A Reply to Professor H. E.
Fosdick Whosoever goes onward and abides not in the teaching of Christ has not God; he that abides in the teaching has both the Father and the Son." St John.
"O Timothy, guard that which is committed unto thee, turning away from the profane babblings and oppositions of the Enowledge which is falsely so called; which some professing have erred concerning the faith." St. Paul.
-Professor Harry Emerson Fos-dick has done good service by calling attention to a situation in the Christian Churches in America, which he rightly describes as "urgent." It is due, he says, to "the people who call themselves Fundamentalists. Their apparent intention is to drive out of the evangelical churches men and women of liberal opinions." The situation is serious enough, let us try to analyse it a little further.
The Professor tells us that the Fundamentalists are people "who are driving in their stakes to mark out the dead lines of doctrine around the Church, across which no one is to pass (that is, to enter the Church) except on terms of agreement. After enumerating certain of these doctrines, on the acceptance of which Fundamentalists are said to insist, the Professor gives the position of "a genuine liberal" in these words: "This is a free country, and anybody has the right to hold these opinions (i.e. of the Fundamentalists) or any others if he is sincerely convinced of them. The question is: Has anybody a right to deny the Christian name to those who differ from him on such points, and to shut against them the doors of the Christian fellow-
Let us divest this altogether of the personal element, which is sure to prejudice calm judgement, and consider it in the abstract. The difference between the Fundamentalist and the genuine Liberal may be put in this way. The Fundamentalists assert that there are certain doctrines without which teaching is not Christian teaching; while the Liberals hold that a man is free to promulgate any opinions of which he is sincerely convinced without pre-indicing his claim to be a teacher of Christianity. The question is: Has anybody a right to deny the name of Christianity to teaching which virtually or explicitly denies any special doctrines?
To this question let Dr, Foakes Jackson, a Divinity Professor at Cambridge and a late colleague of Dr. Fosdick, reply.
He is writing in The Modern Churchman," September 1921, and speaking of -what, in his opinion, is needed at the present day. It is necessary, he says, to shake men oat of their lethargy towards religion and make them realize that it is one of the most important things in the world. "This is being done. I know no better exponent than my colleague, Prof. Harry Emerson Fosdick, in America. The question, however, is whether this type of Liberal Christianity is likely to endure; and I venture to express my doubts upon this point. Its weakness appears to me to be that it is unhistorical For example, till recently all Christians believed that the end of their "faith was salvation in the world to come; that their future depended on their faith and conduct in this present life; that Jesus Christ, who was before all creation, came down from heaven to save mankind; that salvation was through Him alone. It mattered very little whether they' knew this from the Bible only, as the Protestants taught, or from the Bible interpreted by the Church according to the Catholic view. All were agreed that Christianity was a divine revelation contained in an inspired and infallible Book. Now practically to ignore this, or at least to explain it in a sense in which nobody has understood it for 18 centuries is to break completely the chain which links the church of the past with that of to-day. However eloquent these teachers may be, however elevated their morality, they are preaching od something entirely alien from what was once meant by Christianity. They have lost the historical Christ, and have not regained Him by converting Him into a social] reformer, a moral legislator, a revealer of a new conception of God. They are really preaching an entirely new religion, and concealing the fact even from themselves by disguise ing it in the phraseology of the old, which as employed by them is sometimes without meaning." (The italics, as also in other quotations below, are our own).
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.