The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

posted by Phil Johnson

f you think you know who said the following, leave a comment. I'm traveling today, with no time to write or answer comments. But unless weather (or worse) delays me, I'll be home by this evening. So if nobody's got it yet, I'll post the correct answer then.

"These are the things we have stood for: tolerance, an inclusive Church, the right to think religion through in modern terms, the social applications of the principles of Jesus, the abiding verities and experiences of the gospel. And these are right. I am not sorry we tried this experiment. It was worth trying. We have lifted a standard that no one will put down. We have stated an issue that no man or denomination is strong enough to brush aside. . . . They call me a heretic. I am proud of it. I wouldn't live in a generation like this and be anything but a heretic. But I carry some of you on my heart in ways that heretics are not popularly supposed to do. I want you to be Christians. I want your lives for Christ."

No Googling.

AFTERNOON UPDATE: Those who guessed (or googled) Fosdick were correct. Harry Emerson Fosdick, that is, not the Al Capp character.

Fosdick, one of the most militant modernists of the twentieth century, would feel right at home with both the views and the rhetoric of Emergent Village. The similarity of his ideas and the standard talking points at Emergent Village belies the utterly groundless claim that post-modernized "evangelicalism" somehow constitutes the abandonment of modernity rather than the further advancement of it. (One intrepid commenter at one of the post-evangelical trash-talk blogs recently accused me of misconstruing Spurgeon's position with regard to Emerging trends. Spurgeon hated modernism, this fellow reasoned. Therefore he surely would have embraced post-modernism, right?)

Fosdick's words refute such a notion. Sample any of Fosdick's books or sermons and you'll see that they read like an Emergent manifesto. Same arguments; same style of rhetoric; same appeal to "tolerance"; same revulsion for substitutionary atonement and biblical inerrancy; same tactics of decrying the militancy of conservatives while declaring war on conservative principles. If you want to understand the Emergent trajectory, read up on Fosdick.

Here's another excerpt. This one's from Fosdick's most famous sermon, "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?"

Just now the Fundamentalists are giving us one of the worst exhibitions of bitter intolerance that the churches of this country have ever seen. As one watches them and listens to them he remembers the remark of General Armstrong of Hampton Institute, "Cantankerousness is worse than heterodoxy." There are many opinions in the field of modern controversy concerning which I am not sure whether they are right or wrong, but there is one thing I am sure of: courtesy and kindliness and tolerance and humility and fairness are right. Opinions may be mistaken; love never is. As I plead thus for an intellectually hospitable, tolerant, liberty-loving church, I am, of course, thinking primarily about this new generation. We have boys and girls growing up in our homes and schools, and because we love them we may well wonder about the church which will be waiting to receive them. Now, the worst kind of church that can possibly be offered to the allegiance of the new generation is an intolerant church. Ministers often bewail the fact that young people turn from religion to science for the regulative ideas of their lives. But this is easily explicable. Science treats a young man's mind as though it were really important. A scientist says to a young man, "Here is the universe challenging our investigation. Here are the truths which we have seen, so far. Come, study with us! See what we already have seen and then look further to see more, for science is an intellectual adventure for the truth." Can you imagine any man who is worthwhile turning from that call to the church if the church seems to him to say, "Come, and we will feed you opinions from a spoon. No thinking is allowed here except such as brings you to certain specified, predetermined conclusions. These prescribed opinions we will give you in advance of your thinking; now think, but only so as to reach these results."

But the fundamentalists did win—at least in the battle against modernism. And today's evangelicals could learn a lot from that episode.

Although Fosdick insisted that those who believe in the truth of Scripture were evil aggressors destroying the unity of the church, and he decried the efforts of fundamentalists and evangelicals to drive liberals out of their denominations, in the end it was the fundamentalists and evangelicals who were driven out. Most liberals thought they had gained the upper hand. But virtually all the mainstream denominations declined drastically under liberal leadership, and some ceased having any kind of spiritual influence whatsoever. Moreover, the independent churches and institutions founded by fundamentalists and evangelicals grew pretty steadily in size, strength, and influence for most of the twentieth century.

But then fundamentalists and evangelicals went to war with one another. Fundamentalists turned their attention away from the fundamental doctrines of Christianity and spent a few decades fighting over secondary matters. And most evangelicals abandoned their evangelical principles in search of the world's friendship.

That's why the church today is weak, divided, and once again desperately seeking "relevance" by aping the world's fashions. We have we've come full circle, and the typical evangelical and post-evangelical of today have more in common with Fosdick than with their own spiritual ancestors. In the immortal words of Shirley Bassey:

It's all just a little bit of history repeating.

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