"Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" at 100

Column by Rev. David M. Felten on 26 May 2022 2 Comments

When I first read Harry Emerson Fosdick’s Shall the Fundamentalists Win?, it changed my life. In disbelief, I read portions of it over and over again and looked at the date. I read it AGAIN and thought, “What?” How in the world could he have preached this in 1922 and it STILL be controversial?!

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Question

Is it essential for a Christian to believe in the Trinity?

Answer

Dear Ray,

" I hope not!  The belief in a triune God may have confused more people than it has helped.  Like all “developed” doctrines, the Holy Trinity evolved from a way of trying to understand God to a central belief that Christians must adapt, regardless of how impossible it is to take literally. 
 
Bishop Spong put it this way:  “The Holy Trinity is not now and never has been a description of the being of God.  It is rather the attempt to define our human experience of God.” 
 
We experience God as creator; Jesus as the incarnation of God’s love; and the Holy Spirit as the means through which we are drawn to and inspired by that love.  It is a metaphor that should remain, as William Sloane Coffin Jr. put it, “a sign-post, not a hitching-post.”  But as the church sought to secure its power and exclusivity, the Trinity became more than just a metaphor or the poetry of liturgy. 
 
When the church declared that the Holy Spirit could only issue from the Father and the Son, a great schism arose that split the church into East and West.  Rome made the Holy Spirit into a kind of exclusive franchise, while Constantinople saw it operating independently.  This is what happens when we “literalize” our metaphors.  We move from suggesting a helpful way to understand God (who can never be fully understood) to a demand that there is only one way to understand God. 
 
That’s why I have been a non-trinitarian minister for my entire life.  Three-in-one and one-in-three (like fully human and fully divine) not only makes no logical sense, but it sells the mystery of God short.  One of my favorite bumper stickers was spotted on the car of a wise English teacher who loved Star Wars:  METAPHORS BE WITH YOU. 
 
~ Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers

 

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