Those Abiding Experiences

Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969) has come to visit me this morning.  He was founding pastor of Riverside Church in New York City and was considered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as the greatest preacher of the 20th century.  In 1958, King inscribed a copy of his book Stride Toward Freedom for Fosdick:  “If I were called upon to select the foremost prophet of our generation, I would choose you to head the list.”

Harry Emerson Fosdick was an ecumenist and a pacifist.  His book, The Modern Use of the Bible, was and still is essential for understanding the Biblical message.  I have recommended it to friends, parishioners, and others for over fifty years and continue to do so.  My paperback copy of the book is tattered and worn from much use with crudely drawn asterisks, stars and lines in the margins of many of its pages.  Almost every page has a sentence or two underlined.  It is very much MY book now.  

My friend, Harry, tells me again:  “Here, then, is the first essential of intelligent Biblical preaching (study) in our day:  a man [woman] must be able to recognize the abiding messages of the Book, and sometimes he must recognize them in a transient setting.  No man will ever do this well if he does not divest himself of vanity and pride and clothe himself with humility as a garment.  He must see that many of our ways of thinking are very new; that they, too, are transient, and that many of them will soon be as outmoded as our forefathers’ categories are.  He must see that just because our ways of thinking are new, the garnered riches of the world’s thought have been stored up for us in  other forms of thought than ours and in other ways of speaking.  If he sees this clearly he will see also what a pitiably provincial life a man must live whose appreciations are shut up to that truth only which is expressed in modern terms.  Such a man is a prisoner in the thought-forms of the present age.  He cannot get out of that narrow world.  He is robbed of all the treasures of spiritual life which were amassed before our modern age came in and therefore were of necessity stored in other mental receptacles than ours.

A man of catholic culture should know how to be at home in all ages, to appreciate wisdom and spiritual quality in all forms of thought; he should drink the water of life from Greek vases and Jewish water-jars as well as from modern faucets, and whoever lacks such culture robs himself of his racial inheritance of experience and truth….Many of us who call ourselves liberal are not liberal; we are narrow rather, with that most fatal bigotry of all; we can understand nothing except contemporary thought.”