Harry Emerson Fosdick

• Born: 24 May 1878
• Birthplace: Buffalo, New York
• Died: 5 October 1969
• Best Known As: Liberal Protestant preacher who wrote, "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?"

A master preacher, liberal thinker and author of 47 books, Harry Emerson Fosdick drew huge congregations and radio audiences as well as famous critics. A Baptist minister, he rose to prominence as the weekly preacher at New York City's First Presbyterian Church (1918-1924). Fundamentalist Christians nationwide attacked his view that "modern Christians" could doubt doctrines such as the literal truth of the Bible and the virgin birth of Jesus and still remain faithful. In a sermon, "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" (1922), he spoke out against the exclusion of modernists and their views. A Fosdick publicist mailed it to thousands of U.S. churches, fueling the controversy. Not wanting a prolonged national fight with Presbyterian conservatives, Fosdick left and in 1925 became pastor of Park Avenue Baptist Church. The church moved in 1930 to a cathedral-like structure in Upper Manhattan, built by Park Avenue member John D. Rockefeller Jr., and became the interdenominational Riverside Church. Fosdick preached there until his retirement in 1946. In the 1920s, political orator William Jennings Bryan, who faced Clarence Darrow in the Scopes "Monkey Trial," was among Fosdick's fundamentalist Presbyterian attackers. Humanist editor and philosopher Walter Lippmann, in A Preface to Morals (1929), derided Fosdick for lacking dogmatic certainty; Fosdick replied in As I See Religion (1932), an argument for liberal Christianity.

Fosdick married Florence Allen Whitney in 1904, the year he became pastor at First Baptist Church, Montclair, N.J. Their daughters were Elinor (born 1911) and Dorothy (1913)... He taught at New York's Union Theological Seminary from 1908 to 1946 ... His "National Vespers Hour" aired for 19 years on NBC and short-wave radio and was heard in 17 countries... Fosdick drew the title of his 1956 autobiography, The Living of These Days, from a verse of his 1930 hymn, "God of Grace and God of Glory"... Fosdick wrote for such popular magazines as Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, and Ladies' Home Journal and was on Time's cover in 1925 and 1930.

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.

Fosdick, Harry Emerson (fŏz'dĭk) , 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).

Quotes:

"He who knows no hardships will know no hardihood. He who faces no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles."

"Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people."

"Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat."

"Hold a picture of yourself long and steadily enough in your mind's eye and you will be drawn toward it. Picture yourself vividly as winning and that alone will contribute immeasurably to success. Great living starts with a picture, held in your imagination, of what you would like to do or be."

"Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have."

"To keep the Golden Rule we must put ourselves in other people's places, but to do that consists in and depends upon picturing ourselves in their places."

See more famous quotes by Harry Emerson Fosdick

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