Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969) was the most famous liberal preacher in America. Just before World War I, the evangelical and fundamentalist Christians had published a series of booklets entitled, “Fundamentals of the Faith.” Fosdick, then, placed himself in opposition to them and at the heart of the brewing Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversy.
In 1915, John D. Rockefeller, Sr. complained to the Baptist Student Union that there were too many churches. He observed that the churches should be rationally organized like his company, with only one church per town. The conservatives published, in essence, a reply in The Fundamentals. They argued that common beliefs held together the different Protestant denominations, not an organizational monopoly. However, most of the conservatives wanted the liberals out of the pulpit and the seminaries.
In 1918, Fosdick was called to First Presbyterian Church, and on May 21, 1922, he delivered his famous sermon “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” in which he defended the modernist position. In that sermon, he presented the Bible as a record of the unfolding of God’s will, not as the literal “Word of God.” He saw the history of Christianity as one of development, progress, and gradual change. He believed that the modernists were intellectually superior and on the winning side of history.
After enduring a fight within the Presbyterian church, Fosdick became a Baptist at a church attended by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The billionaire then built Riverside Church near Columbia University with Fosdick in the pulpit and Union Theological Seminary to implement an ecumenical, modernist reorganization of the Protestant church. Fosdick’s pastorate at Riverside Church included a deep commitment to civil rights and having African Americans in the pulpit.
Across the street from Columbia University, Gresham Machen preached in response at Broadway Presbyterian Church. In 1923, he published a reply to Fosdick in his minor classic work of public theology Christianity & Liberalism. Machen was probably the better theologian, but Fosdick’s promotion of African Americans in the pastorate was better for the church’s communal life. Interestingly, both could agree that in their opinions, the industrial vision of the city as embodied in the architecture of the Empire State Building was a monstrosity that ruined New York City’s skyline.
