Countless sermons each weekend may prove inspiring for American churchgoers, but historians “will little note nor long remember” most of them.
One great exception, titled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?,” was delivered 100 years ago this spring by the Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick at New York City’s First Presbyterian Church.
Fosdick threw a bright spotlight on the “Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy,” both predicting and demanding that his fellow modernists would win the era’s theological war. The Presbyterian Church had been debating whether to expel biblical liberals since 1892 and in 1910 mandated what later became known as the “five points of Fundamentalism.”
Yes, some of the pioneers of the “fundamentals of the faith” were part of the old Protestant mainline.
Fosdick’s oration attacked three of these beliefs, including the necessity of belief in Jesus Christ’s literal Virgin Birth and Second Coming. But his third target was pivotal, the contention that as the inspired Word of God, the Bible is free of error on history as well as spiritual and moral teachings. Fosdick conveyed the canard that this meant God “dictated” the words to earthly stenographers and then championed “progressive” revelation as promoted by scholarly biblical criticism. (Along the way he remarked that rigid interpretation of the Quran was a similar “millstone about the neck” for Islam.)
A dictionary note is required here. Fosdick defended what he called “evangelical” religion, using the word to broadly signify Protestants of whatever theology. In the 1940s, conservative Protestant foes of the modernists began embracing that same word to distinguish themselves from the unpopular hard-line “fundamentalists.”
Got that? The label has stuck ever since, though some contend it now signifies a Republican political bloc more than a theological movement.
