"God has put within our lives meanings and possibilities that quite outrun the limits of mortality." -- Harry Emerson Fosdick
Harry Emerson Fosdick (May 24, 1878-October 5, 1969) was an American clergyman. He was born in Buffalo, New York. He graduated from Colgate University in 1900, and Union Theological Seminary in 1904. While attending Colgate University he joined the Delta Upsilon Fraternity. He was ordained a Baptist minister in 1903 at the Madison Avenue Baptist Church at 31st Street. Fosdick was the most prominent liberal Baptist minister of the early 20th Century. Although a Baptist, he was Guest Preacher, at First Presbyterian Church on West Twelfth Street and then at the historic, interdenominational Riverside Church (the congregation moved from the then-named Park Avenue Baptist Church, now the Central Presbyterian Church ) in New York City.
Fosdick became a central figure in the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy within American Protestantism in the 1920s and 1930s. While at First Presbyterian Church, on May 21, 1922, he delivered his famous sermon “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”, in which he defended the modernist position. In that sermon, he presented the Bible as a record of the unfolding of God’s will, not as the literal Word of God. He saw the history of Christianity as one of development, progress, and gradual change. To the fundamentalists, this was rank apostasy, and the battle lines were drawn.
The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. (Northern) in 1923 charged his local presbytery to conduct an investigation of his views. A commission began an investigation, as required. His defense was conducted by a lay elder, John Foster Dulles, whose father was a well-known liberal Presbyterian seminary professor. Fosdick escaped probable censure at a formal trial by the 1924 General Assembly by resigning from the pulpit in 1924. He was immediately hired as pastor of a Baptist church whose most famous member was John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who then funded the Riverside Church in Manhattan's Morningside Heights area overlooking the Hudson River, where Fosdick became pastor as soon as the doors opened in October 1930, prompting a Time magazine cover story on October 6, 1930 (pictured). In it, Time said that Fosdick "proposes to give this educated community a place of greatest beauty for worship. He also proposes to serve the social needs of the somewhat lonely metropolite. Hence on a vast scale he has built all the accessories of a community church ... gymnasium, assembly room for theatricals, dining rooms, etc...In ten stories of the 22-story belltower are classrooms for the religious and social training of the young...".
Fosdick's brother Raymond ran the Rockefeller Foundation for three decades, beginning in 1921. Rockefeller had funded the nation-wide distribution of Shall the Fundamentalists Win?, although with a more cautious title, The New Knowledge and the Christian Faith. This direct-mail project was designed by Ivy Lee, who had worked since 1914 as an independent contractor in public relations for the Rockfellers.
Fosdick was an outspoken opponent of racism and injustice. Alleged victim Ruby Bates credited him with persuading her to testify for the defense in the 1933 retrial of the infamous and racially charged case of the Scottsboro Boys in which nine black youths were tried before all white juries for raping white women, Bates and her companion, Victoria Price in Alabama. Fosdick also supported appeasement of Hitler and argued "moral equivalence", i.e. that the democracies were largely to blame for the rise of fascism:
"The all but unanimous judgment seems to be that we, the democracies, are just as responsible for the rise of the dictators as the dictatorships themselves, and perhaps more so."Fosdick's sermons won him wide recognition, as did his radio addresses which were nationally broadcast. He authored numerous books, and many of his sermon collections are still in print. He is also the author of the hymn, "God of Grace and God of Glory".
Fosdick's book A Guide to Understanding the Bible traces the beliefs of the people who wrote the Bible, from the ancient beliefs of the Hebrews, which he regarded as practically pagan, to the faith and hopes of the New Testament writers.
His brother, Raymond Fosdick, was essentially in charge of philanthropy for John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
Fosdick had a daughter, Dorothy Fosdick, who was foreign policy adviser to Henry M. Jackson.
He was the nephew of Charles Austin Fosdick, a popular author of adventure books for boys who wrote under the pen name Harry Castlemon.
Fosdick reviewed the first edition of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1939, giving it his approval. AA members continue to point to this review as significant in the development of the AA movement.
Fosdick was an active member of the American Friends of the Middle East, a founder of the Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land, and an active "anti-Zionist."
"A person wrapped up in himself makes a small package.""Bitterness imprisons life; love releases it.""Christians are supposed not merely to endure change, nor even to profit by it, but to cause it.""Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.""Don't simply retire from something; have something to retire to.""Every human life involves an unfathomable mystery, for man is the riddle of the universe, and the riddle of man in his endowment with personal capacities.""God is not a cosmic bellboy for whom we can press a button to get things.""Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat.""He who cannot rest, cannot work; he who cannot let go, cannot hold on; he who cannot find footing, cannot go forward.""He who chooses the beginning of the road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determines the end.""He who knows no hardships will know no hardihood. He who faces no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles.""I hate war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses.""I hate war... for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it.""I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.""It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.""Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.""Life asks not merely what you can do; it asks how much can you endure and not be spoiled.""Life consists not simply in what heredity and environment do to us but in what we make out of what they do to us.""No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No stream or gas drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.""Our power is not so much in us as through us.""Picture yourself vividly as winning, and that alone will contribute immeasurably to success.""Preaching is personal counseling on a group basis.""Religion is not a burden, not a weight, it is wings.""The steady discipline of intimate friendship with Jesus results in men becoming like Him.""The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst.""The world is moving so fast these days that the one who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.""To keep the Golden Rule we must put ourselves in other people's places, but to do that consists in and depends upon picturing ourselves in their places.""We cannot all be great, but we can always attach ourselves to something that it great.""Whatever you laugh at in others, laughs at yourself."