[Oe List ...] 5/26/2022, Progressing Spirit: Rev. David M. Felton: “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” at 100; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu May 26 09:49:17 PDT 2022
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"Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" at 100
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| Essay by Rev. David M. Felten
May 26, 2022When I first read Harry Emerson Fosdick’s Shall the Fundamentalists Win?, it changed my life. In disbelief, I read portions of it over and over again and looked at the date. I read it AGAIN and thought, “What?” How in the world could he have preached this in 1922 and it STILL be controversial?! Why hasn’t this message gotten out?
It was as obvious to me then as it is today: “real” Christians STILL find what Fosdick was preaching a hundred years ago to be heretical and unchristian. In fact, when the local Baptist pastor in my town found out I was preaching a series to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Shall the Fundamentalists Win?, he let loose with a Facebook tirade of end-times alarmism, even calling me a reprobate (a badge I wear with honor!).
And yet, what Fosdick was preaching has been being taught in our seminaries for generations. I learned it in seminary and so has every other mainline and Roman Catholic seminary student for over ONE HUNDRED YEARS. So, how could this be?
The short answer is, because the Fundamentalists HAVE won in many ways. They’ve managed to stake out a very particular and unchanging set of beliefs that they are convinced must never be questioned and must be defended at all costs. AND, with their appeal to the status quo and what they believe to be the “unchanging truth” of God, they’ve managed to convince the vast majority of practitioners of Christianity that theirs is the only authentic and acceptable way to be a Christian.
Meanwhile, those of us in more mainline traditions, steeped in the values of inclusion and tolerance, have said, “Fine, believe what you want. No skin off my nose.” But by being inclusive and tolerant, we’ve made space for Fundamentalists (who HATE inclusivity and tolerance) to get a foothold in our churches and work to discredit the very values that we embrace. So, while we’ve been going on our merry way with an evolving faith, embracing the realities of cultural change and progress, Fundamentalists have continued to promote a static, unchanging slate of archaic doctrines and tell their people, “You are to believe what we tell you to believe. No questions asked.”
OK, but how did we get here?
Back in the early to mid 19th century, German theologians began reading the Bible in new ways. Theologian David Friedrich Strauss developed the idea of what we now know as the “Historical Jesus” while Karl Heinrich Graf and Julius Wellhausen developed what came to be called the Four Source Hypothesis of Hebrew Scripture (namely that the Pentateuch was NOT written by Moses). Bombshells from London included Darwin publishing the Origin of Species AND newly translated cuneiform tablets from Iraq suggested that the authors of Hebrew scripture had plagiarized earlier “Ancient Near Eastern” texts. The religious establishment went into convulsions.
Despite every effort being made to guard against these ideas crossing the Atlantic, cross they did, creating major intellectual conflicts in academia, seminaries, and churches across America.
So, in 1909, a defense of orthodox Christian doctrine and an attack on the new learnings from Europe was mounted. Founder of Union Oil, Lyman Stewart, anonymously paid for the writing of, printing, and mailing of 90 essays in 12 volumes called “The Fundamentals: a Testimony to the Truth.” Over three million volumes were sent free of charge to ministers, professors of theology, Sunday school superintendents, and any other Protestant religious worker they could think of.
Based on Union Oil’s propaganda blitz, the 1910 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church was then primed to adopt a five-point declaration which all candidates for ordination had to affirm. They included:
1. The inerrancy of the Bible
2. The virgin birth of Christ
3. Christ’s substitutionary atonement
4. Christ’s bodily resurrection
5. The authenticity of Christ’s miracles
In the midst of this religious drama and the trauma of World War I, Harry Emerson Fosdick was receiving his seminary training, preaching at his first church, and serving as an Army chaplain in France. As the Presbyterians continued to tear themselves apart after the war, First Presbyterian in New York sought to fend off Fundamentalist influences with an intentionally progressive message and hired the Baptist Fosdick as their “preaching pastor.” His Christianity not only embraced social changes, scientific advances, and the new knowledge of Biblical scholarship, his theology resonated with many whose faith had been shaken by the social and theological upheavals of the early 20th century and the horrors of WWI. Soon, capacity crowds packed the sanctuary every Sunday. The crowd often overflowed outside onto 5th Avenue where loudspeakers were set up so people could hear the sermon.
Despite the broad popularity of Fosdick’s message, Fundamentalists were putting clergy on trial and actively driving people who didn’t believe the “right things” out of religious institutions around the country. So, on May 21st, 1922, Fosdick preached what was essentially a plea for tolerance, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”. Acknowledging the gulf of disagreement between the “modernists” and the Fundamentalists, he wondered (naïvely?) if there could ever be a church “inclusive enough to take in both liberals and conservatives without either trying to drive the other out.”
But then as now, Fundamentalists thrive on the fear of change — and the early 20th century was seeing a “great mass of new knowledge coming into [humanity's] possession.” Plus, the 19th amendment had just passed, giving women the right to vote, a change that Fundamentalists opposed on the Biblical grounds that Eve was subservient to Adam. Despite the Fundamentalist efforts to hold back time, Fosdick believed that one’s faith and the modern world can’t be kept in opposition to one another. He said:
.....“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.”
His other main emphasis was on what he suggested was the shame Christians should be feeling to be quarrelling over trifling matters of theology when the world was dying of great needs. He asks,
.....“If, during the war, when the nations were wrestling upon the very brink of
.....hell and at times all seemed lost, you chanced to hear two [people] in an
.....altercation about some minor matter of sectarian denominationalism, could
.....you restrain your indignation? You said, "What can you do with folks like
.....this who, in the face of colossal issues, play with the tiddledywinks
.....and peccadillos of religion?"
I ask myself the same question today – and every poll indicates that this is the very reason why so many people have given up and abandoned religion altogether: When the world is in conflict and people’s hopes and dreams are being crushed by prejudice, injustice, and greed, how is it that the church is still wasting its time arguing over the “tiddledywinks and peccadillos” of religion?
The simple answer is: because the Fundamentalists are still at work! They can’t let go of the arcane and obsolete doctrines they’ve been clinging to for over 100 years — and they’ve brainwashed a LOT of people. They so fervently believe they are doing God’s will that they justify actively hurting people, harming communities, institutionalizing prejudice, and misrepresenting Jesus.
Who was most adamantly opposed to Civil Rights and the end of segregation in this country? Fundamentalist Christians. Who is behind most of the punitive and hateful anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion laws passing through legislatures right now around the country? Fundamentalist Christians. The current effort to shut down teaching about racism and evolution in our schools is being driven by who? Fundamentalist Christians. If ANYONE tells you that religion is irrelevant today, they are NOT paying attention. Fundamentalist values and organizational skills are in the background of almost every single story you read on your newsfeed. So, Shall the Fundamentalists Win? They certainly seem to be.
So, here we are, 100 years later, the social conflicts may be a little different, but the theological ones are not. And just like 100 years ago, the Fundamentalists are much better at getting their message out than the mainline church ever has been.
Truth be told, the Fundamentalists have done a GREAT job over the last 100 years of infiltrating almost every corner of global Christianity. Over the last few years, every single mainline denomination has split precisely because none of our denominations have been able to fend off the influence of Fundamentalists throwing a wrench into the continued evolution of Christian thought.
Sadly, the question of whether the Fundamentalist will win remains acutely relevant. Likewise, do progressively-minded Christians have a relevant response?
There’s an apocryphal story about Fosdick going for a walk in Central Park with a young man who was nervous about questioning the conventional faith of his childhood. As they walked and talked, they came upon a rectangular concrete reflecting pool. The water was still and peaceful – but much of it was choked with weeds. Fosdick commented to the young man, “Christianity is either like this pool — where you can stake it out, measure it, and control it — OR it’s like a river that has sprung up from a spring deep and unknowable. Its waters flow, dance, change, and, added to by tributaries, grows and changes course, always moving, often noisy, but never still, never stopping, and most certainly not moving backwards.”
Contrary to what the Fundamentalists fear, Fosdick believed that change is not Christianity’s most deadly enemy. Stagnation is. Fosdick in his day and we in ours have the challenge of showing the world that Christianity is not a stagnant weed-filled pond, but a dynamic, developing, and living faith.
Sam Keen has written,
“History is littered with the remains of civilizations that chose to die rather than change their organizing myth.”
What Fosdick knew then and what we need to remember today, is that without a re-evaluation of the organizing myths of Christianity, the church, too, is poised to pass into the irrelevance to which so many religions of the past have been relegated.
Despite the setbacks all around us, my hope is that the progressive commitment to critical thinking, embracing reality, and compassionate action will inspire us to answer that 100-year-old question, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” with a solid, “Not on my watch!”
~ Rev. David M Felten
Read online here
________________
Don’t miss out on additional resources available in reflecting on the centennial of Harry Emerson Fosdick’s “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”
- First Presbyterian Church in New York City (where Fosdick preached the sermon) is hosting a monthlong series of esteemed preachers (including fellow Progressing Spirit columnist Brian McLaren) You can find links to the sermons at fpcnyc.org
- Diana Butler Bass is posting a monthlong series of excellent reflections on “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” (She answers, “Yes. Yes they have.”). These include in-depth backstories and commentary on the damage Fundamentalists are currently wreaking on our culture. Check them out on her site, The Cottage
- During the month of May, I’m preaching a sermon series at The Fountains deconstructing the “Fundamentals” with which many Christians are still obsessed. They include “The Case Against Virgin Birth,” “The Case Against Biblical Inerrancy,” and “The Case Against Substitutionary Atonement.” You can view the archive on The Fountains YouTube page HERE
About the AuthorRev. David M. Felten is a full-time pastor at The Fountains, a United Methodist Church in Fountain Hills, Arizona. David and fellow United Methodist Pastor, Jeff Procter-Murphy, are the creators of the DVD-based discussion series for Progressive Christians, “Living the Questions” and authors of Living the Questions: The Wisdom of Progressive Christianity. He is a co-founder of Catalyst Arizona and also a founding member of No Longer Silent: Clergy for Justice. David is active in the Desert Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church. Visit his website here. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By Ray
Is it essential for a Christian to believe in the Trinity?
A: By Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers
Dear Ray,I hope not! The belief in a triune God may have confused more people than it has helped. Like all “developed” doctrines, the Holy Trinity evolved from a way of trying to understand God to a central belief that Christians must adapt, regardless of how impossible it is to take literally.
Bishop Spong put it this way: “The Holy Trinity is not now and never has been a description of the being of God. It is rather the attempt to define our human experience of God.”
We experience God as creator; Jesus as the incarnation of God’s love; and the Holy Spirit as the means through which we are drawn to and inspired by that love. It is a metaphor that should remain, as William Sloane Coffin Jr. put it, “a sign-post, not a hitching-post.” But as the church sought to secure its power and exclusivity, the Trinity became more than just a metaphor or the poetry of liturgy.
When the church declared that the Holy Spirit could only issue from the Father and the Son, a great schism arose that split the church into East and West. Rome made the Holy Spirit into a kind of exclusive franchise, while Constantinople saw it operating independently. This is what happens when we “literalize” our metaphors. We move from suggesting a helpful way to understand God (who can never be fully understood) to a demand that there is only one way to understand God.
That’s why I have been a non-trinitarian minister for my entire life. Three-in-one and one-in-three (like fully human and fully divine) not only makes no logical sense, but it sells the mystery of God short. One of my favorite bumper stickers was spotted on the car of a wise English teacher who loved Star Wars: METAPHORS BE WITH YOU. ~ Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers
Read and share online here
About the Author
Rev. Dr. Robin R. Meyers is retired senior minister of Mayflower Congregational UCC Church, Oklahoma City, Distinguished Professor of Social Justice Emeritus at Oklahoma City University, and Adjunct Professor of Homiletics at Phillips Theology Seminary. He is a fellow at Westar, a member of the God Seminar, and his most recent book is Saving God from Religion: A Minister’s Search for Faith in a Skeptical Age. Visit website here: RobinRexMeyers.com |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
My Way into an Interfaith Future
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
June 28, 2012Last week I introduced you, my readers, to an interfaith “think tank” in which I shared recently at a conference center known as the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York. Some fifty leaders from among all the major religious systems of the world gathered there to explore the common ground that might lead to deeper interfaith cooperation and appreciation.
The goal seemed desirable and all of the participants came with hope and excitement. The need for interfaith cooperation is apparent all over the world. Where divergent religious systems confront each other, violence almost always ensues. One has only to look for documentation at the Jewish-Moslem conflict in the Middle East, the Hindu-Moslem conflict between Pakistan and India, the Christian-Islamic violence that cuts across Africa, the Catholic-Protestant tensions in Ireland or the Sunni-Shia conflict that keeps Islam divided in the Middle East. One could also look at Christian history to see the anti-Semitism of the ages, the violence of the Crusades directed against Islam, or the Thirty Years’ War in Europe that followed the Reformation as both Protestant Europe and Catholic Europe sought to impose its faith on the other.
This reality forces us to ask what there is about religion in most of its forms that makes violence all but inevitable as it appears to be in religious history. At the Chautauqua conference it did not take long for this flaw to be revealed. Indeed, it became present and visible in the first presentation.
This presentation was given by Dr. John Cavadini, a Roman Catholic Professor of Theology from Notre Dame. The Roman Catholic Church articulates its claim to supremacy quite overtly. The current pope has reiterated a position taken by his predecessor that there is but one true religion and that is Christianity and that there is only one true version of Christianity and that is the Roman Catholic Church! He went on to warn those Catholics engaged in ecumenical relations that they should never refer to other Christian traditions as “sister churches,” since that implies some legitimacy. When that point of view is publicly articulated there is a genuine embarrassment in the listening audience. Such an attitude makes any significant conversation aimed at unity a rather worthless activity. Professor Cavalini tried at our gathering, unsuccessfully I believe, to navigate these troubled waters by making a distinction between revealed truth and our understanding of this truth. The central Christian doctrine of the Incarnation was not subject to debate, he said, but the way we understand that doctrine is always unfolding.
Lest the blame for interfaith failure be placed too heavily on Roman Catholic shoulders, let me hasten to say that almost every religious tradition makes similar claims to be the exclusive possessor of revealed and “saving” truth. Protestant fundamentalists assert that the Bible is the literal “word of God” and those denying that claim are either to be condemned or subjected to conversion pressure. Protestant evangelicals believe that the prerequisite for salvation is that one must be “born again” or “accept Jesus as their personal savior.” Muslims make the Islamic claim that in the Koran the Word of God was dictated directly to the prophet Muhammad. Within Islam itself both the Sunnis and the Shia claim that theirs is the only true expression of that faith tradition. Other sacred writings from the religions of the East are similarly invested with claims of being vessels through which the absolute truth of God has come into human possession. These claims that ultimate truth is the possession of a particular religious system are what make interfaith conversation all but impossible. The attempt to be open, to understand or to appreciate another faith perspective is thus deeply threatening to every religious system.
One of the things that every religious system seeks to do is to offer religious certainty and for that to be possible that religion must escape the quicksand of relativity. Relativity, at the same time, is almost always impossible to escape without falling into religious triumphalism. At the Chautauqua “think tank” these problems were quickly identified and named. We could not start without finding a new way into the interfaith issue. As I thought about this over the next few days I tried to discover that illusive new path. Let me try to outline it briefly.
The first step in any interfaith process is to be conscious of the fact that these exclusive claims exist and that we must begin where people are, not with where we wish they were. No one speaks in a vacuum and no one listens in a vacuum. We need to listen to each other closely, the same way we want others to listen to us. Let me then begin this process autobiographically.
I am a Christian. Any interfaith activity in which I am engaged must start with that fact. I am not apologetic about this self-identification, nor am I willing to jettison this definition of myself for the sake of interfaith unity. The deepest commitment of my life is my commitment to walk the Christ path as my doorway into the mystery of God. Christianity is of absolute importance to me. I want to explore its wonders as deeply as I possibly can. Yet, I do not think that God is a Christian, certainly not in any creedal way, and that insight opens me up to all kinds of new possibilities. Christianity, like every other religious system in history is clearly a human creation that has evolved over the centuries. The virgin birth, for example, did not enter the Christian tradition until the ninth decade of the Christian era. It was certainly not a part of primitive Christianity. Neither Paul nor Mark appears ever to have heard about such an idea. The ascension was a tenth decade addition. Surely a quick reading of Paul would reveal that Paul was not a Trinitarian. The doctrines of the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity were not worked out until the third and fourth centuries. Doctrines are always attempts to put rational forms onto a transformative experience. Doctrines, therefore, can never be ultimate, but the experience that made the development of the doctrine seem proper might well be. Can we then separate the God experience that we Christians believe we have met in Jesus from the explanations of that experience which form the content of our faith tradition? That is a crucial distinction. The Jesus experience might well offer me a doorway into that which is ultimate, but Christianity itself cannot be ultimate and it thus cannot be the final revelation of God. God can never be contained inside any human form or bound by any human words. This means that neither my understanding of God nor my Church’s understanding of God can ever be ultimate. This realization does not, however, invalidate the truth of my experience.
As a Christian, I walk the Christ path. My deepest hope is that if I walk the Christ path long enough and faithfully enough, I will discover that I inevitably will transcend the boundaries of my own religion. That reality thus becomes a religious inevitability. When I articulate the fact that this is true for me I discover that it also seems to be true for people in all other religious systems. The Muslim must walk the Islamic path; the Jews must walk the Jewish path; the Hindus and Buddhists must walk the Hindu or Buddhist path. All walk with the realization, however, that God is not a Muslim, a Jew, a Hindu or a Buddhist. All religious systems are designed by human beings to help its adherents walk into the mystery of an unbounded God. If any of us walks our own faith path long enough and faithfully enough, we will discover that our walk carries us beyond the boundaries of our own religious systems, since God can never be limited by or exhausted in any thing that is a human creation, whether it be scripture, creeds, doctrines or dogmas. To say it boldly the God experience may well be ultimate, but the religious system through which we walk into the God experience can never be.
The next realization comes when we discover that while we are walking our separate paths, we are also taking into ourselves the values and the treasures found in our own tradition. We hold these treasures close to our hearts; we do not want to lose them. I grasp joyfully the pearl of great price that Christianity gives me. Then I realize that my brothers and sisters in Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism are doing exactly the same. They must embrace the treasures of their religion and cling to the pearl of great price that they have received from their religious system. So perhaps the deepest and the common religious call to each of us is not to affirm our unique creeds so much as it is to explore our faith so deeply that we each transcend its boundaries and escape fear-laden limits. Then beyond the boundaries and the limits of the faith system that has nurtured each of us, but without sacrificing the pearl of great price that our own tradition has given us, we can turn and face in a new way our brothers and sisters who have walked a path different from our own. In that setting I can speak to them and say: “This is the essence of my faith. This is the treasure that I have received as I walked the Christ path and now I want to share this treasure with you.” Each of my interfaith pilgrims will in turn do the same. They will say to me: “This is the essence of Judaism, of Islam, of Hinduism, of Buddhism. This is the treasure, the pearl of great price that I have received by walking faithfully and deeply the path of my religion and I want to share it with you.” We each receive the treasure of the other. No one has to sacrifice the treasure of the system which has nurtured him or her. We all become enriched. We no longer have to protect our truth or play the familiar religious games of supremacy that we have so often played in the past. No one loses, everyone gains.
The alternative to genuine interfaith cooperation may well be genocide. While we can assert that there is no relativity in the God experience, there can also be no triumphalism in the various explanations of that experience. No religion is therefore ultimate, but God is and God is met on many paths and our call is to walk our path faithfully. In that realization, the beauty of an interfaith future is born.~ John Shelby Spong |
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