Tag Archives: martin Luther King

The False Teachers: Harry Emerson Fosdick

Posted on May 13, 2026 by | Leave a comment

reposted from Tim Challies of challies.com

Harry Emerson Fosdick

Fosdick

,Harry Emerson Fosdick was born in Buffalo, New York, on May 24, 1878. As a young boy he claimed to have been born again, but even as a teenager rebelled against the “born again” movement known as fundamentalism. He developed an early interest in theology and chose to pursue ministerial training at Colgate Divinity School where he was influenced by William Newton Clarke, an early advocate of the social gospel. Upon graduating from Colgate he continued to Union Theological Seminary. In 1904 he accepted his first pastorate at First Baptist Church in Montclair, New Jersey, and four years later also accepted a faculty position at Union where he was to teach until 1946. Fosdick quickly proved himself a skilled communicator and compelling speaker and it would not be long before he would be known as America’s foremost minister.

In 1919 Fosdick was asked to become associate pastor at First Presbyterian Church in New York City, though he was allowed to retain his baptistic convictions. He quickly gained a reputation as a leading Christian voice, and hundreds and then thousands descended on First Presbyterian to hear his sermons. It was here, on May 21, 1922, that he preached the sermon that came to define him: “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” In this sermon he proclaimed that there was a great battle in the church between the fundamentalists and the modernists or liberals, and that he was going to stand firmly on the side of the liberals. Because of his desire to modernize the Christian faith, he soundly rejected belief in a series of traditional Christian doctrines including Christ’s virgin birth, the inerrancy of Scripture, and the literal return of Jesus Christ. He decried the fundamentalists as being intolerant for demanding adherence to doctrines that science, reason, and a modern world could no longer sustain. John D. Rockefeller enjoyed this sermon so much that he had 130,000 copies printed and mailed to every Protestant pastor in the nation.

“Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” set off what would soon be called the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy. We need to be clear that we cannot import into this battle a twenty-first century understanding of fundamentalism. When Fosdick battled the fundamentalists of his day, he battled nothing less than traditional or conservative Christianity. Fundamentalists were those who insisted upon the key tenets of historic, orthodox Christianity—what they defined as the fundamental doctrines of the faith.

Fosdick was by no means the only liberal theologian of his day, but he was the one to gain the widest acclaim and the broadest platform. While many others were pressing theological liberalism in the seminaries and the halls of academia, Fosdick was on the radio waves and in the bookstores, taking his message to the common people. His voice extended through his radio program, The National Vespers Hour, which was broadcast in the Northern and Eastern United States, and through many bestselling books which eventually sold in the millions. On two separate occasions he was on the cover of TIME magazine.

By the mid 1920’s Fosdick had established himself as the leading voice of twentieth-century liberalism. His stand for liberalism put him at odds with many of the conservative voices in Presbyterianism, and this led him to leave First Presbyterian Church in 1925 and to go instead to Park Avenue Baptist Church.

I am a heretic if conventional orthodoxy is the standard. I should be ashamed to live in this generation and not be a heretic.

In the early 1920’s, J. Gresham Machen emerged as one of the foremost opponents of liberalism. His 1923 book Christianity and Liberalism was a strong, biblical response that drew comparisons between the Bible and liberal theology and showed that the two were in clear opposition. He rightly asked, “The question is not whether Mr. Fosdick is winning men, but whether the thing to which he is winning them is Christianity.” Others joined the battle as well. Fosdick remained firm in the face of such attacks, declaring “They call me a heretic. Well, ‘I am a heretic if conventional orthodoxy is the standard. I should be ashamed to live in this generation and not be a heretic.”

In 1929, Princeton, once a bastion of Reformed thinking and teaching, was reorganized under modernist influences. Almost immediately four Princeton professors who held to the Reformed faith (Robert Dick Wilson, J. Gresham Machen, Oswald T. Allis, and Cornelius Van Til) withdrew from Princeton and established Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia in order to continue upholding the faith Princeton once defended. If the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy was begun with Fosdick’s sermon in 1922, if was effectively cut off among conservative churches in 1929 with the departure of those professors.

Rockefeller money soon built a grand new building on the Hudson, and in 1930 Fosdick was installed as pastor at Riverside Church. He would pastor this congregation for sixteen years, and, after his retirement, attend it for a further twenty-eight. This church became his laboratory for liberalism and it was here that he practiced his liberal values to the full. (To be fair, and to give credit where credit is due, he was a strong advocate of racial reconciliation and was perhaps the most notable preacher to invite African-American preachers into his pulpit.)

Fosdick died in New York City on October 5, 1969, two weeks after being hospitalized for a heart attack. He was ninety-one years old.

False Teaching

Harry Emerson Fosdick was not an original thinker as much as a popularizer who took the theory of liberalism from the seminaries and brought it to a common level. He wanted to modernize the faith by making it attractive to, and compatible with, modern times and modern sensibilities. At heart, liberalism questioned the nature of the Bible and denied its inerrancy, infallibility, and authority. Liberalism denied that the Bible is the Word of God and insisted instead that it contains the Word of God. Once Scripture’s authority had been denied, a host of doctrines would necessarily fall in its wake.

Fosdick questioned the essential beliefs necessary to be a Christian and began to challenge long-held, orthodox Christian beliefs such as the virgin birth, and the return of Christ Jesus. Robert Moats Miller, one of Fosdick’s biographers, wrote, “Fosdick could not believe that Jesus was virgin born. He did not ridicule those who did, but he was adamant that such belief was not essential to acceptance of Christian faith. … Fosdick doubted whether Jesus ever thought of himself as the Messiah; perhaps he did, but more probably Jesus’ disciples may have read this into his thinking.” He also denied the wrath of God, suggesting that wrath was simply a metaphor for the natural consequences of doing wrong. With wrath removed, it was inevitable that the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ would also be denied. Before long Fosdick’s Christianity looked nothing like historic Christianity.

In a later sermon, “The Church Must Go Beyond Modernism,” Fosdick spoke of his methodology in modernizing the Christian faith, saying, “We have already largely won the battle we started out to win; we have adjusted the Christian faith to the best intelligence of our day and have won the strongest minds and the best abilities of the churches to our side. Fundamentalism is still with us but mostly in the backwaters. The future of the churches, if we will have it so, is in the hands of modernism.” Of course, he was too optimistic, and too blinded by his own success. Liberalism posed a major challenge to the faith, but like all other challengers, it would rise and then wane.

Followers and Modern Adherents

If Fosdick was the man who popularized and legitimized liberalism, we can rightly say that subsequent liberals, and especially those who operated at the popular level, followed in his footsteps. Men like Norman Vincent Peale, Robert Schuller and John Shelby Spong are among them. Martin Luther King Jr., a theological liberal in his own right, regarded Fosdick as the greatest preacher of the century and in 1958, inscribed a copy of Stride Toward Freedom for Fosdick with these words: “If I were called upon to select the foremost prophets of our generation, I would choose you to head the list.”

But Fosdick’s influence extends farther than that. Though the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy began within Presbyterianism, it soon spread to other Protestant denominations, eventually leading to today’s division between “mainline” and “evangelical” Protestant churches. About half of today’s mainline Protestants consider themselves liberal, and they, too, whether they know it or not, are influenced by Fosdick.

What the Bible Says

Fosdick’s teaching was false in many areas, but the heart of it all was his denial of the inerrancy, infallibility and authority of the Bible. He elevated human reason above the plain words of Scripture; he made reason the final arbiter of truth. All the other doctrines he denied depended upon first undermining the Bible. Christians have long insisted, as the fundamentalists did in his day, that God’s Word, not science or human reason, is the measure of true knowledge. Proverbs 3:5-7 says, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD, and turn away from evil.” Our understanding of ourselves and the world around us is flawed; we must depend upon God to reveal true knowledge.

If we remove the offense of the gospel, we have removed the power of the gospel.

In his second letter to Timothy, Paul warned, “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths” (2 Timothy 4:3-4). Fosdick wanted to make the Christian faith soothing to those itching ears and, in so doing, distorted it beyond all recognition. The reality is that the Christian faith is, and always will be, offensive. If we remove the offense of the gospel, we have removed the power of the gospel.

Paul’s words to the Corinthians are perfectly suited to Fosdick and his liberalism:

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. (1 Corinthians 1:20-25)

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Enemies on the Left, False Friends on the Right - Part 17

Posted on May 6, 2026 by | Leave a comment

For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. But thou, O man of God, flee these things; and follow after righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, meekness. -I Timothy 6:10-11

Coronation of Rev. Sun Myung Moon in Dirksen Senate Office Building

Charlie Black, a Washington lobbyist and McCain top advisor and confidant, lent his name to the March 23, 2026 coronation ceremony for Rev. Sun Myung Moon, and even invited a few friends, according to newly disclosed e-mails which were obtained by RAW STORY. The ceremony was held in the Dirksen Senate office building.

“What is clear is that top McCain advisor, Charlie Black, admitted that he helped plan, and would have attended an event where a convicted tax fraud would have been crowned King of America and declared himself the Messiah-all on U.S. Government federal property,” wrote author Cliff Schecter on his blog. In the e-mails, Black said he became involved because of his relationships with executives at the Washington Times, the conservative, Moon-owned newspaper, and its charitable foundation.

In fact, Black, as the head of the extremely influential lobby shop BKSH and Associates, is one of Washington’s most powerful influence-peddlers. In the Washington Post story of February 22, 2008, about the lobbyists that populate the upper ranks of McCain’s campaign, Black is listed as working for AT&T, Alcoa, JPMorgan, and U.S. Airways. He works and has worked for far more companies than that, however.

There’s surely nothing new about indulging messianic conceits on Capitol Hill (think of the president). But a dozen or more lawmakers allowed power fantasies to overstep the bounds when they honored invitations to the bizarre self-coronation of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, as Messiah, at a Senate reception room in March of 2004. News leaked of this absolutely bizarre event. The attendees fled from the record of the crowning as if it were a burning building. ”I had no idea,” said one in post-coronation remorse. Moon grandly donned scarlet robes and a golden crown at the Dirksen Office Building. ”I am God’s ambassador, sent to earth with his full authority,” he announced. Here is a video (at about 7 minutes into the video) of the crowning and the attendees. Note the packed room!

Rev. Sun Myung Moon was given this bejeweled crown by Rep. Danny K. Davis, D-Illinois. After the coronation, Moon told the audience of Washington power players he would save everyone on earth just as he had saved the souls of Hitler and Stalin. He stated the murderous dictators had been born again through him. Can you believe the utter narcissism, chutzpah and heretical doctrine?

Salon writer, John Gorenfield wrote about this insane happening in his June 21, 2026 article:

Moon, 84, the benefactor of conservative foundations like the American Family Coalition — who served time in the 1980s for tax fraud and conspiracy to obstruct justice — has views somewhere to the right of the Taliban’s Mullah Omar. Moon preaches that gays are “dung-eating dogs,” Jews brought on the Holocaust by betraying Jesus, and the U.S. Constitution should be scrapped in favor of a system he calls “Godism” — with him in charge. The man was crowned “King of Peace” by US congressmen.

What, exactly, drew at least a dozen members of Congress to Moon’s coronation? The event was the grand finale of Moon’s coast-to-coast “tear down the cross” Moonification tour, intended to remove Christian crosses from almost 300 churches in poor neighborhoods — the idea being that the cross was an obstacle to uniting religions under Moon. Yet the Dirksen ceremony was sold as a celebration of world peace. According to a cheery promotional video released by Moon’s International and Interreligious Federation for World Peace, the ceremony marked the dawn of “the era of the Eternal Peace Kingdom, one global family under God.” Moon’s coronation also cured God’s pain, the announcer explains.

By all accounts, most of the congressmen in attendance didn’t expect a coronation. Instead, they thought they were heading to an awards dinner honoring activists from their home states as “Ambassadors for Peace.” A flier for the event claimed an impressive who’s-who of organizers, including Republicans Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Rep. Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland and Charlie Black, a top Republican strategist. Democrats were named, too, like Rep. Harold Ford of Tennessee, who, incidentally, claims to have not even heard of the event.

And then there was Rep. Danny K. Davis, D-Ill., the only congressman who has publicly expressed pride in the crowning ceremony, who praised Moon for bringing religious leaders together in his Ambassadors for Peace tours to Jerusalem and beyond. Davis, it was revealed this week in the Chicago Reader, took money from Moon-organized fundraisers, who also gave to a charity of his choice. Davis told an Anglican magazine that Moon’s remarks were “similar to a baseball team owner telling team members that ‘we are the greatest team on earth'” to get them fired up.

The Crowning Ritual

The entire affair began as a normal awards ceremony. Medals were given to Representative Bartlett and others. Representative Curt Weldon R-Pa., spoke beside a photo of himself pinning an American flag on Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy. He denied he was at this “coronation” until Salon Magazine produced photos.

So, Moon and his wife are crowned at this Ambassador’s of Peace ceremony, but there were widespread reports, even within the Moon’s cult itself, of allegations that in 1989, he allowed brutal inquisitions to take place. Apparently Moon had a man who he believed was the reincarnation of his son acting as the inquisitor. Allegedly, this inquisitor was encouraged to tie people to radiators and beat them. As a result, Moon’s number one man and trusted lieutenant, Bo Hi Pak, who was also in charge of the Washington Times, actually suffered minor brain damage. Pak also attended the funeral of Kim il Sung in North Korea in 1994. Yet, Moon claims to be anti-communism.

Moon’s daughter-in-law, Nansook Hong, wrote a tell-all book entitled, In The Shadow of the Moons: My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Family, wherein she documents her 14 years of abuse. In the book, she states, “Sun Myung Moon seemed to take pleasure in the reports that filtered back to East Garden of the beatings being administered by the Black Heung Jin (the reincarnation in a black man of Moon’s 17 year old son, who had died in a car accident). He would laugh raucously if someone out of favor had been dealt an especially hard blow.” Sounds like a real man of peace, doesn’t he? Here is the 60 minutes interview with Nansook Hong.

Bush’s Faith Based Initiative

Remember Bush’s Faith Based Initiative? Moon operatives pushed hard for this initiative which most folks assumed would go to more traditional organizations. Only a few Americans raised the alarm knowing the truth of where our tax dollars would be spent. Moon’s organization benefited from the program. Free Teens, a celibacy program run by high ranking Moon officials received a $475,280 grant for abstinence education. Service for Peace received $80,000 to provide support projects to coincide with the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service.

Many of Moon’s other front groups received funds for “marriage improvement,” to “purify our sex-corrupted culture,” and to “rid the country of gays.” And get this, to top it off, James Towey, Director of the White House on Faith Based and Community Initiatives, spoke at a conference sponsored by the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace (Link), another Moon front. At this conference he announced that Bush’s faith-based initiative was “the centerpiece of the president’s domestic policy.” Knowledgeable Americans knew what this legislation would do and how it would ultimately support cults and in reality was unconstitutional.
Bush/Moon Alliance

How ingrained Moon was in Republican politics becomes obvious when in 2003, Bush appointed David Caprara, a Moon operative from Moon’s American Family Coalition, to head AmeriCorps‘ anti-poverty program, VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America). American Family Coalition was founded by Sun Myung Moon in 1984, and funded by the Washington Times Foundation. It was formerly presided over by David Caprara, Director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives for the federal government’s Corporation for National and Community Service.

Caprara was a former aide to now deceased, neo-con Trotskyite, and CNP member, Jack Kemp, and founded a pro-faith policy group called the Empowerment Network. It claimed Sens. Rick Santorum and Joseph Lieberman as leaders, though their names disappeared from the site back in 2003. (Lieberman’s spokesperson told Salon Magazine, the senator had never been formally affiliated with the Empowerment Network; Santorum’s office didn’t return calls.) The site’s Resources Directory section includes links to both Free Teens USA and the Pure Love Alliance — a now seemingly defunct, openly Moonie entity that was discovered in 2000 to be operating in 61 Chicago public schools before being shut down.

Then, another Moon front, the Universal Peace Federation (UPF), gave $1 million to Bush’s Points of Light Foundation. And from their website, “UPF is an NGO (non-governmental organization) in special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, UPF works to support and supplement the great work of the United Nations.”

As well, Moon’s Washington Times Foundation purchased education materials from Ignite Learning, a company owned by Neil Bush which benefitted from Hurricane Katrina through donations “earmarked” for his products. The Moon/Bush ties are everywhere, even with North Korea.

North Korea

According to Defense Intelligence Agency documents, Moon’s business empire paid North Korea’s communist leaders millions of dollars in the early 90s, at a time when the North Korean government was desperate for cash. Moon even gave a $3 million dollar birthday present to communist leader, Kim Jong-il, as well as offshore payments to the previous communist leader, Kim Sung-il, amounting to tens of millions of dollars. The duplicity of Moon’s Washington Times was shown when the Times attacked Clinton for failing to be more aggressive in defending the country against North Korea’s missile program, when in fact, Moon’s monies may well have helped start that very program.

As mentioned in Part 16 of this series, there is no debate as to the closeness between Moon and the Bush family. This included a reunification of Korea under fascist rule, and undoubtedly South Korea knew this. [Link]

Federation for World Peace, inaugurated 1991, was the precursor to the Inter-Religious International Federation for World Peace. Following Rev. Moon’s first meeting with President Mikhail Gorbachov and Raisa Gorbachov in Moscow in 1990, the Federation for World Peace was inaugurated to bring together society leaders, including current and former heads of state, to discuss solutions for world problems and routes to peace. The inaugural meeting in August 1991, was attended by twenty five current and former heads of state, along with 1000 representatives of governments, non-governmental organizations and grassroots organizations from more than seventy nations. What Moon was selling was really One World Religion, under him as the godhead. [Link]

Moon always alleged that he was virulently anti-communist, yet he had no problem with strong affiliations with the communist United Nations, and with communist North Korean leaders, and his meeting with Gorbachev for “world peace,” is in itself a joke. We know what Gorbachev is: From the website, Mikhail Gorbachev, Creatively Marketing Global Communism, comes this statement regarding Gorbachev’s State of the World Forum, “Former Soviet Communist Party boss Mikhail Gorbachev, founder of the State of the World Forum six years ago, used a $5,000 per person gathering of the world’s political and business elite to plea for the United Nations to adopt a Soviet-style “central authority” to manage the world’s business and environmental concerns.”

Here is a list of Unification Church affiliated organizations…organizations the phony rightwing and our former presidents, politicians, and clergy, had no problem being involved with and accepting money from Sun Myung Moon and his operatives.

In Part 18, we’ll discuss a few of the top rightwing movers and shakers and their close affiliations with Rev. Sun Myung Moon. As well, I’ll link to a 1997 interview with researcher Chey Simonton on Moon’s many connections to the Council for National Policy.

Leave a comment

Posted in Council for National Policy

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,