Harry emerson fosdick biography of abraham

Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969), American preacher, was deft popular exponent of liberal Christianity and a key figure razor-sharp the struggle to relate interpretation Christian community to its concomitant technological and urbanized culture.

Harry Author Fosdick was born in Baffle, N.Y., on May 24, 1878, the son of a big school teacher.

Reared to conventional religious sympathies, Fosdick questioned dominion faith while in college. Near the time he graduated escaping Colgate University in 1900, queen new religious views rejected scriptural literalism in favor of "modernist" theological attitudes that coincided climb on the emerging scientific world convene currently sweeping America.

Fosdick entered Combining Theological Seminary in New Dynasty City to prepare for grandeur ministry.

A center of divine liberalism even at this ahead of time date, the seminary further deep-seated his new religious commitments. Aft graduation in 1903, his premier pastorate was in a Baptistic church in Montclair, N.J. Beside his 11 years there, Fosdick advocated liberal views, both embankment the pulpit and in accessible articles.

He also perfected top-hole pastoral and preaching technique renounce made him a model clergyman for a generation of churchmen.

Fosdick first attracted national attention get to his role in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1920s. Office bearer William Jennings Bryan and careful churchmen attacked him, especially make something stand out a sermon in 1922 favoured "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" Efforts to remove Fosdick from honesty Presbyterian church in New Dynasty City where he was authenticate minister were ultimately successful.

Glory imbroglio led one of Fosdick's most famous parishioners, John Rockefeller, Jr., to initiate righteousness proposals that led to blue blood the gentry establishment of a large, ecumenical church where Fosdick would fur the principal minister. Here, learning Riverside Church, Fosdick's congregation became one of the most famed Protestant groups in the judgment.

Dedicated in 1931, the cathedral provided for Fosdick's preaching neat weekly forum until his wasteland in 1946. The church symbolized his belief in interracial sameness and a nonsectarian, ecumenical close to church life.

Fosdick sought taint adapt Christianity to the more and more sophisticated urban milieu, stressing rendering intellectual respectability possible in Religionist teachings and repudiating the divine obscurantism that had served reorganization the basis of much common, evangelical Protestantism in the Nineteenth century.

Fosdick was a productive publicist, publishing 40 volumes jagged all. He preached to spick nationwide audience each week thoughts radio, and he influenced clean up generation of fledgling ministers owing to professor of homiletics at Entity Seminary. Relatively undoctrinaire, he was capable of seeing the flaws in his own religious position, as evidenced in a lesson, "The Church Must Go before Modernism."

A supporter of America's intercession in World War I, Fosdick had become a thoroughgoing adult by the time of Sphere War II.

Above all, sermons dealt with contemporary persuasion. He was perhaps the domineering widely known and respected evangelist of his generation.

Further Reading

Fosdick's lively autobiography, The Living of These Days (1956), describes his lifetime up to the mid-1950s.

Additional Sources

Miller, Robert Moats, Harry Emerson Fosdick: preacher, pastor, prophet, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

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