The Liberal

It was quite a birthday present: $250,000 from John D. Rockefeller III to establish the Harry Emerson Fosdick visiting professorship at Union Theological Seminary. At Union's annual alumni dinner this week, President Henry P. Van Dusen announced the gift and its terms: "To honor Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick for his distinguished contributions as teacher, preacher, writer and counselor, and to strengthen the training of the . . . leaders of the Christian church so as to enable them in their generation, as Dr. Fosdick has in his generation, to interpret the abiding truths and experiences of Christian faith . . ."

Guest of honor 75-year-old Harry Fosdick sat pink-cheeked and snap-eyed through the encomiums. Then he rose to speak for himself with the familiar, measured voice that was the best-known and most influential one in Protestantism during the 'sos and '303.

"This seminary made my ministry possible," he said. "Over 50 years ago, I came here a confused and hungry student, wishing above all else to teach and preach the Christian gospel, but wondering how I could do it with intellectual integrity and self-respect. And here the doors were opened . . ."

Three Hours a Day. Harry Fosdick grew up in Buffalo, the son of a high-school principal who believed that Christianity was more important than sects. He gave young Harry a course in the same conviction by bringing him up a Baptist (by immersion), sending him to a Presbyterian Sunday school, and letting him enroll in a Methodist young people's society. In Colgate University Harry Fosdick encountered Doubt. "I'm building another [universe] and leaving God out," he told his mother. But God got back in through the interstellar space, and in 1901 Fosdick was at Union, preparing for the ministry.

In 1904 he graduated (summa cum laude), married Florence Whitney, a Worcester, Mass, manufacturer's daughter, and took a pastorate at the First Baptist Church in Montclair, N.J. For the next eleven years, First Baptist grew and flourished under his magnetic pulpit, and Harry Fosdick grew with it. Each morning at 9 he shut himself up in an unmarked office and spent three hours soaking up philosophy and literature in preparation for his Sunday sermons. Christian behavior, not doctrine, was what he preached; he was against materialism and sin, and for the righteous life. But though what he had to say was not startling, he said it with such eloquence, and such a wealth of practical application, that his suburbanite parishioners were stirred and delighted. By the time World War I took him overseas as a Y.M.C.A. worker, Harry Emerson Fosdick knew how to prepare and preach a sermon that would vibrate through a congregation for days.

Heresy & Tears. In 1919 he went to a more influential pulpit. Three churches in downtown Manhattan had just joined to form the First Presbyterian Church of New York City, and the new church called Baptist Fosdick to become associate pastor, with preaching as his only duty. And preach he did. Crowds jammed the pews and stood in the aisles. Such conservative Protestants as William Jennings Bryan and Gresham Machen viewed his liberalism with alarm, and denounced him as a "modernist." In 1922, Fosdick preached a sermon entitled "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" which contained a dismissal of the doctrine of the virgin birth as "one of the familiar ways in which the ancient world was accustomed to account for unusual superiority." And to the Fundamentalists : "Nothing in all the world is so much worth thinking of as God, Christ, the Bible, sin and salvation . . . But you cannot challenge the dedicated thinking of this generation to those sublime themes upon any such terms as are laid down by an intolerant church." For the Presbyterian General Assembly this was too much, and within two years Harry Fosdick had been forced to resign.

The New York Times reported the circumstances of the farewell sermon: "Most of the women in the church were in tears, and many of the men struggled to hide their feelings . . . No one left the church after the benediction, which closed the service . . . Before [Dr. Fosdick] could leave the pulpit, the emotion of the men and women in the front rows overcame them. They hurried forward and ascended into the pulpit, all that could get in." Two months later, another church sounded him out--the Park Avenue Baptist Church, which numbered John D.

Rockefeller Jr. among its trustees. When Fosdick hesitated about accepting. Rockefeller asked him one day, "What's troubling you?""For one thing, you're too rich," said Fosdick. Replied Rockefeller: "Do you think more people will criticize you on account of my wealth than will criticize me on account of your theology?" Fosdick accepted, with some conditions: no baptism by immersion, a congregation open to all Christians, a new and larger church building near Columbia University.

Certainty in Experience. The new building was dramatically larger. Riverside Church is a 22-story, neo-Gothic epitome of the community-center type of church, containing an assembly hall, a gymnasium, basketball and handball courts, four bowling alleys, locker and shower rooms, studios, classrooms and four elevators. Here, from 1931 until his retirement seven years ago, Dr. Fosdick carried on his busy, businesslike round of writing, preaching and counseling to a world plagued by depression, fear and war.

He has met all three with the kind of confident optimism and untheological faith that European clergymen consider typical of the U.S. Titles of his books reflect it: Adventurous Religion (1926),

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