, the dictator invalidated many liberal and modernist assumptions about humanity's essential good nature.

A Spiritual Leader

In his many sermons and books Fosdick offered guidance to the American people through the events and issues of the day. No other preacher of his time seemed to speak so directly to the time and his audience.

Sources:

Harry Emerson Fosdick, The Living of These Days: An Autobiography (New York: Harper, 1956);

Robert M. Miller, Harry Emerson Fosdick: Preacher, Pastor, Prophet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

Harry Emerson Fosdick

Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969), American preacher, was a popular exponent of liberal Protestantism and a key figure in the struggle to relate the Christian community to its contemporary technological and urbanized culture.

Harry Emerson Fosdick was born in Buffalo, N.Y., on May 24, 1878, the son of a high school teacher. Reared to traditional religious sympathies, Fosdick questioned his faith while in college. By the time he graduated from Colgate University in 1900, his new religious views rejected biblical literalism in favor of "modernist" theological attitudes that coincided with the emerging scientific world view currently sweeping America.

Fosdick entered Union Theological Seminary in New York City to prepare for the ministry. A center of theological liberalism even at this early date, the seminary further confirmed his new religious commitments. After graduation in 1903, his first pastorate was in a Baptist church in Montclair, N.J. During his 11 years there, Fosdick advocated liberal views, both in the pulpit and in published articles. He also perfected a pastoral and preaching technique that made him a model minister for a generation of churchmen.

Fosdick first attracted national attention for his role in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1920s. Politician William Jennings Bryan and conservative churchmen attacked him, especially after a sermon in 1922 entitled "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" Efforts to remove Fosdick from the Presbyterian church in New York City where he was then minister were ultimately successful. The imbroglio led one of Fosdick's most famous parishioners, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to initiate the proposals that led to the establishment of a large, nonsectarian church where Fosdick would be the principal minister. Here, at Riverside Church, Fosdick's congregation became one of the most famous Protestant groups in the nation. Dedicated in 1931, the church provided for Fosdick's preaching a weekly forum until his retirement in 1946. The church symbolized his belief in interracial unity and a nonsectarian, ecumenical approach to church life.

Fosdick sought to adapt Christianity to the increasingly sophisticated urban milieu, stressing the intellectual respectability possible in Christian teachings and repudiating the theological obscurantism that had served as the basis of much popular, evangelical Protestantism in the 19th century. Fosdick was a prolific publicist, publishing 40 volumes in all. He preached to a nationwide audience each week on radio, and he influenced a generation of fledgling ministers as professor of homiletics at Union Seminary. Relatively undoctrinaire, he was capable of seeing the flaws in his own religious perspective, as evidenced in a sermon, "The Church Must Go beyond Modernism."

A supporter of America's intervention in World War I, Fosdick had become a thoroughgoing pacifist by the time of World War II. Above all, his sermons dealt with contemporary problems. He was perhaps the most widely known and respected preacher of his generation.

Further Reading

Fosdick's sprightly autobiography, The Living of These Days (1956), describes his career up to the mid-1950s.

Additional Sources

Miller, Robert Moats, Harry Emerson Fosdick: preacher, pastor, prophet, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. □

Harry Emerson Fosdick , 1878–1969, American clergyman, b. Buffalo, N.Y., grad. Colgate Univ., 1900, and Union Theological Seminary, 1904. Ordained a Baptist minister in 1903, he was pastor in Montclair, N.J., until 1915. From that year until 1946, Fosdick was professor of practical theology at Union Theological Seminary. He became pastor of the Park Ave. Baptist Church, New York City, in 1926; this was transformed into the Riverside Church in 1930, when the congregation and Fosdick moved to an impressive new structure on Riverside Drive. He served there until 1946, when he became pastor emeritus. His position as a Modernist leader in the Fundamentalist controversies of the 1920s and his forceful, practical sermons won wide recognition. His radio addresses were nationally broadcast. Among his writings are The Meaning of Prayer (1915), A Great Time to Be Alive (1944), The Man from Nazareth, as His Contemporaries Saw Him (1949), and his autobiography, The Living of These Days (1956).

Bibliography: See biography by R. M. Miller (1985).

Fosdick, Harry Emerson (1878–1969), American Baptist minister. From 1926 to 1946 he was minister of the Baptist Riverside Church, New York. He wrote widely from an evangelical liberal point of view.