Shall the Fundamentalists Win? 100 Years Later

On May 21, 1922, Harry Emerson Fosdick preached a sermon titled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” that helped spark the modernist-fundamentalist controversy. Fosdick was a Baptist minister serving as an associate at First Presbyterian Church in New York and a faculty member at Union Theological Seminary. He was well-known and had published several popular religious books. Ned B. Stonehouse remarked, “the fact that a minister not even subject to the authority of Presbytery and General Assembly should have used a Presbyterian pulpit to make what was widely regarded as an attack upon the constitution disclosed a situation bordering on lawlessness” (Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir, 302). Dr. Darryl G. Hart joins Camden Bucey to speak about this infamous sermon and a new course on Machen that Dr. Hart recorded last week for Reformed Academy. Chapters 0:00:00 Introduction 0:01:03 Dr. Hart’s Forthcoming Course on Machen 0:09:54 Harry Emerson Fosdick in Context 0:20:49 Presbyterians and Broad Ecumenism 0:23:53 New York and Philadelphia in Presbyterian History 0:28:25 A Baptist in a Presbyterian Pulpit 0:33:19 Fosdick Preaching from Acts 5:38–39 0:38:40 Fosdick and Modernity 0:45:07 The Soft Middle 0:50:02 Machen, Orthodoxy, and Modernity 0:56:17 The Spirits of Fosdick and Machen Today 1:08:06 Conclusion Download the Sermon PDF Participants: Camden Bucey, Darryl G. Hart