by Bruce Bawer
Finally, Fosdick examines the Second Coming. The fundamentalist notion "is that Christ is literally coming, externally on the clouds of heaven, to set up his kingdom here." Believing this, "they sit still and do nothing and expect the world to grow worse and worse until he comes." To a liberal (a word Fosdick uses in this sermon in place of modernist), the idea that "Christ is coming!" means that "his will and principles will be worked out by God's grace in human life and institutions until 'he shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied.'"
Fosdick asks, "Has anybody a right to deny the Christian name to those who differ with him on such points and to shut against them the doors of the Christian fellowship?" He answers this in the negative, and concludes by making several observations:
• There is a need for tolerance—on both sides. Though "just now the Fundamentalists are giving us one of the worst exhibitions of bitter intolerance that the churches of this country have ever seen," young modernists need to respond "not by controversial intolerance, but by producing, with our new opinions, something of the depth and strength, nobility and beauty of character that in other times were associated with other thoughts."
• Love is more important than doctrine. "There are many opinions in the field of modern controversy concerning which I am not sure whether they are right or wrong, but there is one thing I am sure of: courtesy and kindliness and tolerance and humility and fairness are right. Opinions may be mistaken; love never is."
• The mind is a terrible thing to waste. "Science treats a young man's mind as though it were really important." (Alas, Fosdick, in the manner of his time, tended to speak as if ideas, religious or otherwise, were the exclusive province of men.) The churches, by contrast, say, "Come, and we will feed you opinions from a spoon. No thinking is allowed here except such as brings you to certain specified, predetermined conclusions." The mind, Fosdick underscores, is not a threat to faith but an instrument by which we can better understand God and our relationship with him.
• The main business of Christianity should be not to discuss details of theology but to minister to human misery. At the time that Fosdick gave his sermon, the Armenian holocaust was under way. Such "colossal problems," he insisted, "must be solved in Christ's name and for Christ's sake"; to devote one's energies instead to theological controversy is "immeasurable folly."
Fosdick's reference in his sermon to young people reflects his special concern with reaching intelligent Christians of tender years who rejected fundamentalist dogma but hungered for spiritual experience. Unless the church made an effort to communicate its message to them in terms that did not outrage their intelligence, Fosdick insisted, they would be lost to the church—and the church would be lost to them. Fosdick, throughout his career, would make a special effort to reach young audiences. In addition to his sermons, which at the height of his fame routinely drew overflow crowds, he gave addresses at major universities and lectures to YMCA groups. In reading through old newspaper accounts of Fosdick's exploits, I realized that my maternal grandfather was only one of countless young people of the 1920s who responded enthusiastically to the Baptist preacher's message that you didn't have to close your mind to embrace Jesus as your savior.
Published later in 1922 as a pamphlet (under the title The New Knowledge and the Christian Faith), "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" occasioned widespread attacks and made Fosdick, in the eyes of both friend and foe, the standard-bearer of Christian modernism—and its principal lightning rod. On September 24 John Roach Straton of New York's Calvary Baptist Church delivered a sermon attacking Fosdick and challenging him to a debate. (Fosdick declined the invitation.) Clarence Edward Macartney of Philadelphia's Arch Street Presbyterian Church responded to Fosdick's sermon both by publishing his own tract, entitled "Shall Unbelief Win?" and by taking institutional action, which resulted in the first of dozens of front-page New York Times articles about Fosdick. On October 18, 1922, the newspaper reported that the Presbytery of Philadelphia, at Macartney's instigation, had submitted to the Presbyterian Church's General Assembly a document of protest that took issue with "the kind of preaching done in the First Presbyterian Church of New York." Fosdick was not mentioned by name, but it was clear to everyone that the protest had been occasioned by "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?"
To read Fosdick's once-famous sermon today is to be astonished by its continuing power and by the enduring relevance of its salient points, among them:
• The continuity of modernist Christians' faith with historic Christian faith.
• The fact that letting go of fundamentalism does not imperil faith but in fact makes the Bible "more inspired and inspiring" and renders spiritual experience more vital. The fundamentalists' "static and mechanical theory of inspiration," he writes, is "a positive peril to the spiritual life."
• The alienness of the fundamentalists' mean-spiritedness and intolerance from the character of Jesus. "If he [Jesus] should walk through the ranks of the congregation this morning, can we imagine him claiming as his own those who hold one idea of inspiration and sending from him into outer darkness those who hold another?"
• The fact that if the fundamentalists continue to prevail in the established church, they will drive members away and destroy the institution. Because of fundamentalism, Fosdick warns, "educated people are looking for their religion outside the churches." Young people of faith who don't think "in ancient terms" are considered anathema by fundamentalists. This cannot go on, he says. "A religion that is afraid of the facts is doomed."
Near the end of "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" Fosdick stated, "There is not a single thing at stake in the [fundamentalist-modernist] controversy on which depends the salvation of human souls." His fundamentalist opponents—among them James M. Gray, dean of the Moody Bible Institute—could not have disagreed more vehemently. Gray's response to Fosdick, an essay entitled "The Deadline of Doctrine Around the Church," amounts to a precis of the fundamentalists' antimodernist arguments. For me it brought to mind a passage in Fos-dick's book As I See Religion (1932) that distinguishes between religious and scientific truths. Implicitly separating himself from fundamentalists who render putative religious truths with pseudoscientific precision (the ultimate example thereof, naturally, being Darby's seven dispensations), Fosdick noted that
though religion is interested in truth, . . , often with a fierceness that science cannot surpass, it is interested rather as art is; and in a scientific age this leads to all sorts of misunderstanding. . . . We are convinced beyond peradventure that he who travels merely the path of electrons, atoms, molecules toward a vision of the Ultimate misses it, and that he who travels the road of spiritual values—goodness, truth, beauty—-finds it. . . . Many who use the symbols of religion do not know what they are doing. They read poetry as prose, take similes with deadly literalness, make a dogma from a metaphor. They call God a person, and to hear them do it one would think that our psychological processes could naively be attributed to the Eternal. It is another matter altogether, understanding symbolic language, to call God personal when one means that up the roadway of goodness, truth, and beauty, which outside personal experience have no significance, one must travel toward the truth about the Ultimate— "beyond the comprehension of the human mind." Of course, that is vague; no idea of the Eternal which is not vague can possibly approximate the truth.
To read "The Deadline of Doctrine" on the heels of Fosdick's sermon is to recognize that Gray's essay perfectly illustrates Fosdick's distinction between reading the Bible as poetry and reading it as prose. Gray, of course, does the latter.
He opens by rejecting Fosdick's terminology. The word fundamentalist, he says, "is unnecessary . . . because the body of truth for which it stands has always had a name which requires neither explanation nor defense." In other words, the present struggle is not between two kinds of Christians; it is between true Christians and pretenders. Gray asks, "Is liberalism Christianity?" His answer: a firm and angry no. What Fosdick calls f
undamentalism, Gray says, introducing a quotation from a familiar hymn, is quite simply the "Faith of our fathers, living still, / In spite of dungeon, fire, and sword"; what Fosdick calls liberal Christianity is anathema. Gray refers to Fosdick's identification of the virgin birth, scriptural inerrancy, substitutionary atonement, and the Second Coming as the "four stakes which the fundamentalists are driving 'to mark out the deadline of doctrine around the church,'" and to Fosdick's assertion "that no one has a right to deny the Christian name to those who do not hold these doctrines, or to shut against them the doors of Christian fellowship." Gray disagrees, arguing that Saint Paul himself demands such a denial and a shutting of doors: "Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any gospel unto you than that which we preached unto you, let him be accursed" (Gal. 1:8-9). This quotation from Saint Paul has continued, down to the present time, to be a favorite of legalistic Protestants.
Gray blames Fosdick's "new movements in Christian thought" for Bolshevism and World War I. The latter connection is particularly odd, as Fosdick's sermon exudes a peaceable spirit while Gray's essay is chockablock with violent images. For example, Gray quotes the letter to Timothy enjoining him to "war a good warfare" (1 Tim. 1:18—19); he cites Peter's statement that "false teachers" will "bring upon themselves swift destruction" with their "damnable heresies" (2 Pet. 2:1); and he takes note of John's command that "if any one cometh unto you and bringeth not this teaching, receive him not into your house, and give him no greeting" (2 John 7:11). Gray concludes from these passages that it is incumbent upon Christians of good conscience "to withhold the Christian name from, and shut the door of Christian fellowship against the deniers of such doctrines." While Fosdick's account of Christianity draws on the most beautiful passages in scripture, principally from the Gospels, Gray's response to that account draws on some of the Bible's ugliest and most violent passages, few of them from the Gospels.
Having denied Fosdick and his followers the name of Christian, Gray proceeds through the four matters of doctrine on which Fosdick focuses in "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" His method is essentially one of assertion: The Bible says these things are so; case closed. Does extra-scriptural evidence suggest otherwise? Then perhaps Satan is at work. "Would it occur to him [Fosdick], that possibly the prince of darkness might wish to forestall the effect of the biological miracle of Jesus' birth by counterfeiting it in the annals of paganism?" In other words, were the references to virgin births in other faiths planted by Satan, perhaps, in order to challenge Christians' faith in the real virgin birth? To read Fosdick's sermon and then Gray's response is to feel that they inhabit entirely different mental worlds. In Fosdick's world, other faiths are to be respected, for all have something in them of God; in Gray's world, elements of other faith traditions may well have been designed by Satan to weaken Christians' faith. Fosdick's religion centers on the person and the teachings of Jesus, which for him can be separated easily from such "tiddledywinks and peccadillos" as the virgin birth, angelic annunciations, and sundry miraculous happenings; Gray's faith is constructed of that very tissue of miracles, and to challenge any part of it is to threaten to destroy the whole. For Fosdick, Satan and angels and so forth are metaphors, and the gospel is to be read as a poetic attempt to convey the essence of Jesus; for Gray, Satan and angels are quite literal realities, and the gospel narratives are to be read as pure history. For Fosdick, all of Christianity flows out of the commandments to love God and one's neighbor, and the validity of other parts of scripture is to be measured by the degree to which they are consistent with those commandments; for Gray, every line of scripture is equally valid, and indeed he is inclined to quote verses that directly contradict the commandment to love one's neighbor. For Fosdick, fundamentalism arrests spiritual growth; for Gray, modernism destroys belief and thwarts salvation. Fosdick holds out hope for entente between the two parties, envisioning a church in which fundamentalists and liberals live together in harmony; Gray insists that it is the obligation of "true Christians" not to compromise in any way with apostasy.
In Gray's essay as well as in other fundamentalist responses to Fosdick, one may note certain recurring elements that remain hallmarks of fundamentalist rhetoric:
• An insistence that modernist Christians are not Christians. Samuel Craig, in a 1923 essay in the Princeton Theological Review entitled "Genuine and Counterfeit Christianity," distinguishes between "those who are Christians and those who merely call themselves Christians. . . . Those to whom Jesus is not a present object of worship, and who have no consciousness of themselves as sinners redeemed by His blood, are of a totally different religion from those to whom He is an object of faith and whose hope for time and eternity is grounded in the conviction that He bore their sins in His own body on the tree." And Reeve in The Fundamentals argues that people who buy into Fosdick's views thereby "forsake the Christian standpoint" and that "a preacher who has thoroughly imbibed these beliefs has no proper place in an evangelical Christian pulpit." (This is the ultimate reactionary posture: seeing a preacher's function as being to affirm believers' attitudes, not to challenge their assumptions and values, to make them think, to beckon them to a higher spiritual plane.)
From Fosdick's time until our own, fundamentalists have talked about nonlegalistic Christians as if Jesus is not a present fact to them. They are wrong. For nonlegalistic Christians Jesus is a present fact. What fundamentalists are uncomfortable with is the degree to which nonlegalistic Christians assume that present Jesus to be continuous and consistent with the Jesus of history, whom they take as a life model. The hostility of fundamentalists to the historical Jesus can reach astonishing proportions; many fall just short of saying "The hell with the Jesus of history!" The Baptist theologian Calvin Miller goes so far as to say that Christians "are not interested in talking about the Jesus who was. They are interested only in the Christ who is. The academic, historical Jesus is not to be compared with the Christ of the right now. This is not the Christ of theology or of history, but the Christ of faith." If, for contemporary legalists like Miller, the Jesus of history threatens the institutions and ideologies they have constructed around the concept of the saving Christ, it is plainly because the Jesus of history had values that differed dramatically from their own.
• Martial metaphors. As Gray quotes Saint Paul's injunction to Timothy to "war a good warfare," so George Whitfield Ridout opens a reply to Fosdick with a two-page poem that likens the conflict between fundamentalists and modernists to all-out war. The poem, "Valiant for the Truth" by Frances Ridley Havergal, begins with the line "Unfurl the Christian Standard! Lift it manfully on high," and goes on to identify Christian values with soldierly virtues: "No faint-hearted flag of truce with mischief and with wrong, / Should lead the soldiers of the Cross, the faithful and the strong." To Ridout, clearly, love and peace are not virtues in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy but marks of faintheartedness; the true virtue is a steadfast willingness to fight. Saying that "it is high time that the Protestant Church should awake to the perils that beset us," Ridout quotes twelve lines of another poem filled with images of warfare, including the following: "Dread not the din and smoke,/The stifling poison of the fiery air;/Courage! It is the battle of thy God!" In similar spirit, Samuel Craig refers antagonistically to those who cry "Peace, peace; when there is no peace," and asks, "If the trumpet give an uncertain voice, who shall prepare himself for war?"
It is instructive to compare such rhetoric to that of Fosdick, who complains in his 1925 book The Modern Use of the Bible that "Our Western civilization is built on war. . .. We have bred men for war, trained men for war; we have gloried in war; we have made warriors our heroes and even in our churches we have put the battle flags beside the Cross. . . . With one corner of our mouth we have praised the Prince of Peace and with the other we have glorified war."
• A preoccupation with Christianity as the "faith of our fathers," in the words of Frederick William Faber's nineteenth-century hymn.
Gray, as noted, quo
tes the first two lines of Faber's hymn in his essay, saying that what Fosdick calls fundamentalism is quite simply the "Faith of our fathers, living still,/In spite of dungeon, fire, and sword." Ridout, in his aforementioned essay, quotes the hymn's last two lines: "Faith of our fathers, Holy Faith, /We will be true to thee till death." None of Fosdick s opponents seems to have quoted the hymn's third stanza, which was more up Fosdick's theological street than their own:
Faith of our fathers! we will love Both friend and foe in all our strife, And preach thee, too, as love knows how, By kindly words and virtuous life.
The tone of these "faith of our fathers" arguments tends to be self-consciously desperate and pathetic. To read some of Fosdick's fundamentalist opponents is to get the impression that they have determined that they are on the Titanic, as it were, and have decided to go down with it, singing hymns and brandishing swords. But God doesn't need this kind of fierce protection: We're not his saviors and protectors; he's ours. If these fundamentalists were defensive, it was because something precious to them was indeed threatened— namely the American Protestant establishment. If Christianity, for Fosdick, was about rejecting that establishment's narrow social ideas and prejudices in the name of Jesus, for many of his opponents lifting high the cross became essentially equivalent to hoisting the Confederate flag. When one reads Ridout's charge that Christian modernism is "robbing Protestants of their Bible" and "striking at the foundation of our Republic," one cannot help thinking that Jesus' earliest followers were criticized in similar terms for overthrowing the Old Faith and threatening the Roman Empire's stability. It should be remembered, too, that the Republic whose foundation Ridout was defending was one in which white fundamentalists forbade blacks to worship in their churches and turned a blind eye to lynchings.