Have the Fundamentalists Won?

 Most preachers would be pleased if one of their sermons was remembered for 100 days. But Harry Emerson Fosdick preached a sermon 100 years ago that is still remembered today. That sermon delivered on May 21, 1922, was titled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”* 

Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878~1969) was, in the estimation of Martin Luther King, Jr., “the greatest preacher of the twentieth century.” He was also one of the first vocal opponents of Christian fundamentalism—and was, consequently, a primary target of the fundamentalists.

In 1921, and less than a year before his renowned May 1922 sermon, Fosdick was the guest preacher at missionary conferences in China and in Karuizawa, Japan. It was an eye-opening experience for him.

In The Living of These Days, Fosdick’s autobiography published when he was 78, he wrote:

It was one of the most informing and revealing experiences I ever had. For one thing, I saw fundamentalism for the first time in its full intensity. The missionary community was split wide open. On one side, some of the largest personalities and most intelligent views one could meet anywhere; on the other, such narrowness and obscurantism as seemed downright incredible.

In “Shall the Fundamentalists Win? Fosdick discussed briefly four of what the fundamentalists considered essential (=fundamental) to the Christian religion: the virgin birth of Jesus, the inerrancy of the Bible, the substitutionary atonement of Jesus, and Jesus’ literal second coming.

However, while he did not agree with the fundamentalists on those points of doctrine, Fosdick’s main criticism was not their doctrinal beliefs as such but their intolerance for those Christians, such as him, who espoused alternative interpretations of Christianity.

He emphasized, “We must be able to think our modern life clear through in Christian terms, and to do that we also must be able to think our Christian faith clear through in modern terms.”

Fosdick continued, “Now the people in this generation who are trying to do this are the liberals, and the Fundamentalists are out on a campaign to shut against them the doors of the Christian fellowship.”

So, this was the pivotal question, “Shall they be allowed to succeed?”

Fosdick’s answer to his question was of course in the negative, and he confidently concluded: “I do not believe for one moment that the Fundamentalists are going to succeed.”

But have the fundamentalists won? This month, various Christian writers have reflected on Fosdick’s 100-year-old sermon, and some have concluded that, indeed, the fundamentalists have won.

For example, James Lupfer, a Florida-based journalist, wrote, “100 years later, Fosdick’s question, ‘Shall the fundamentalists win?’ still echoes.” He concludes in that May 20 article published by Religion News Service, “The answer, improbable at the time, was, ‘Yes, they shall.’”

More importantly, Diana Butler Bass (b. 1959, ten years before Fosdick’s death), a trustworthy American historian of Christianity, posted four essays between April 29 and May 20 regarding Fosdick’s 5/1922 sermon.

The subtitle of the first one is, “A Century After the Question: They Have.”

Near the end of Bass’s fourth essay, she quotes Fosdick’s confident assertion about the fundamentalists failing and then concludes, “I confess that I do not share his certainty. I do not know if they will ultimately win, but they are—right now—stronger than ever.”

But I disagree with Lupfer and Bass and others who agree with them regarding the fundamentalists having won.

True, fundamentalists, now generally known by the label “conservative evangelicals,” have gained and wielded considerable political power and have been victorious in various culture war battles since 1980, but that is not what Fosdick was dealing with in his sermon.

(And it can be credibly argued that the Republican Party has “won” by using conservative evangelicals far more than the latter have “won” by their influence upon the GOP.)

Certainly, conservative evangelicals have “won” in some Christian denominations—such as the Southern Baptist Convention, which did succeed in dispelling moderates/progressives (such as I).

Most of the respected and influential Christian spokespersons cited in public media, though, are not conservative evangelicals (=fundamentalists). The latter are most often described somewhat disdainfully.

To paraphrase Fosdick, “I do not believe for one moment that the fundamentalists have succeeded.”

_____

* Fosdick’s sermon in its entirety can be found at this website.

** For further consideration of this topic, I recommend the detailed essay “Did the Fundamentalists Win?” posted on May 17 by my friend Brian Kaylor and his colleague Beau Underwood. And for more about Fosdick and Riverside Church (where he was pastor from 1925~45), see my 10/5/15 blog post.

What Is Theological Liberalism?

The blog posting I made on January 25 was titled “Still Seeing the Limits of Liberalism.” It was based on the Preface of my book The Limits of Liberalism, which I am updating and slightly revising this year. This posting is based on the book’s first chapter, “What is Liberalism?”  

A Movement Attempting Adaption

The first subdivision of Chapter One is “A Sincere Movement to Adapt Christianity to the Modern Worldview.” Regardless of what negative views one might have about liberalism—and some of you have views much more negative than mine—it must be recognized that liberal theologians and pastors were well-intentioned.

To a large extent, liberals in the 19th and 20th centuries actively sought ways to affirm both a modern, scientific worldview and the Christian faith. They attempted to reinterpret Christianity in order to keep many intelligent, educated people of the contemporary world from rejecting the faith.

Early in the 20th century, one of the leaders of modernism, as it was generally termed then, was the eminent preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, whose 1924 book The Modern Use of the Bible was highly influential.

In his autobiography, For the Living of These Days (1956), Fosdick (1878~1969) asserted that the central aim of liberal theology was to make it possible for people “to be both an intelligent modern and a serious Christian.” That is what he admirably sought to do in his numerous books and in his preaching.

In a 1968 book that I have highly evaluated through the decades, William E. Hordern wrote,

Although the fundamentalists saw the liberals as subversives of the faith, liberals saw themselves as the saviors of the essence of Christianity. For the liberal, it was the fundamentalist who was destroying Christianity by forcing it into the molds of the past and making it impossible for any intelligent man to hold it (Layman’s Guide to Protestant Theology, p. 73).

A Threatening “Militant” Movement

Partly to parallel this chapter with the first chapter of my Fed Up with Fundamentalism, I refer here to “militant” liberals, although because of the nature of liberalism none were as militant as some of the fundamentalists.

Nevertheless, there were liberals who sought not just to adapt Christianity to the modern world but to change decisively the content of the historic Christian faith. Two examples of this more radical form of liberalism are Unitarianism and Transcendentalism.

Even though disavowal of the Trinity is one tenet of Unitarianism, that is by no means its main emphasis. The Unitarianism that developed in the 19^th century is now a part of the Unitarian Universalist Association, which “affirms and promotes seven Principles grounded in the humanistic teachings of the world's religions.” 

I have no problem with an organization being based on the humanistic teachings of the world’s religions. But I do object to the claim that it is a valid expression of (liberal) Christianity.

The current Unitarians are perhaps farther removed from historic Christianity than those of the past, but the Unitarian tendency from the beginning to radically change Christianity from traditional doctrines is why I have referred to them as “militant,” even though they largely acted in a benign manner.

The Transcendentalists, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker, were men of high moral quality. But their beliefs moved farther away from traditional Christianity than even the Unitarians and became a full-fledged humanism.

The Road Ahead

Most of what I treat in the rest of The Limits of Liberalism is related to those who sought, and those who are now seeking, to adapt Christianity. Next month I plan to post an article based on Chapter Two, which focuses on the development of liberalism in the last part of the 20^th century and the first decade of this century.

For the Living of These Days

October 5, 1930, was a big day for Harry Emerson Fosdick, pastor of the Riverside Church in New York City. It was the first worship service in Riverside’s new church building, one of the most magnificent structures in the United States. 

Although I have attended a Sunday service at Riverside only once, and that was probably around 30 years ago, I still remember being greatly impressed by the size and beauty of the building—as well as by the service itself.

(Sometime I’d like to tell you the story of how I rented a bicycle and peddled through Central Park and then through Harlem on my way to Riverside, near the bank of the beautiful Hudson River.)

Pastor Fosdick wrote a hymn for that dedication service, which was 85 years ago today. Here is the second verse of that hymn, “God of Grace and God of Glory,” which I assume many of you have sung:

Lo! the hosts of evil round us

scorn the Christ, assail his ways!

From the fears that long have bound us

free our hearts to faith and praise.

Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,

for the living of these days,

for the living of these days.

Fosdick, who was born on May 24, 1878, was one of the most influential pastors of the first half of the 1900s. Martin Luther King, Jr., characterized him as “the greatest preacher of the twentieth century.”

In 1922 Fosdick preached a sermon for which he is still widely known: “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” He was one of the first vocal opponents of Christian fundamentalism—and was a primary target of the fundamentalists.

But Fosdick was also an opponent of liberalism, back when it was called “modernism.” In 1935 one of the most significant sermons he preached at Riverside Church was “The Church Must Go Beyond Modernism.”

While rejecting both fundamentalism and extreme liberalism, Fosdick was an advocate of the Social Gospel. Two years before the dedication of the new church building, Fosdick declared that a church

"that pretends to care for the souls of people but is not interested in the slums that damn them, the city government that corrupts them, the economic order that cripples them, and international relationships that, leading to peace or war, determine the spiritual destiny of innumerable souls’’ would receive divine condemnation (Hope of the World, p. 25).

Fosdick died on October 5, 1969, on the 39th anniversary of that notable first Sunday at Riverside Church, where he served as pastor until 1946.

One of Fosdick’s successors was William Sloane Coffin, who was the Senior Minister at Riverside from 1977 to 1987. (See my blog article about him here.) On Oct. 5, 1980, Coffin preached at the 50th anniversary of Riverside Church. Near the end of that sermon he declared, 

“Dearly beloved parishioners, we have no choice, we must work for the redistribution of wealth. We must abridge our luxuries for the sake of others’ necessities, in this city, in this land, and in the world” (The Collected Sermons of William Sloan Coffin: The Riverside Years, 2008, I:358).

Wealth had long been an issue at Riverside, for the new edifice, whose construction began in 1927, was largely funded by business magnate John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The dedication of that magnificent building, though, was almost a year following the beginning of the Great Depression.

So the powerful words of prayer in Fosdick’s hymn had great meaning in 1930: “Give us courage, give us wisdom, for the living of these days.” 

That’s still a good prayer for us today.

God's Funeral

It was reading part of Michael Harrington’s book “The Politics at God’s Funeral: The Crisis of Western Civilization” (1983) that got me thinking about the provocative words used as the title of this article. (I am still reading, and increasingly impressed with, Harrington’s book.)

Come to find out, “God’s funeral” has been used several times in the past 100+ years. Between 1908 and 1910 the English poet Thomas Hardy wrote a 17-stanza poem with that title.

Hardy’s poem is introduced, and printed in full, in A. N. Wilson’s 1999 book titled “God’s Funeral: A Biography of Faith and Doubt in Western Civilization.”

In contrast to Hardy and Wilson, who were agnostics/atheists, David Tyler, a Baptist pastor and “biblical counselor,” has more recently written “God’s Funeral” (2009), a book which deals with psychology and “trading the sacred for the secular.”

Although I don’t know that he said anything about a funeral, perhaps the best known statement about God’s demise was made by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who declared “God is dead” in his 1882 book “The Gay Science” (with “gay” being the translation of the German fröhliche=cheerful, happy).

Actually, though, according to Harrington, “God’s death has been announced in every generation for about three hundred years” (p. 11).

Many of us remember that in 1966 Christian theologian Thomas Altizer penned a book titled “The Gospel of Christian Atheism.” And in April of that year Time magazine published a provocative issue with the cover having only the words “Is God Dead?” in bold red letters on a black background.

In my previous article I referred to a book by Harry Emerson Fosdick. Most of you know the story of Fosdick’s talk with a young man who came to confess that he could no longer believe in God.

The young man was a student at prestigious Columbia University, a short walk from Riverside Church, where Fosdick was the legendary pastor from 1925 to 1946.

Fosdick said, “Tell me about this God you don’t believe in.” After hearing the young man’s explanation, Fosdick remarked, “Well, son, I don’t believe in that God either!”

So perhaps God needs to be buried—at least some understandings of God, such as the God of imperial Christendom, the God of “manifest destiny,” the God of exploitative capitalism, and the God who supposedly sanctions male supremacy and who condemns all homoerotic activity (even between consenting adults).

But there are other, truer, concepts of God. And there are many who remain thoroughly convinced that there is a God who is certainly alive and well today.

For example, think about the current Pope, who reportedly has some fairly close ties to God. He seems to be in tune with a living God who is quite different from the dead God that Harrington wrote about.

Pope Francis appears to have considerable concern for God’s “preferential option for the poor,” a phrase that Harrington did not use, to my knowledge, but one he would have fully affirmed.

And now Pope Francis is also calling on the world to take action against global warming. And that pro-active position is based, of course, on his unwavering belief in the Creator God.

Even though it came out before this week’s Pew report on the serious decline of religion in America, an earlier article this week advised, “Don’t plan any funerals for religion just yet.” (The Baylor conference covered in that article referred to the worldwide situation, not just the 5% of the world’s population in the U.S.)

And it is also still far too early, and far too presumptuous, to be talking about God’s funeral.

How Should We Read the Bible Today?

Although he wrote it back in 2001, eminent biblical scholar Marcus Borg declared, “Conflict about the Bible is the single most divisive issue among Christians in North America today.” We don’t know if he would say the same thing now, for, alas, he died in January. (In March I wrote about him here).

Today, though, it seems to me that the most divisive issue among Christians is same-sex marriage—but that squabble is largely because of opposing understandings of how to read and interpret the Bible.

Borg’s book is titled “Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but Not Literally.” In many ways it is similar to another good book written three-quarters of a century earlier: Harry Emerson Fosdick’s “The Modern Use of the Bible” (1924).

Recently, I have looked through another excellent book on this subject: N. T. Wright’s “Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today” (2011). And then there is a new book which I haven’t seen yet: Harvey Cox’s “How to Read the Bible”—but I have read Jonathan Merritt’s informative interview with Cox about his book. (That interview was published last month here.)

If more people had read and heeded Fosdick’s book, many of the needless “Bible wars” of recent decades could have been avoided—and maybe the newer books would not have been necessary.

Fosdick wrote about two parties in the churches: one which thinks that “the essence of Christianity is its original mental frameworks; the other party is convinced that the essence of Christianity is its abiding experiences” (p. 102).

There are some who still today see the Bible as a rulebook. That seems to be their primary “mental framework.” The issue of same-sex marriage, for example, is decided by the rules, the prohibitions, the condemnatory words found in the Bible and considered binding at all times and places.

Others of us see the Bible as a record of God’s grace, a book abounding with the good news of life, love, light, and liberty—the 4Ls that I have emphasized for years. Those are the “abiding experiences” that we find in the Bible and seek to live by today.

When I read the many anti-gay or anti-same-sex marriage arguments from conservative Christians, I see that they are legalistically holding on to the mental framework of the past, but I have trouble seeing how they are upholding the abiding experience of a gracious God.

Certainly the Bible contains condemnation of sin, that which destroys a proper relationship with God and which injures others as well as oneself. That is, the Bible condemns such sins as pride, greed, idolatry, and injustice.

All human actions that devalue others—treating people like things, exploiting them, using them for one’s own selfish ends, etc.—are all expressions of human sinfulness. It is most likely that the only type of homosexual activity condemned in the Bible were those kinds of actions. And there was, no doubt, that kind of activity then.

And there still is. But that certainly doesn’t mean that all homosexual activity is of that nature.

The Bible’s condemnation of the sinful treatment of others is not a reasonable basis for rejecting same-sex marriage between consenting adults who seek to live a life of covenanted commitment to each other.

The abiding experience of God’s grace for all people, including those who wish to be in a committed same-sex relationship, should surely not be defined by people who read the Bible with the mental framework of an era long past.

In Memory of Marcus Borg

Marcus Borg was born on March 11, 1942—eight days after my little sister. But whereas my sister is alive and well—in celebration of her birthday June and I had a good visit (and a good meal) with her and her husband in St. Joe last week—Borg passed away on January 21 of this year.

Borg’s death was a great loss to the Christian academic world, for he was a good scholar and a prolific writer. He will be especially missed by many non-conservative Christians, for whom he was long a noteworthy spokesman.

The New York Times referred to Borg as “a leading evangelist of what is often called progressive Christianity.” His interpretation of the Christian faith convinced many people to remain a Christian.

That article related how Borg spoke at a packed church in Colorado a few years ago. Then, on the day Borg died, the pastor of that church said he received an email from a young woman in his church. She wrote “Without Marcus, I wouldn’t be able to call myself a Christian.”

Similarly, the author of an article in The Christian Century avers that many Christians “identify Borg as the person who made space for them to return to—or remain in—the Christian faith.” To the extent that that is true, Borg is certainly praiseworthy.

Borg’s contribution to contemporary Christianity was much like that of Henry Emerson Fosdick in the 1920s. In the first chapter of my book “The Limits of Liberalism” (2010) there is a brief section on “the liberalism of Fosdick.” Then in the second chapter, Borg is presented as one of the “contemporary leaders of liberalism.”

Borg, like Fosdick, was able to interpret the Bible and Christian beliefs in ways that appealed to those who were no longer able to accept or to abide in the teachings of fundamentalism or restrictive conservatism.

Borg’s picture is also one of four liberal Christian theologians on the cover of my book. Because I thought some of his theological views were too liberal, in the section about him I said that Borg “writes in such an evenhanded and convincing manner that in some ways he is the most ‘dangerous’ of the contemporary liberals.”

Borg began writing his last book when he turned seventy. He called it Convictions: How I Learned What Matters Most, and it was published less than a year ago. It is a fine book and I enjoyed reading it—and I think it is more balanced theologically than his earlier books.

In the introduction of Convictions, Borg writes, “Seventy isn’t a guarantee of wisdom or a license to be dogmatic. It’s quite easy to be an opinionated old fool.” It was generous of him to say that—and yours truly needs to remember that also!

If all I had known of Borg was what he wrote in this book, he wouldn’t have been used as an example of contemporary Christian liberalism. And I find that now I am much more in agreement with Borg’s “convictions” than with the theological stance of my own sister.

During the meal at Ryan’s last week, she began asking questions about my theological beliefs. It became quite evident that my views have changed considerably from what we both believed back in the 1950s. But her beliefs seem to be much the same—and she most likely sees that as a positive thing. 

But many realize that a broader theological worldview is needed. So they, and I, are grateful for the life and work of Marcus Borg.