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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Thank you for this Dr. Hart. Machen seems to be the timeless, objective correction to so many ills in church and state thinking since his departure. Unless I missed it, your 2022 RTS post, excerpted here, did not contain the phrase “Christian Nationalism” (but you did quote Machen’s use of “Christian Americanization”). At least in my case, the HB clickbait in the heading worked… happily so!
As Carl Trueman and others have observed, whether CN serves as an offensive epithet or a badge of honor depends entirely on how one defines it. There is a passage in John Murray I recently saw that makes me ask: (1) how would Machen have responded to this? (2) Does this view incline Murray toward a “Christian Nationalist” position? I note his assertions that the state must “promote” the kingdom of God—presumably the “Christian” kingdom that Jesus announced—and must acknowledge its subordination to “Christ in his mediatorial dominion.”
We sometimes see claims that the promotion of God’s kingdom in the American Constitutional Republic is not “feasible” or “executable.” I imagine Machen would prefer to assess this idea from the perspective of whether it is “biblical,” and let the chips fall where they may. Maybe you’ve dealt with this in A SECULAR FAITH, or elsewhere.
I appreciated your sane observations on the Acton Institute page in “The Existential Threat of Anti-Christian Nationalism.” Comments like this seem particularly useful: “Aside from the errors that afflict single-cause explanations of American greatness or wickedness, attributing the pernicious aspects of the United States to Christian nationalism may represent a greater existential threat to the nation than fusing Christianity to national identity.” (01.09.23). Thus, I’d love your thoughts on this Murray passage (emphases added):
“The church is not subordinate to the state, nor is the state subordinate to the church. They are both subordinate to God, and to Christ in his mediatorial dominion as head over all things to his body the church. Both church and state are under obligation to recognize this subordination, and the corresponding co-ordination of their respective spheres of operation in the divine institution. Each must maintain and assert its autonomy in reference to the other and preserve its freedom from intrusion on the part of the other. But while this diversity of function and of sphere must be recognized, guarded, and maintained, the larger unity within which this diversity exists must not be overlooked. The principle that defines this unity is the sovereignty of God, and the obligation emanating from it is the requirement that both church and state must promote the interests of the kingdom of God. It is only on the basis of such principles that any Christian conception of the relation of church and state can be developed.” (John Murray, Collected Writings, Vol 1, Banner of Truth, 1977, p.254)