Christianity and Progress — Text and Context

From Resignation to Belligerent Unresignation

Fosdick draws a sharp line between medieval and modern Christian attitudes toward evil. The older piety counseled passive submission to God's will as something to be endured. The modern Christian, by contrast, prays for "the victory of God and righteousness" and treats God's will as something to be achieved. To illustrate the shift, Fosdick cites the Rev. Leonard Wood in 1836, who recalled forty ministers who were drunkards or "far addicted to drinking," and an ordination where two aged ministers were "literally drunk." Our forefathers were resigned to that, Fosdick says; we are not. He extends the same logic to militarism, which he denounces in a long, accumulating sentence as a system that demands vast armaments, slays the best youth, and leaves the crippled to propagate. The modern Christian duty, he insists, is to be "tirelessly unresigned."

The Creeds as Obstacles to a Progressive Faith

Fosdick argues that the idea of Christianity as a progressive movement requires serious alterations in historic conceptions of theology. He traces the problem to the early church's response to heresy: creeds were defined and then treated as final. Tertullian around 204 A.D. called the creedal standard "a rule of faith changeless and incapable of reformation." Fosdick notes that Roman Catholic councils still decree papal definitions as unchangeable, and Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors specifically condemned the idea that divine revelation is imperfect and subject to progress. Protestantism, he observes, did not attack this central Catholic conception; it merely substituted an unalterable Bible for an unalterable pope. Change was allowed only as the unfolding of potentialities already present in the original deposit—a view both Catholics like Cardinal Newman and some Protestants accepted.

The New Mood Born of Scientific Control

Fosdick locates the source of Christianity's transformation in "the scientific control of life and the modern ideas of progress." This new mood, he claims, is not merely an environment to which Christianity conforms; it is a fact that Christianity itself exhibits. The shift is visible in regulative conceptions and earthly hopes. Where earlier Christians looked for a static heaven or endured present evils as divine punishment, modern Christians fight the liquor traffic, militarism, and other social abominations as acts of faith. Fosdick is careful to note that this new spirit is "consonant with the spirit of the New Testament," but he acknowledges that it penetrates deep into the nature of Christian thought. The excerpts do not reveal how he reconciles this claim with the New Testament's own eschatology, but the tension between continuity and transformation is central to his argument.

Fosdick's lectures are best read as an attempt to negotiate a crisis of authority: if progress is real and Christianity is true, then the faith must be able to change without losing its identity. Readers should watch how Fosdick handles the evidence he cites—from Tertullian to the temperance movement—and note where he relies on rhetorical force rather than detailed exegesis. The spoken style means arguments unfold cumulatively; a single paragraph often carries the weight of a whole case.

It’s strange how Fosdick’s worry about a static faith still lingers, like an old ache. I thought of that while rereading Monism as Connecting Religion and Science — that quiet insistence that truth shifts shape. Monism as Connecting Religion and Science A Man of Science — Edition Insights feels like a distant echo of his plea, a softer voice asking the same question. We were both younger then, I suppose.