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Fosdick meaning

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Harry Emerson Fosdick and the Spirit of American Liberalism

On May 21, 1922, Harry Emerson Fosdick took to the pulpit of Old First—the historic First Presbyterian Church (est. 1716) located on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan—to deliver what would be his most famous sermon. The American church broadly, and the Presbyterian church specifically, were already divided into conservative and liberal camps. Fosdick’s sermon did not create this theological and ecclesiastical division. But his sermon that spring clearly exposed the division, and, more than that, it exemplified all the reasons for it. For as much as Fosdick thought of himself as irenic, moderate, and peace-loving, one does not entitle a sermon “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” without meaning to pick a fight.[1]

A Sermon for the Times

The text for Fosdick’s sermon that morning came from Acts 5:38-39 where the esteemed Gamaliel, a leader of the Jewish Sanhedrin, counsels an angry mob to leave the apostles alone, for if their “work be of men, it will come to nought: but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it.” Whether Fos

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Fosdick, Harry Emerson

May 24, 1878 to October 5, 1969

Harry Emerson Fosdick, the founding minister of Riverside Church in New York City, was regarded by Martin Luther King, Jr., as “the greatest preacher of this century” (Papers 4:536). One of liberal Protestantism’s most influential voices, Fosdick was a proponent of ecumenical Christianity, pacifism, and civil rights, whose radio sermons and writings reached millions. King frequently drew on themes and passages from Fosdick’s sermons.

Fosdick was born in Buffalo, New York, and earned his BA at Colgate University (1900), his BD at Union Theological Seminary (1903), and his MA at Columbia University (1908). Fosdick became pastor of New York City’s First Presbyterian Church in 1919. He sparked national controversy in the 1920s for challenging Christian fundamentalism’s literal reading of the Bible and rejection of historical biblical analysis, and was forced to resign from First Presbyterian in 1925 because of it. After his resignation, millionaire John D. Rockefeller, Jr., asked Fosdick to head Park

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Harry Emerson Fosdick: Colgate’s most distinguished graduate, now unknown

II. Why His Renown?

In 1904, Fosdick received his MDiv from Union Theological Seminary. In 1908 he completed a master’s degree in political science from Columbia University and began teaching practical theology, Bible, and homiletics at Union. He was already a pastor, with congregations in Manhattan and Montclair, N.J.

He started to write popular journal articles and books based on his sermons, six of which sold into the millions:

  • The Second Mile (1908) exhorted its readers to do more than is expected of you, following Jesus’ words and actions.
  • The Assurance of Immortality (1913) provided confident Christian apologetics for the afterlife.
  • The Manhood of the Master (1913) examined Christ’s character as a model for our own. Fosdick wrote about this book: “My greatest single source of satisfaction, so far as this early book of mine is concerned, is that during one of his imprisonments, Mahatma Gandhi read it. A friend of his saw his copy, well underlined and annotated.” So, Fosdick was gaining

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