The History of the Riverside Church in the City of New York

Peter J. Paris, John W. Cook, James Hudnut-Beumler, Lawrence Mamiya

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780814768365
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Kirchengeschichte

It was from the pulpit of the Riverside Church that Martin Luther King, Jr., first publicly voiced his opposition to the Vietnam War, that Nelson Mandela addressed U.S. church leaders after his release from prison, and that speakers as diverse as Cesar Chavez, Jesse Jackson, Desmond Tutu, Fidel Castro, and Reinhold Niebuhr lectured church and nation about issues of the day. The greatest of American preachers have served as senior minister, including Harry Emerson Fosdick, Robert J. McCracken, Ernest T. Campbell, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., and James A. Forbes, Jr., and at one time the New York Times printed reports of each Sunday's sermon in its Monday morning edition.

For seven decades the church has served as the premier model of Protestant liberalism in the United States. Its history represents the movement from white Protestant hegemony to a multiracial and multiethnic church that has been at the vanguard of social justice advocacy, liberation theologies, gay and lesbian ministries, peace studies, ethnic and racial dialogue, and Jewish-Christian relations.

A collaborative effort by a stellar team of scholars, The History of the Riverside Church in the City of New York offers a critical history of this unique institution on Manhattan's Upper West Side, including its cultural impact on New York City and beyond, its outstanding preachers, and its architecture, and assesses the shifting fortunes of religious progressivism in the twentieth century.

1

The Riverside Church and the Development of Twentieth-Century American Protestantism

James Hudnut-Beumler

We could tell the story of modern American Protestantism through the lens of the Riverside Church, for few of its major themes have not been manifested in the life of this one church. In fact, Riverside has not been merely a reflector of these larger events. Rather, it often has had a leading hand in crafting the way that liberal American Protestants thought, worshiped, and responded to their times. Riverside was founded in 1930 by John D. Rockefeller Jr., the greatest philanthropist of his age, and members of the Park Avenue Baptist Church as a preaching venue for Riverside’s first senior minister, Harry Emerson Fosdick, for many years the best-known minister in the United States. The succession of senior ministers through the rest of the century—Robert J. McCracken, Ernest T. Campbell, William Sloane Coffin Jr., and James A. Forbes Jr.—has maintained the church’s reputation as a place to hear great preaching. At the same time, innovations in education and public witness have made Riverside beyond the pulpit a leading institution in American Protestantism. Even Protestantism itself changed dramatically over the twentieth century, with three major themes emerging from viewing the Riverside and liberal Protestant stories in tandem: theological modernism and the Riverside theology, the goal of revising the Christian tradition, and the difficulty of living up to the church’s ideals.

Theological Modernism and the Riverside Theology

If Harry Emerson Fosdick and John D. Rockefeller had neither lived nor met, the Riverside Church would never have been built, for the church was a product of the passions of these two men and the people who respected and followed them. To a remarkable degree, their collective vision represented the religious spirit of the age. The Riverside Church began at the peak of what William Hutchison called the “modernist impulse” in American Protestantism.¹ Although they were born into different circumstances—Fosdick was the son of a high-school teacher, and Rockefeller was the son of one of Cleveland’s most successful businessmen—they had much in common. Both their families were from the Western Reserve, the region stretching along Lake Erie through western New York to northern Ohio, a flat and fertile region deeply marked by the Second Great Awakening.²

Both Rockefeller and Fosdick were the products of homes in which the Bible was the most important—though not the only—book. For both, prayer and religious reflection were regular parts of their daily activities. For Fosdick, religion was both omnipresent and oppressive:

I was a sensitive boy, deeply religious, and, as I see it now, morbidly conscientious, and the effect upon me of hell-fire-and-brimstone preaching was deplorable. I vividly recall weeping at night for fear [of] going to hell, with my mystified and baffled mother trying to comfort me. Once, when I was nine years old, my father found me so pale that he thought me ill. The fact was that I was in agony for fear I had committed the unpardonable Sin, and reading that day in the book of Revelation about the horrors of hell, I was sick with terror.³

Rockefeller remembered his upbringing in religious terms as well. On Friday nights the Rockefeller family held prayer meetings, and at an early age, each was encouraged “to take part like the older people, either in a brief word of prayer or word of personal experience.”⁴ Biographer Ron Chernow described Sundays with the Rockefellers:

Sunday was a heavily regimented day, starting with the morning prayers and Sunday school then proceeding through an afternoon prayer meeting and culminating with evening hymns. If the children had spare time, they couldn’t read novels or worldly literature but had to restrict themselves to the Bible and Sunday-school literature. Laura Spelman Rockefeller, in the end was the more conservative of the two parents and led her children in hour-long “home talks,” in which she asked each child to choose a “besetting sin,” and then prayed with that child to the Lord, “asking for guidance and help in combating the sin.”⁵

Like countless other late Victorian evangelicals, Fosdick and Rockefeller each carried parts of the old piety with them for the rest of their lives. Neither man drank or smoked. Their respective moves toward a greater openness to the world were the product of personal experience but, even more, the outcome of a sweeping turn-of-the-century movement to modernize the Christian faith for a new age.

Theological Modernism

The Protestant modernism that emerged in the late nineteenth century was the complex development of the Enlightenment’s impact over more than a century. A key turning point away from the sin-obsessed Protestantism that characterized the Fosdick and Rockefeller households was Congregationalist minister Horace Bushnell’s insistence in the mid-nineteenth century that nurture was as important a route to faith and salvation as a radical conversion experience was. Bushnell developed several of the themes that dominated the turn-of-the-century mainstream Protestant mind. He argued for the eminence of God, the importance of continued experiences of growth as a Christian, the need for received doctrines to be updated to speak to contemporary understandings, and the poetic—as opposed to literal—nature of religious language.

After the Civil War, Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory and the findings of geologists and paleontologists began to challenge traditional orthodox understandings of the history of creation and the place of humans within it. Meanwhile, the rapid rise of industrialization after the war, coupled with immigration and repeated economic panics and depressions, left some religious leaders wondering how following Jesus could be squared with the squalor of the burgeoning American cities. The development of the telegraph, telephone, artificial light, railroads, and steamships brought progress along with the industrial and mining injuries and the dehumanizing aspects of female and child employment. It was only too obvious to religious leaders that the old pietism was not sufficient. Indeed, late-nineteenth-century religious thinkers coined a new term, social sin, to describe the evil they experienced. To them, sin was not just the result of individual rejections of the ways of God but something more, the wholesale system of institutions and behaviors at odds with the ways of God. Out of this basic mismatch of modern urban social organization and existing forms of Christian discipleship was born the Social Gospel.

At the same time, what the scientific method did for biology and geology, opening them to new critical insights, it also did for the study of ancient texts and peoples. By the end of the century, biblical scholars were establishing textual variants for biblical passages and, by juxtaposing biblical claims and historically verifiable facts, were calling into question simple and literal readings of the Bible. Through the seminaries and church-sponsored colleges that made up most of American higher education at the time, they exposed would-be ministers and others to their findings. Most of the scholars and ministers who encountered these teachings assimilated them into their personal faith, and it was this accommodation of Christian faith to modern science that made them modernists. A significantly large group of ministers and theologians preferred not, however, to accept modern beliefs when they conflicted with the received tradition of the Christian faith. That is, Protestant modernism stood for the high doctrine of human beings’ spirit and capability for the good and intellectual achievement. Modernism also endorsed a highly immanent God, and sin became a soluble problem, not an irrecoverable state. Consequently, modernism generated much talk about the rights of individuals and the value of human progress toward the end of an earthly kingdom of God. Those who opposed modernism argued that with its emphasis on human goodness and social perfectibility, belief in humanity had replaced God as the first article in the creed, for Christian affirmations of faith had always begun with one variation or another of the words “I believe in God the Father Almighty.”

Both Rockefeller and Fosdick were modernists in regard to the pivotal place of belief in humanity. On July 8, 1941, in a radio broadcast appeal on behalf of the USO and the National War Fund, Rockefeller gave a statement of his own principles, which was widely reprinted under the title “I Believe”:

I believe in the supreme worth of the individual and in his right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.

I believe that the law was made for man and not man for the law; that government is the servant of the people and not their master.

I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.

I believe that thrift is essential to well-ordered living and that economy is a prime requisite of a sound financial structure, whether in government, business, or personal affairs.

I believe that truth and justice are fundamental to an enduring social state.

I believe in the sacredness of a promise, that a man’s word should be as good as his bond; that character—not wealth or power or position—is of supreme worth.

I believe that the rendering of useful service is the common duty of mankind and that only in the purifying fire of sacrifices is the dross of selfishness consumed and the greatness of the human soul set free.

I believe in an all-wise and all-loving God, named by whatever name, and that the individual’s highest fulfillment, greatest happiness, and widest usefulness are to be found in living in harmony with His will.

I believe that love alone is the greatest thing in the world; that it alone can overcome hate; that right can and will triumph over might.⁶

Rockefeller’s first principle combines individualism and civic humanism. The second quotes Jesus and turns him against contemporary totalitarian governments abroad (and perhaps against totalistic tendencies in government at home). Most of the central four principles are the ideals typical of a Progressive-era businessman. In the next to last principle, Rockefeller describes his own experience as a rich man redeemed from the selfish possibilities of wealth. Finally, only in the last principle is the old religion—man living according to the will of God—present. But alongside the old religion is the new, that God might be known by some other name.

Harry Emerson Fosdick had been arguing since the 1920s that a religion that denigrated the human being was not Jesus’s religion. In a remarkable sermon entitled “I Believe in Man,” delivered during Fosdick’s early career at the First Presbyterian Church, he presented his belief that the missing article in the Apostles and Nicene creeds was a belief in humanity. Fosdick’s approach was both a subtle attack on creedalism and a claim that true Christianity was fundamentally pro-humanity. Jesus, Fosdick noted, suffered not for what he said about God—all of which had been said before—but for what he said about man. Healing on the Sabbath, allowing himself to be touched by women, and consorting with sinners all demonstrated Jesus’s radical new humanism. Fosdick believed that modern Christians should demonstrate no less concern for the “fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man” than Jesus had. In their combined beliefs that the human sphere was the most important locus for religious activity and attention, Rockefeller and Fosdick held views in line with the developing Protestant modernism, views that ultimately shaped the approach of the new Riverside Church.

FIGURE 1.1 John D. Rockefeller Jr. around the time of the founding of the Riverside Church. Used by permission of the Riverside Church Archives.

Fundamentalism

Fundamentalism was a broad-based movement reacting to modern trends in theology that centered on the nature of biblical authority and doctrines arising from a reading of the Scriptures. The term Fundamentalism itself derives from a series of twelve paperback volumes published between 1910 and 1915. The series, entitled The Fundamentals, was intended by Lyman Stewart, a southern California oil millionaire, to be a “testimony to the truth.” The editors, starting with A. C. Dixon, a well-known evangelist and pastor of Moody Church in Chicago, gathered together a variety of Bible teachers and seminary professors in hopes that they would be “the best and most loyal teachers in the world.” Lyman Stewart and his brother, Milton, financed the printing and distribution of enough copies of The Fundamentals so that every missionary, pastor, theological professor and student, YMCA and YWCA secretary, college professor, Sunday school superintendent, and religious editor in the English-speaking world could have a copy. In all, some three million volumes were sent out.⁷

As Fundamentalism evolved in the 1910s and 1920s into a list of five fundamentals that one had to believe in, in order to be a Christian, it became the doctrine of biblical inerrancy and the literal and verbal inspiration of the Scriptures that most rankled moderate Baptists like Fosdick and Rockefeller. The five fundamentals were the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth, substitutionary atonement, miracle-working power, and the bodily resurrection of Christ. Often added to these were a belief in the second coming of Christ and an affirmation of the doctrine of the Trinity. The first time that a list had formed from the diffuse movement of opposition to theological liberalism was in 1910, when the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America affirmed the five fundamentals as beliefs essential to candidates for ordination into the ministry. This attempt to control what was preached by controlling who became ministers of the gospel was again affirmed by the General Assembly in 1916. The mere existence of these lists as a litmus test of orthodoxy in one of the Protestant denominations helped promote its spread to other churches, not the least of which was the Northern Baptist Convention. Unlike the Presbyterians, Baptists did not require their ministers to subscribe to a particular confession. Although the Northern Baptist Convention was organized to promote cooperation in missionary and educational activities, those convinced of the dangers of liberalism in the church tried to use the convention as a forum for pushing a Fundamentalist agenda.

It is no accident that the two denominations—the Northern Baptists and the Presbyterians—most seriously affected by the Fundamentalist challenges were the two evangelical denominations that most emphasized theology and that ordered their common life with laity and clergy without the presence of bishops. The Methodists and Episcopalians were spared the full brunt of Fundamentalism because of the role of the episcopacy. The Disciples of Christ (Christian Church) were constitutionally resistant to creedalism, and even the Fundamentalist list of essentials smacked of a creed. Congregationalists did not have large assemblies in which this kind of thing was discussed, and they too were constitutionally configured to handle diverging beliefs by allowing different congregations to worship and believe differently.

The Baptists and Presbyterians, however, were ripe for a fight. In the past fifty years, these two denominations had produced most of the American biblical scholars and had sent more of their bright young men to Germany to study the Bible and theology than had all the other American churches combined. Therefore, when the Northern Baptists and Presbyterians opposed the higher criticism and liberal theology, they were objecting to moves made by their own intellectuals. The so-called Fundamentalist controversy was a family fight, all the more painful since no one in such a fight wishes to concede ownership of the family property to others. In this case, the family property at issue were the churches’ colleges, seminaries, publishing operations, and pulpits. The Methodists, meanwhile, incorporated another form of liberal religion, the Social Gospel, which could and did apply Jesus’s teachings to the problems of turn-of-the-century America without ...