Have you ever heard that phrase before? It is the last line in the first stanza of the hymn, "God of Grace and God of Glory." Its author, Harry Emerson Fosdick, was for years the famous--and, to some, controversial--pastor of the Riverside Church in New York City. I propose to examine very briefly his life and ministry to see how it might inform us as Christians today.

Harry Emerson Fosdick was born in Buffalo, New York, on May 24, 1878. Seven years later, while attending a worship service at the Baptist church in the village of Westfield, New York, young Harry, responding to a sermon on the Great Commission, made a profession of faith in Christ, was baptized, and immediately felt a call to the Christian ministry. The religious atmosphere of his Baptist home was one which would influence the subsequent course of his life and ministry. In his autobiography, The Living of These Days, Fosdick noted, "Few remembered impressions of my childhood are more clear than the family's insistence on our individual liberty and responsibility; we were supposed to think and to make decisions for ourselves, and the whole bent of our upbringing was toward independence . . . ."

In 1895 eighteen-year-old Harry enrolled in Colgate University, a small Baptist school in Hamilton, New York. During his college years, Fosdick had the foundations of his faith shaken by much of the new learning of his time. He asked himself if it were possible to remain a Christian without rejecting all that nineteenth-century science and scholarship had declared about the universe, humanity, pre-Christian religions, and Christianity itself, especially with respect to the nature of the authority of the Bible. After much soul-searching, he was able to answer "yes." In doing so, the young man espoused the Modernist theology of his day.

After graduating first in his class, Fosdick remained an additional year to study in Colgate's seminary. He then began study in Union Theological Seminary in New York City. While there, he was ordained a Baptist minister in the Madison Avenue Baptist Church.

Upon obtaining his degree at Union, Fosdick became pastor of the First Baptist Church of Montclair, New Jersey. There he honed his preaching skills, which were already considerable. During the time he was at Montclair, Fosdick began to teach at Union Seminary. Upon his appointment to a full professorship there in 1915, Fosdick resigned his pastorate and moved to New York.

In 1918 Fosdick was asked to take the position of associate minister of New York's Old First Presbyterian Church, which carried with it the responsibility to preach at the church's worship services. He accepted, while retaining his professorship at Union and his Baptist credentials. His preaching and the theology it encompassed proved very popular with the congregation at Old First Presbyterian and with many others as well.

On May 21, 1922, Fosdick preached what was perhaps the famous (and notorious) sermon of his career, "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" It was a response to the Fundamentalist movement which had been born a few years earlier in American Presbyterianism. Fosdick criticized the Fundamentalists for, among other things, their attempt to exclude from Christian fellowship all persons who did not conform to their own views about what constituted the truth of God. In the process, he laid out views of his own that certainly did not conform to historic Protestant orthodoxy. Those who heard the sermon that morning loved it but, following its wide circulation in print form, many leaders and laypersons in the Presbyterian Church, USA, including William Jennings Bryan, did not. The Baptist preacher was eventually forced to resign his position with the church.

Soon after, however, Fosdick accepted a call to the pastorate of New York's Park Avenue Baptist Church, where he carried on the Liberal tradition of that congregation's recent pastors. Another important fact about the church was that one of its members was John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Even before Fosdick accepted the pastorate there, he, Rockefeller, and others had laid the groundwork for the establishment of a new church on Riverside Drive, near Columbia University in Morningside Heights. Park Avenue church reconstituted itself as the Riverside Church in 1930. The building's architecture, which features a tall bell tower, is suggestive of a medieval cathedral, even to the extent of its choir stalls.

The new church, which from the first has been essentially interdenominational in character, prospered under Fosdick's leadership. He and the congregation became known for their engagement with issues of social justice, including labor/management relations, poverty, war and peace, and racism. This ministry emphasis continues to this day. Through the years, Fosdick's preaching drew large crowds to the church. He became the best known and most quoted minister in the nation. Several religious leaders and publications proclaimed him America's greatest preacher of the twentieth century.

In 1946 Fosdick retired from his pastorate at Riverside and his teaching responsibilities at Union Seminary. In the years that followed, Fosdick concentrated on his writing, an important part of his ministry since his earliest years as pastor and seminary professor. He died in 1969 at the age of ninety-one. (For more on this great preacher's life, ministry, and theology, I recommend Harry Emerson Fosdick: Preacher, Pastor, Prophet, by Robert Moats Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

What does Harry Emerson Fosdick have to say to us today? A look at some things he said in a few of his sermons will, I believe, be instructive, encouraging, and challenging. His sermon, "Must the Fundamentalists Win?" Is both troubling and inspiring. It is troubling in that, in laying out his (and others') liberal theological interpretations, there is a hint of arrogance. Fosdick seems to imply indirectly that all truly intelligent persons will, because of their intelligence, accept the Modernist understanding of Christian doctrine, including, for example, discounting even the possibility of the Virgin birth of Christ and also of his physical resurrection.

On the other hand, the sermon is very encouraging--and relevant today--in its affirmation of Christian liberty and its call for tolerance. Fosdick at one point noted that "multitudes of young men and women . . . are graduating from our schools of learning, thousands of them Christians who may make us older ones ashamed by the sincerity of their devotion to God's will on earth. They are not thinking in ancient terms that leave ideas of progress out. They cannot think in those terms. There could be no greater tragedy than that the Fundamentalists should shut the door of the Christian fellowship against such."

Three years later Fosdick preached, from John Calvin's pulpit in Geneva, Switzerland, a sermon entitled, "A Christian Conscience about War." In that headquarters city of the League of Nations, Fosdick stated that one of the elements that ought to enter into such a conscience was "the futility of war to achieve any of the purposes that Christianity is meant to serve." He also excoriated nationalism, especially as it had recently developed. "Our politics has become nationalized until the aggrandizement of one's own country in the competitive struggle with other nationalities has been the supreme aim of statesmanship. . . . Even our religion has been nationalized; . . . the center of loyalty in the religious life of the people has increasingly become the nation. . . . . In our fight for liberty we broke up the inclusive mother church into national churches; we reorganized the worship of the people around nationalistic ideals; we helped to identify religion and patriotism. And so far has this identification gone that now, when war breaks, the one God of all humanity, whom Christ came to reveal, is split up into little tribal deities, and before these pagan idols even Christians pray for the blood of their enemies." Near the sermon's end, Fosdick declared, "We cannot reconcile Jesus Christ and war--that is the essence of the matter. That is the challenge which today should stir the conscience of Christendom."

Fosdick preached his second most famous sermon, "The Church Must Go Beyond Modernism," at Riverside Church in 1935. In it he defended the basic approach of Modernist or Liberal theology but criticized Modernism for having become "primarily an adaptation, an adjustment, an accommodation of Christian faith to contemporary scientific thinking" and called this aberration "no adequate religion to represent the Eternal and claim the allegiance of the soul. . . . . Unless the church can go deeper and reach higher than that [,] it will fail indeed." He also charged modernism with having been excessively preoccupied with intellectualism and with having "watered down and thinned out the central message and distinctive truth of religion, the reality of God. "

Fosdick's strongest criticism of modernism was that it "has too commonly lost its ethical standing-ground and its power of moral attack. . . . It is a dangerous thing for a great religion to begin adjusting itself to the culture of a special generation. . . . . To adjust Christian faith to the new astronomy, the new geology, the new biology, is absolutely indispensable. But suppose that this modernizing process, well started, goes on and Christianity adapts itself to contemporary nationalism, contemporary imperialism, contemporary capitalism, contemporary racialism . . . . What then has become of religion, so sunk and submerged in undifferentiated identity with this world?" He concluded, "We must go beyond modernism! And in that new enterprise the watch-word will be not, Accommodate yourself to the prevailing culture! but, Stand out from it and challenge it!"

During his retirement years Fosdick preached a sermon at Riverside which has an important message for all Christians. It was titled, "Finding God in Unlikely Places." In it Fosdick stated, "We naturally find God in life's lovely experiences, 'Praise God from whom all blessings flow' --that is where we find him--in our blessings--but when darkness and disaster come, we commonly cry, Where is God?"

Fosdick's text was that passage in Exodus in which Moses, a fugitive from justice in Egypt, found God in a dry sheep pasturage in the Sinai desert. He noted, "God is in life's lovely things. But soon or late all of us come to the place where, if we are to find God at all, we must find him in a wilderness. . . . In formidable hours when loyalty to the right means the risk of everything, perhaps life itself; in dismaying generations when right is on the scaffold and wrong is on the throne; in personal calamity when God is no mere frosting on life's cake but the soul's desperate necessity--then have come profoundest religious insights and assurances. Where did Jesus say, 'Not my will, but thine be done'? in Gethsemane. When did Luther write, 'A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing'? When he faced a hostile emperor at the risk of his life. When did Sir Thomas More say, 'I die, the King's good servant--but God's first'? On the scaffold."

Perhaps we at University Baptist are at an unlikely place now where we will find God and will be both comforted and challenged by his Spirit. May we pray?

God of grace and God of glory,
On thy people pour thy pow'r;
Crown thine ancient church's story,
Bring her bud to glorious flower.
Grant us wisdom,
Grant us courage,
For the facing of this hour,
For the facing of this hour.
Amen

(Harry Emerson Fosdick, 1930)

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