Fosdick, a Baptist who pastored the First Presbyterian Church of New York, was not the first person in the history of American evangelicalism to question the virgin birth, the inspiration of the Bible, the substitutionary atonement, or the second coming of Christ. But he was certainly one of the first to do so with the assurance that most evangelicals would soon agree with him. For fundamentalists, the most shocking aspect of Fosdick’s sermon was not simply the heresy, but the assumption that heresy (or the acceptance of heresy) was the new orthodoxy. 

To say that Harry Emerson Fosdick’s sermon “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” (1922) ignited the fundamentalist-modernist controversy requires a bit of qualification. In truth, the lines had been drawn for at least a decade.
Between 1910 and 1915, a series of 12 paperback volumes called The Fundamentals had defended everything from the virgin birth to the deity of Christ to the inspiration of Scripture against those who sought to undermine the supernatural character of the Christian faith. In 1920, the term “fundamentalist” was coined by Baptist editor Curtis Lee Laws at the first meeting of the General Conference on Fundamentals to describe someone who held to the historic doctrines of Christianity. By 1922, a “militantly anti-modernist Protestant evangelicalism” had already emerged in America. According to Fosdick’s biographer, “The sermon was not a stone dropped into denominational waters that would otherwise have remained calm.” In some sense, Fosdick did not create the fundamentalist movement. He just gave it a push.
New Orthodoxy
Fosdick, a Baptist who pastored the First Presbyterian Church of New York, was not the first person in the history of American evangelicalism to question the virgin birth, the inspiration of the Bible, the substitutionary atonement, or the second coming of Christ. But he was certainly one of the first to do so with the assurance that most evangelicals would soon agree with him. 
For fundamentalists, the most shocking aspect of Fosdick’s sermon was not simply the heresy, but the assumption that heresy (or the acceptance of heresy) was the new orthodoxy. “I do not believe for one moment that the Fundamentalists are going to succeed,” Fosdick declared triumphantly. The fundamentalist defeat was inevitable. Preaching from Acts 5:34–39, Fosdick was as confident of modernist victory as the Pharisee Gamaliel had been of the work of God.
Fosdick’s inflammatory sermon soon unleashed a torrent of responses from fundamentalists, who now had an adversary bold enough to meet them out in the open. In his reply to Fosdick titled “Shall Unbelief Win?” (1922), Clarence Edwards Macartney was struck by the fact that, unlike modernists of the past, Fosdick “leaves no reader or hearer in the least doubt what he believes, or disbelieves, about the cardinal doctrines of the Christian religion.” One might say that Fosdick finally turned a conflict into a controversy.
United Against Liberalism
In some ways, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” was a missile wrapped in a banner of peace. As a call for tolerance within the Presbyterian church, Fosdick’s sermon was also an offensive launched against those “illiberal and intolerant” Presbyterians who would expel him from their denomination for his beliefs (the heretical ones, not the Baptist ones). Consequently, the sermon helped conservatives to do what they’d been struggling to do on their own: unite. 
By 1922, for instance, the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association (WCFA), begun by William Bell Riley, “was already displaying signs of collapse.” Interdenominational cooperation didn’t come easy, and the name “fundamentalist” carried a stigma even inside the conservative ranks, particularly due to its association with “the premillennial reign of Christ.” But as America’s chief popularizer of modernism, Fosdick embodied for many fundamentalists the very worst of theological liberalism and evoked their collective disdain.
In Christianity and Liberalism (1923), published less than a year after the sermon, J. Gresham Machen argued that historic Christianity and modernism were not simply two shades of the same faith, but rather two completely different religions. Not surprisingly, he cited Fosdick’s sermon.
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Written by A.W. Workman |
Tuesday, January 10, 2023
When the city of man begins to creak and groan we may naturally feel a good deal of fear or disorientation. I don’t think there’s any way around this. But this creaking is also an opportunity for humility, for renewed faith in the New Jerusalem, and for identification with the historical and global Church. In this way, no matter if the cracks get worse or if they get patched, we will be able to maintain hope, to serve our brothers and sisters and even the perishing, and to point to what is coming.

Eating out just hasn’t felt worth it these past couple months that we’ve been back in the US. While restaurants in the states are open again, most are understaffed and alarmingly expensive. The lack of staff usually means pretty poor service, and even the quality of food usually strikes us as not what it used to be. Hearing others in the US voice similar sentiments means it’s not just those of us who have been living overseas who notice these differences. The food service industry is creaking, trying to lurch back to what it was before the pandemic. There is this sense that—convenience though it is—we can’t count it like we used to.
Food service is not the only system struggling to regain its pre-pandemic efficiency. International air travel has still not recovered either. We’ve never had the kind of travel difficulties that we’ve experienced over this past year. Even business behemoths like Amazon seem past their, ahem, prime. More seriously, crime has also skyrocketed in many American cities, with the understanding in some places that if you are the victim of certain crimes, you are on your own.
The strange thing about all this for highly-educated millennials like us is that we’ve hardly ever known the systems around us to get worse, perhaps with the exception of our elected government. By and large, we’ve only known the infrastructure and services offered in the West to (eventually) get faster, more efficient, and more user-friendly. This was also the worldview of our parents’ generation. Progress in the systems we rely on for life necessities or conveniences has been assumed. The pandemic and its aftermath have challenged this assumption and, whether temporary or long-term, the systems around us are showing their weakness.
Systems don’t last forever. The prophecy of the twelve eagles was right—Rome would fall. The Roman legions would leave places like Britain in 409 and never come back. Which meant the structures of empire that the Romanized residents of Londinium (London) relied upon would have slowly but surely broken down. A thousand years later the Portuguese would successfully sail to India – thereby causing the economic collapse of the Central Asian silk road. Trade routes that were kept safe by the wealth and power of regional regimes would become frequented by violent robbers and be slowly abandoned by the caravans. Empires rise. Empires decline. At some point a certain generation realizes that things are breaking faster than they can be repaired, and life is likely going to get a lot worse before it someday gets better.
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The current suppression of the self-evident truths of sexuality and gender in the unrighteousness of perverse diversity and the cruelty of genital mutilation is unsustainable.  These things will eventually and inevitably end.  Pretend marriages, make-believe families and ruined bodies will become sad relics of our present darkness.  The creational and natural truth of human, heterosexual, monogamous and covenanted marriages bearing the fruit of children out of deep roots of natural love will again resurface as true, right and good.

No human being can hold a beachball under water indefinitely. Sooner or later, the buoyancy of the beachball will overcome the stamina of the person holding it down.  Moral truth is the same.  Sooner or later, those suppressing the truth in unrighteousness will be unable to hold it down any longer.  Truth will manifest itself again and righteousness will follow in its wake.  In human history, this is known as “revival” and includes such events as The First Great Awakening in America which brought spiritual liberty and led to the pursuit of political freedom.  Note the connection and the order of these two blessings.  True revival is not the pitiful imitation created by man but the genuine outpouring of the Spirit of God applying the work of Christ by crucifying lies and sin and by resurrecting truth and righteousness with the result of peace and joy.  Lord Jesus, please send a fresh outpouring of Your Spirit to us soon, quickly and powerfully!
The current suppression of the self-evident truths of sexuality and gender in the unrighteousness of perverse diversity and the cruelty of genital mutilation is unsustainable.
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