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FOSDICK, HARRY EMERSON 1878-1969

MINISTER AND PROFESSOR

Prominent Protestant

Harry Emerson Fosdick was one of the major voices of liberal Protestantism in the middle of the twentieth century. As pastor of the spectacular, nondenominational Riverside Church in New York City and as the leading Protestant speaker on radio, he helped to define the personality and meaning of mainline Protestantism for thirty years.

Early Recognition

Fosdick was born in upstate New York and entered the Baptist ministry after graduating from Union Theological Seminary in New York. His talents and abilities were quickly recognized. He became professor of practical theology at Union in 1911 and taught there until he retired in 1946. In 1918, even though he was a Baptist, he was called to the pulpit of the First Presbyterian Church in New York City. In 1922 he attracted national notoriety when he preached a sermon called "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?," which entered him in the battle between modernists and fundamentalists that splintered many Protestant denominations in the 1920s. The furor over the sermon led to efforts to move him from a Presbyterian pulpit. While his congregation supported Fosdick, he decided to accept an offer to pastor the Park Avenue Baptist Church. That congregation then decided to move to a new sanctuary to be built on Riverside Heights near Union and Columbia University. The Riverside Church, which was generously supported by John D. Rockefeller Jr., was dedicated in 1930.

Riverside

The Riverside Church was one of the largest churches in the nation, with more than two thousand members and a staff of seventy. The structure contained facilities for its varied urban ministry as well as a. radio studio for the production of Fosdick's radio sermons. With the support of a professional staff and its extensive facilities, the congregation played an active role in the affairs of the neighborhood and city,

Radio Preacher

Fosdick engaged in a vigorous ministry during the decade. One of his most effective ways of influencing people was through his nationally broadcast program, The National Vesper Hour. It was estimated that he reached more people than any other preacher in his nineteen years of broadcasts over NBC's Red Network. Some suggested that a reason for the decline in church attendance in the 1930s was because people stayed home from their local congregations to hear Fosdick.

Critic of Modernism

Though Fosdick entered the battle against fundamentalism in 1922, he also challenged the supremacy of modernism in a widely discussed 1935 sermon, "Shall the Church Go Beyond Modernism?" While he still insisted that modernism had played an essential role in the development of current Christianity, he asserted that religion must go beyond it. This meant advancing beyond a modernist emphasis on intellectualism, which seemed to attempt to adjust Christianity to the world. "Our modern world cries out … for souls maladjusted to it, not most of all for accommodators and adjusters but for intellectual and ethical challengers." People must realize, he said, that "Sin is real… and it leads men and nations to damnation.…" Modernism, he claimed, had watered down the essential truth of religion, the reality of God. Finally, he said, modernism had lost its ethical standards and its ability to attack the problems people face. "What Christ does to modern culture is to challenge it."

Away from Liberalism

Fosdick's sermon reflected the growing influence in Protestant theological circles of the new theology being introduced by Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Americans such as Reinhold Niebuhr and his brother, H. Richard. But equally important in challenging the accommodating qualities of American Protestantism were the questions raised by the Depression and by war and the threat of war. What did the spreading totalitarian regimes of Adolf Hitler's Germany, Benito Mussolini's Italy, and Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union say about humanity and the historical moment? For Fosdick, the dictator invalidated many liberal and modernist assumptions about humanity's essential good nature.

A Spiritual Leader

In his many sermons and books Fosdick offered guidance to the American people through the events and issues of the day. No other preacher of his time seemed to speak so directly to the time and his audience.