THE URBAN PULPIT:
New York City and the fate of liberal
evangelicalism
By Matthew Bowman
Oxford University Press. 307 pages. £48.00
ISBN 978 0 199 977 604
I wouldn’t recommend buying this book unless you are a New Yorker or an American church history buff or both.
The subject of the book is somewhat specialised, but nevertheless it deals with a subject of perennial relevance and interest. The author looks at how Protestant churches in late 19th century and early 20th century New York City became theologically liberal and how evangelicals or fundamentalists reacted to this development.
The older evangelicalism
Matthew Bowman, who teaches at a college in Virginia, first examines the older evangelicalism of New York and then how it was modified. Brick Presbyterian Church figures much in the account. This was the church of Gardiner Spring, who was an old school Presbyterian of the old Princeton variety. At the end of the 19th century, Henry van Dyke became the minister. While considering himself still an evangelical, his preaching was less concerned with the meaning of the words of Scripture and more with their overall emotional effect on his hearers. He was the defender of Charles Briggs, who was tried for heresy in the Presbyterian Church for his views on the Old Testament. He was also an antagonist of J. Gresham Machen who became the spokesman for orthodoxy in the church. However van Dyke was only one of many ministers moving towards liberalism.
Another famous one who figures prominently was Harry Emerson Fosdick, a Baptist minister for whom John D. Rockefeller had Riverside Church built.
Another religion
He always considered himself an evangelical and would use biblical language, but, as Machen pointed out, his Christianity was another religion than that of the Bible. Behind much of this was a desire to accommodate the message of Christianity to the sensitivities of urban middle-class culture. On the other side were well-known fundamentalist preachers in their day such as John Roach Stanton of Calvary Baptist Church. Unfortunately Stanton and others were con-troversialists both in waging theological battles and also in inveighing against the moral decline of American society. What seemed to be lacking were conservative evangelical preachers who could faithfully proclaim historic Christianity as they expounded the Bible and apply it to people in a culturally savvy way, as is being done at Redeemer Presbyterian and similar churches in New York today. Machen did this in some degree, but he was an professor in a seminary and not a pastor in a church.
The book is well written and evokes well the lost world of the liberal Protestant ascendency in the largest American city. It is a work of history and on the surface makes no judgment on the views of the various characters, but I suspect the author regrets the failure of the liberal evangelical project. If you are interested in the subject there are other books by historians such as George Marsden and Mark Noll that deal with it on a broader canvas.
Lessons for today
The lessons for us in the UK are salutary. Something similar happened both in the Anglican churches and in the main Nonconformist denominations in the same period, as well as in the Church of Scotland. The old evangelicalism was discarded by popular preachers who claimed to be evangelicals and spoke in a way that echoed the older faith but gutted it of meaning and in the end taught another gospel. Sadly, we can see the same thing happening again today as popular preachers on both sides of the Atlantic deny or at least downplay the inerrancy of Scripture, penal substitutionary atonement, imputed righteousness, hell and, in a way the older liberals would not have dreamed of, historic Christian sexual morality. And all largely to accommodate the gospel to the sensibilities of the middle class cultural élite. We need to learn the lessons of history.
