“On Sunday morning, 21 May 1922, Harry Emerson Fosdick mounted the
pulpit of the First Prsebyterian Church of New York to preach the most
famous sermon of his career, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Described
by Fosdick as a “plea for good will,” the sermon fell like a bombshell
on the Presbyterian Church and set in motion a series of explosions that
would rock the church until well into the next decade.
A liberal Baptist preaching by special arrangement in the Presbyterian
Church, Fosdick had become increasingly dismayed by conservative
intolerance of liberal Christians. Since the close of the war, liberals
and conservatives had been sparring on issues as biblical authority,
evolution, and foreign missions. In response to the escalating militancy
of the fundamentalists, Fosdick launched a counteroffensive and thereby
precipitated the Presbyterian controversy.
The sermon contrasted the differences between liberal and
fundamentalist theology and proposed a solution to tensions that
threatened to tear Baptist and Presbyterian churches apart. Liberals,
Fosdick maintained, were sincere evangelical Christians who were
striving to reconcile the new knowledge of history, science, and
religion with the old faith. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, were
intolerant conservatives determined “to shut the doors of Christian
fellowship” against all who would modify any traditional doctrines…”
Reading through Bradley Longfield’s account in The Presbyterian Controversy
(Oxford, 1991) of the splintering of the Presbyterian church into
fundamentalists, moderates, and modernists, as he assesses it, or the
battle between Christianity and liberalism, as Gresham Machen more
accurately summarized it, brought me to muse on some of the similarities
to the present. Continue at Christian Pundit
No comments:
Post a Comment