Man for All Sects

Fundamentalism was on the defensive in the Roaring Twenties, and William Jennings Bryan, its principal spokesman, found himself under siege by the giants of the emerging Liberalism. He was attacked not only in the press by Henry Mencken and in the courtroom by Clarence Darrow, but even from the pulpit by a bright-eyed Baptist who had the temerity to question the virgin birth and the second coming of Christ.

Instead of being smitten for heresy, the preacher--much to Bryan's chagrin --thrived and became famous. Harry Emerson Fosdick's 1922 sermon entitled "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" flayed oldtime religionists for intolerance and became a rallying cry in U.S. Protestantism's biggest battle. By the time the conflict ended, Bryan and his beliefs had been repudiated by increasingly sophisticated Christians, while Fosdick had been elevated to the pulpit of New York's famed Riverside Church. There he remained, counseling and preaching, for 16 years until his retirement in 1946. And there he was eulogized last week after his death at the age of 91.

New Universes. Fosdick was reared by a liberal schoolteacher father who was a trinitarian in his own way: he had his son immersed as a Baptist but sent him to Presbyterian Sunday school and allowed him to join a Methodist youth group. At Colgate University, modernist thinkers so impressed the boy that he wrote his mother, "I am building another universe and leaving God out of it." But God was back in by the time Fosdick graduated from Colgate in the class of 1900. He entered Union Theological Seminary and in 1903 was ordained into the Baptist ministry.

The young minister ever afterward admitted the divinity of Christ, whom he referred to as "the Master." But Fosdick also subscribed to what he called "the sacredness and possibilities" of humans and he impressively preached a religion that linked the two without obscurantism. One who heard him was Ivy Lee, the father of the public relations industry and adviser to the Rockefeller family. Lee published Fosdick's 1922 sermon under the title of "The New Knowledge and the Christian Faith," and arranged to have it and subsequent homilies widely distributed. When John D. Rockefeller Jr. offered Fosdick the pulpit at the fashionable Park Avenue Baptist Church in 1925, the controversial preacher at first refused. "I do not want to be known as the pastor of the richest man in the country," he said in an exchange that has become famous. Answered Rockefeller: "Do you think that more people will criticize you on account of my wealth than will criticize me on account of your theology?"

Rarely Empty Seats. Fosdick was eventually won over when Rockefeller's congregation agreed to form a new interdenominational church for him. The result was the 2,500 seat, $5 million Riverside Church, above the Hudson River near Columbia University. Topped by a 28-story bell tower, Riverside drew its architectural inspiration from Chartres. Its iconography, however, included Albert Einstein and Ralph Waldo Emerson in addition to Moses and John the Disciple.

The great church rarely had empty seats when Fosdick took the pulpit. His messages reached others across the nation by way of 32 books and a long-lived Sunday radio series. Fosdick's eloquent "life-situation preaching," which incisively related modern theology to everyday situations, was hardly spontaneous. He shut himself off from callers each day to compose his highly literate discourses replete even with articulate jokes that friends called "Fosdickettes." As he observed: "A last-minute sermon preparer is not doing a good job or giving the congregation what it deserves."

Fosdick was a longtime pacificist and once thundered to League of Nations delegates in Geneva that "the church has come down through history too often trying to carry the cross of Jesus in one hand and a dripping sword in the other." He energetically supported a host of social causes, and well after his retirement he continued to work against the war in Viet Nam and in behalf of the black population that lived in poverty not far from Riverside's neo-Gothic splendor. "Always take a job that's too big for you," he once proposed as a code of life, "and then do your best." No one followed that code more faithfully than Harry Emerson Fosdick.

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