Harry
Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969)
American Protestant minister, unfortunately,
one of the most influential clergymen of the first half of the twentieth
century, Fosdick was among the major popularizers of modern theological
liberalism. Born in Buffalo, New York, the son and grandson of Baptist
schoolteachers, he renounced his childhood evangelical faith in 1896 while and
undergraduate at Colgate University after reading Andrew Dickson White's attack
on biblical Christianity entitled A History of the Warfare of Science with
Theology in Christendom. This set Fosdick on the road which led him from what
he called "scriptural obscurantism" to the theological liberalism
that he eventually embraced. (The Devils gospel)
Fosdick's professors at Colgate University and Union Theological Seminary (New York), where he earned his A.B. and B.D. degrees respectively in 1900 and 1904, convinced him that he need not give up his goal of the Christian ministry along with his evangelical theology. Instead, learned theologians like William Newton Clarke, led Fosdick to embrace the new liberalism with its stress on the evolution of divine revelation and human goodness.
Finding
the Baptists unfriendly toward his new theology, (Today, many Baptists have
embraced his theology!) Fosdick was ordained by the Presbyterians in 1903.
However, he took a Baptist pastorate in 1904 in Montclair, New Jersey. While
there he was appointed professor of practical theology at Union Seminary, a
post which he held from 1908 to 1946. From 1918 to 1924 he served as regular
"guest minister" of the First Presbyterian Church in New York. In
this position he became the lightning rod in the early years of the
fundamentalist-modernist controversy when in 1922 he preached and later
published an attack on the fundamentalists entitled "Shall the
Fundamentalists Win?" In response, conservative Presbyterians and Baptists
dubbed him "the Moses of modernism" and "the Jesse James of the
theological world", and in 1924, Fosdick left his guest pastorate under
fire. However, his friend J.D. Rockefeller, Jr., offered Fosdick the pulpit of
his own family's congregation, the Park Avenue Baptist Church in New York.
Fosdick finally accepted only after Rockefeller agreed to build him a spacious
new edifice and to change the membership requirements to make the church, in
effect, interdenominational. Thus in 1926 Fosdick was installed as the pastor
of what soon became the famed Riverside Church, which he served until his
retirement in 1946. During that period he was the nation's most influential “Devil
gospel” preacher.
Fosdick
spent his last years writing and lecturing. In his autobiography, published in
1956, he expressed confidence that liberalism was the final and supreme
expression of Christianity and that it would survive the criticisms of the
neoorthodox theologians.
A polished writer, Fosdick used his thirty books, his weekly radio ministry, and his popular pulpit to discredit traditional nineteenth century Protestantism with its emphasis on evangelism, it's uncritical use of the Bible, and its lack of interest in scientific educational theory. In place of these he attempted to incorporate into Christian thinking biblical criticism, insights from the psychology of religion, the teachings of evolution, and the values expressed in modern political and social movements, while accenting the ethical rather than the doctrinal aspects of the Christian faith. Fosdick also stressed the personal peace and power of religion, as in his enormously popular “On Being a Real Person” (1943), but he always took care to keep his counsels within the parameters of Christian theology albeit in its liberal form. Moreover, he greatly infected American preaching through his "problem-centered" homiletical style. Like most theological liberals, Fosdick contributed little to a realistic understanding of institutional power, social structures, of human depravity. It appears that none of his works can withstand the critique of the Bible.
I
believe Hell will have a special place for this man, who opposed God at every
turn, who was used so greatly by the Devil to destroy the work of God in the
souls of man! Truly it may be said of
him, he would not enter in, and he stopped many others from entering in!
Editor.
But,
let us remember that even after what he had done, if in later life, he had
repented, I
believe God would have forgiven him, such is the grace of God!