Open-Shop Parson

"Never again will I prostitute my Christian ministry to the idealizing of any war." Harry Emerson Fosdick, Manhattan's famed preacher, made this blunt promise in his own pulpit in 1939. He has kept his promise. He has avoided glorifying war, has continually sounded the thesis that after the war the U.S. must live with all the nations of the world.

Last week Harry Emerson Fosdick, 64, handed in his resignation after twelve years as pastor of the towering Riverside ("Rockefeller") church. The trustees, "considering the spiritual needs of these war days," would not accept it. They got Dr. Fosdick to remain by allowing him to confine his duties to preaching.

For black-eyed Fosdick, who still looks youngish and agreeably testy, it was, in many ways, quite a week. He published his 20th book, On Being a Real Person (Harper; $2.50), and his publishers ran off 50,000 copies -- their largest original print order for a religious book. Wrote Dr. Fosdick: "Here I have tried to set down what I have seen going on inside real people, have endeavored to describe their familiar mental and emotional maladies, their alibis and rationalizations, their ingenious, unconscious tricks of evasion and escape, their handling of fear, anxiety, guilt and humiliation, their compensations and sublimations also.

"My main purpose in writing this book has not been to present an argument for religious faith. . . . I have tried in writing, as in personal counseling, to begin with people as I have found them, and to confront religion only when, following the trail of their problems and needs, I ran headlong into it. Nevertheless, one does run headlong into it."

Forward-Sliding Baptist. While a sophomore at Colgate, "Fuzzy" Fosdick wrote home to his parents in Buffalo (his father was a high-school principal): "I am throwing over my old idea of the universe. I am building another--and leaving God out." But God did not stay out. When Fuzzy graduated (as class poet, cheer leader, winner of five major prizes), he went to Manhattan's liberal Union Theological Seminary, then to a Baptist pastorate in Montclair, NJ.

There he built a new church, retired each morning to an office building to write his sermons, wrote with a vigorous accent that attracted big congregations. During World War I he went overseas with the Y.M.C.A., helped to stir up war sentiment as a lecturer for the British Ministry of Information. After the war, Baptist Fosdick was called to Manhattan's rich, influential First Presbyterian Church.

Soon a Fundamentalist Presbyterian group in Philadelphia smelled heresy in Fosdick's sermons, sent word to the New York brethren to cast out the interloper. The battle was noisy. The Presbyterian General Assembly finally suggested a way out: Fosdick might become a Presbyterian. Harry Fosdick refused; he said it would be too much like making the ministry a denominationally "closed shop." His farewell sermon packed the First Church. The closing hymn was "God be with you Till We Meet Again." He had to shake hands for an hour afterwards.

John D. Rockefeller Jr. offered him the Park Avenue Baptist Church. Fosdick turned the offer down. Said he jokingly: "For one thing, you're too wealthy." Rockefeller replied: "Do you think that more people will criticize you on account of my wealth than will criticize me on account of your heresy?" Fosdick took the job, with four stipulations: 1) immersion was not to be required; 2) all believers in Jesus were to be acceptable as members; 3) a new, larger church would be built uptown; 4) the minister's salary was not to exceed $5,000.

Five years later Fosdick preached his first sermon in the new Riverside Church. In form it was an elaborate Neo-Gothic cathedral, niched with statues of Darwin, Einstein, Emerson, Buddha, Confucius. It cost some $4,000,000 (largely donated by the Rockefellers). Today Dr. Fosdick preaches from his marble pulpit on Sunday mornings, before a microphone in his 18th-floor tower study on Sunday afternoons. His voice is carried by national hookup to one of the nation's largest radio congregations. He preaches the same kind of rationalistic, enthusiastic sermons that he has occasionally preached in the chapels near his summer home in Boothbay Harbor, Me.

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