Harry Emerson Fosdick’s provocative sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?,” delivered on May 21, 1922, is as good a date as any to locate the start of the controversy between conservatives and liberals in the Presbyterian Church. It did prompt conservative reactions and put the Presbytery of New York at the center of Presbyterian deliberations for the next three years. It was in a sense a clarifying moment for Presbyterians.
But it came from an unlikely source. For one, Fosdick was a Baptist and though preaching as stated supply at First Presbyterian Church, New York City, he had no obvious awareness of developments in Presbyterianism beyond his urban associates. Fosdick had recently visited China and seen the opposition from conservative Baptists to stop the spread of liberal views. Indeed, the origin of the word, “fundamentalist,” was Baptist. Two years before as conservatives in the Southern Baptist Convention along with northern and Canadian counterparts fought liberalism along a variety of fronts, Curtis Lee Laws, the editor of the Baptist newspaper, The Watchman-Examiner, popularized the term. It became a badge of honor among Baptists, including John Roach Straton, who kept close tabs on liberals in New York City, which meant keeping an eye on Fosdick. For this reason, Fosdick was likely most concerned about fundamentalism among Baptists. He unintentionally kicked the sleeping Presbyterian giant by raising fears about fundamentalist intolerance in the setting of an apparently welcome environment like First Presbyterian Church. He had not counted on Presbyterian polity and a system of graded courts.
Gresham Machen was a frequent visitor to New York City for its bookstores, theaters, and restaurants. He often attended the churches of known liberal preachers to hear the other side, though his efforts to monitor modernist sermons became most notable after 1923. When Fosdick preached his infamous sermon, Machen was more involved in his own academic work. His New Testament Greek for Beginners had just been published with Macmillan. Machen was also likely thrilled to see a positive response from liberal New Testament scholars to his first book, The Origin of Paul’s Religion, published the previous year also with Macmillan. Although many reviews faulted Machen for not granting more influence from the surrounding first-century culture on the apostle’s thought, most were also impressed by the young scholar’s command of the sources and secondary literature. Benjamin W. Bacon, professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School, esteemed the book as “worthy of a high place among the products of American biblical scholarship.” Even Rudolf Bultmann praised Machen for representing fairly the views of scholars who questioned the supernatural character of the New Testament. Read more»
D. G. Hart | “For Machen, Fosdick Was a Small Part of the Problem” | Reformed Faith and Practice 7.2 (May 2022).
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Darryl Hart
D. G. Hart teaches history at Hillsdale College. He is has written biographies of J. Gresham Machen, John Williamson Nevin, H. L. Mencken, and Benjamin Franklin. He is an elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and lives in Michigan with his wife, Ann.
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