The role of the prophet was to mediate between God and His covenant people by declaring God’s word and encouraging obedience to His requirements. They were guardians of the kingdom, seeking to hold kings and other leaders accountable to God for their actions. They can be regarded as enforcement mediators of the covenant, dedicated to maintaining the special bond that God had established with His people.

We know very little about some of the prophets, but the book of Amos, like his contemporary, Isaiah, is different. Amos tells us at the very beginning of his book that he was from Tekoa, and that his ministry was directed to the Northern Kingdom of Israel. He dates it as being delivered two years before the earthquake, when Uzziah was king in Judah, and Jeroboam was king in Israel (Amos 1:1). This means his book is to be dated around 760 BC, though we have no way of determining the date of the earthquake with precision. There are three special things that we should learn from this book.
1. A prophet had to be called of God.
Amos did not come from Israel, but from the southern nation of Judah. “Go home to your own country,” was the message of Amaziah, the priest at Bethel, “earn your food there, and work as a prophet” (Amos 7:10–13). Amos had been a farmer until God directed him to go to the Northern Kingdom of Israel with his message.
Being a prophet did not depend on the family one came from or belonging to any guild of professional religious people. Rather, it depended on God’s sovereign call to serve as His spokesman. Prophets were raised up by God as the times required, and words were given them to speak to their audiences. Before God acted, divinely chosen messengers were entrusted with His word. The secret counsel of the Lord was communicated through His servants, the prophets.
2. The role of the prophets was connected with the covenant that God made with Israel.
The role of the prophet was to mediate between God and His covenant people by declaring God’s word and encouraging obedience to His requirements. They were guardians of the kingdom, seeking to hold kings and other leaders accountable to God for their actions. They can be regarded as enforcement mediators of the covenant, dedicated to maintaining the special bond that God had established with His people.
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God did not treat the human writers as inert objects (non-organic) but as living beings (organic) with their own unique traits. Yet at the same time, every single word was what God wanted written down.

Who wrote the Bible? God did. To put a finer point on it, God is the divine author who used various human authors to write exactly what He wanted written. That is, God is the primary author and the humans are secondary authors. This type of dual authorship is assumed throughout the Bible. For example, “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord [primary author] had spoken by the prophet [Isaiah, secondary author]” (Matt. 1:22; see also Mark 12:36; Heb. 3:7 with 4:7; 2 Peter 1:21). Traditionally, God’s effecting the Scriptures to be written is termed inspiration, which means that God breathed out the Scriptures (2 Tim. 3:16).
Primary Authorship
In addition to straightforward passages that declare God as the author of Scripture (2 Tim. 3:16), there are other types of intriguing biblical passages confirming divine authorship. Let us look at three.
There are passages where the Scriptures are functionally equated to God. In Romans 9:17, Paul is quoting from Exodus 9:16, where Moses is told to declare God’s words to Pharaoh. But Paul does not write, “God says to Pharaoh,” but instead, “Scripture says to Pharaoh.” Obviously, Paul means that God spoke to Pharaoh, but God’s speaking and Scripture’s speaking are intimately related to each other in Paul’s mind. Similarly in Galatians 3:8, within an argument showing that the doctrine of justification by faith existed in the Old Testament, Paul notes the forward-looking aspect of Genesis 12:3 intended by God. But in referring to this, Paul does not write, “God foreseeing,” but “Scripture foreseeing.” Again, God and Scripture are intimately related.
There are also Old Testament passages where God does not appear to be the speaker, but He is denoted as the speaker by a New Testament writer. Hebrews 1:5–13 includes seven Old Testament quotes. These quotes include passages in which God is the direct speaker but others in which He is not. However, all the quotes in Hebrews are prefaced by some form of “God says” or “he says.” Thus, whether the Old Testament context includes God’s explicitly speaking or not, the author of Hebrews considers all of Scripture to be God’s speaking on some level.
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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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