Word: fosdick
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...Never again will I prostitute my Christian ministry to the idealizing of any war" (TIME, March 15) said Harry Emerson Fosdick in 1939. He may have said it; he did not mean it. A caring moral man cannot be indifferent to the awful needs of a sorely stricken world...
...Some members of the commission, headed by John Foster Dulles, Manhattan lawyer and counsel to the American Commission to the Paris Peace Conference: Philosopher William Ernest Hocking, Yale Divinity School's Dean Luther A. Weigle, Sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin, the Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick...
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...
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...