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Shall the Christian Right Win?
If Harry Emerson Fosdick were to give his famous 1922 sermon "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" today, the style might be different, but the content might be surprisingly similar. It was given at a time when the clash of a science-driven urban moderism and religion was perhaps at its height. Some of those kinds of battles continue today on everything from matters of creationism to climate science. And at time when the ever nefarious Institute on Religion and Democracy works for the demise of the mainline liberal Protestantism that Fosdick sought to defend and advance; and the progressive Protestant legacy is being actively reconsidered by scholars; progressive Christians of many kinds remain an active part of our religious and political life. Of course, there is much more going on in our politics and culture than the state of institutional churches, but the story of these churches remains a central part of our story as a nation, whether we are part of these institutions or not.
Much has changed and much has not changed since 1922, as a reading of Fosdick's historic sermon "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" will show -- and is worth considering. Excerpts below: |
Already all of us must have heard about the people who call themselves the Fundamentalists. Their apparent intention is to drive out of the evangelical churches men and women of liberal opinions. I speak of them the more freely because there are no two denominations more affected by them than the Baptist and the Presbyterian. We should not identify the Fundamentalists with the conservatives. All Fundamentalists are conservatives, but not all conservatives are Fundamentalists. The best conservatives can often give lessons to the liberals in true liberality of spirit, but the Fundamentalist program is essentially illiberal and intolerant.
The Fundamentalists see, and they see truly, that in this last generation there have been strange new movements in Christian thought. A great mass of new knowledge has come into man's possession--new knowledge about the physical universe, its origin, its forces, its laws; new knowledge about human history and in particular about the ways in which the ancient peoples used to think in matters of religion and the methods by which they phrased and explained their spiritual experiences; and new knowledge, also, about other religions and the strangely similar ways in which men's faiths and religious practices have developed everywhere. . . .
Now, there are multitudes of reverent Christians who have been unable to keep this new knowledge in one compartment of their minds and the Christian faith in another. They have been sure that all truth comes from the one God and is His revelation. Not, therefore, from irreverence or caprice or destructive zeal but for the sake of intellectual and spiritual integrity, that they might really love the Lord their God, not only with all their heart and soul and strength but with all their mind, they have been trying to see this new knowledge in terms of the Christian faith and to see the Christian faith in terms of this new knowledge.
Doubtless they have made many mistakes. Doubtless there have been among them reckless radicals gifted with intellectual ingenuity but lacking spiritual depth. Yet the enterprise itself seems to them indispensable to the Christian Church. The new knowledge and the old faith cannot be left antagonistic or even disparate, as though a man on Saturday could use one set of regulative ideas for his life and on Sunday could change gear to another altogether. We must be able to think our modern life clear through in Christian terms, and to do that we also must be able to think our Christian faith clear through in modern terms.
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