TRANSFORMATIONAL CHRISTIANITY: THE CHURCH MUST GO BEYOND FUNDAMENTALISM AND MODERNISM
Texts: II Corinthians 3:17-18; Luke 5:1-11

On May 21, 1922, Harry Emerson Fosdick preached what would become one of the most famous sermons of the twentieth century. It was titled "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" He, a liberal Baptist minister with an extraordinary gift for preaching, was the preaching minister of First Presbyterian Church, New York City. The Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy was threatening to split most Protestant denominations. Nowhere was the battle more fiercely pitched than in the Presbyterian Church, and this renegade Baptist preacher in the nation’s most visible Presbyterian pulpit provoked a national controversy.

In the sermon, he defended the liberal/modernist movement in American Christianity, which sought to integrate the new knowledge in science and historical studies with Christian faith and to address the social challenges of urbanism and industrialization. In response, the Fundamentalist movement arose to defend what they identified as the bedrock fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith against the encroachments of the modern age.

Fosdick’s sermon became a lightning rod. Ivy Lee, a New York P.R. expert, arranged for the sermon to be sent to 130,000 clergy across the nation. John D. Rockefeller, an American Baptist who would later help lure Fosdick to become the first minister of the Riverside Church, paid for the mailing.

The Fundamentalists in the Presbyterian Church were led by Princeton theologian J. Gresham Machen and lawyer/politician William Jennings Bryan. They mounted an attack against Fosdick. In the end, pressure was exerted to require that in order for Fosdick to remain as preacher of First Presbyterian Church, he had to sign the Westminster Confession and become a bona fide Presbyterian. Although the congregation was solidly behind him, he refused on principle to sign any creed and resigned. Sounds Baptist to me!

His good friend Henry Sloane Coffin, pastor of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, later to become President of Union Theological Seminary, wrote a personal letter at his resignation which said,

While we think your brain and conscience out of gear, we know your heart is Christian through and through.

Fosdick wrote back,

No, Henry, you have that wrong. The fact is that my heart is desperately wicked, but that my brain and conscience never were more luminously clear.

Thirteen years later, in the fall of 1935, Fosdick preached another sermon that became as famous as the first. It was titled, "The Church Must Go Beyond Modernism." It showed his extraordinary capacity for change and for intellectual reassessment.

He began the sermon by saying that though the church must go beyond modernism, it had to go as far as modernism, and offered these poignant words:

Fifty years ago, a boy, seven years of age, was crying himself to sleep at night in terror lest, dying, he should go to hell, and his solicitous mother, out of all patience with the fearful teachings which brought such apparitions to the mind, was trying in vain to comfort him. That boy is preaching to you today . . . .

Modernism had liberated his mind and soul. But here were the weaknesses he now saw in modernism:

1. Modernism was "excessively preoccupied with intellectualism." Christianity needed to bring reason into its faith, but spiritual issues go deeper than intellectual solutions can offer.

2. Modernism was "dangerously sentimental." It did not take sufficient account of the power of sin, and it believed too easily in the inevitable progress of the human race. World War I was a jolt to such thinking.

3. Modernism had "watered down and thinned out the central message and distinctive truth of religion, the reality of God." This age had followed Protagoras: "Man is the measure of all things." Fosdick quoted the poet Swinburne:

Glory to Man in the highest! for Man is the master of things.

4. Modernism had "lost its ethical standing-ground" and its moral power to challenge society. It had begun with the noble and necessary attempt to adapt Christianity to the new findings in knowledge, but it had ended in concession and compromise. Fosdick noted especially the church’s acquiescence to nationalism and militarism. You see the fire in his soul on this point in the phrases of his great hymn, "God of Grace and God of Glory":

Cure thy children’s warring madness,
Bend our pride to thy control:
Shame our wanton, selfish gladness,
Rich in things and poor in soul.

Fosdick ended his sermon with these words:

Therefore let all modernists lift a new battle cry: We must go beyond modernism. And in that new enterprise the watchword will be not, Accommodate yourself to the prevailing culture! but, stand out from it and challenge it!¹

Martin Luther King, Jr., would echo this cry twenty or so years later, saying that the gospel of Christ makes us a people maladjusted to our age. We are called to be non-conformist in the cause of the kingdom of God.

As Paul put it: "Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds" (Romans 12:2 KJV).

That was 1935. Here we stand 72 years later; and while some things have changed, many things seem much the same. Fundamentalism did not win in the 1920's, but it now has re-emerged with ever greater force in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, like a cancer after remission, returning with greater fury and reach. It has invaded religions across our world, joining with social and political passions to create a great danger to our world. And the church is still wrestling with the weaknesses of the modernism we needed: an overly intellectualized, overly sentimentalized, overly humanized, overly accommodated faith.

What then and where then is the "beyond" beyond fundamentalism and modernism? I am no seer into the future and offer no global solutions. Global solutions were part of the pretense of the modern age.

But here are some signs of the "beyond" which are even now revitalizing the church. It is what Marcus Borg and others of many theological stripes are calling "Transformational Christianity." Such Christianity includes what I’ve been discussing recently in terms of the "Missional Church" and the "Practicing Church." It goes deep in spiritually, it moves out in mission. Its faith is as Diane Butler Bass describes it: "open and generous, intellectual and emotive, beautiful and just."

This is a Christianity focused on following Jesus and on personal and social transformation. I stress both personal and social transformation. G. K. Chesterton once said, "Beware of the person who wants to change the world but is uninterested in changing himself." I could add, beware a Christianity focused on individual transformation but in uninterested in the transformation of the world. It is a religion too comfortable with its culture. "Woe to those who are at ease in Zion," the prophet Amos says (Amos 6:1). Dick Cornwell told me last year that for him our most passionate focus here should be discipleship and transformation. The more I’ve reflected on that, the righter it seems.

This means change, more change than we know – which may not sound like good news in an age where we’re already seasick with change. But there is no change that Jesus wants, and God brings, that is not for our healing and wholeness – and for the healing and wholeness of the world.

Diana Butler Bass writes:

In the New Testament, Jesus asks everyone to change. With the exception of children, Jesus insists every person he met do something to change.²

What is this change, this metanoia, Jesus is asking of us? Does it happen all at once, or over time? The answer is yes. One right thought can change a life. Small deeds done over time can renew our minds, our spirit.

Paul saw a world changed, a world being changed, in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. He called it the New Creation which was even now transforming the old creation. And this change happens day by day, cell by cell, thought by thought, action by action, as we gaze upon the Christ and follow him. This is how he put it:

And we all with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord...are being changed into Christ’s likeness from one degree of glory to another.
II Corinthians 3:18)

"Transformation," says Anne Howard, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Santa Barbara, California, "is the promise at the heart of the Christian faith."

Early Eastern Christianity called it theosis, divinization. "Christ became human so we might be divine," wrote the early church theologians.

Wesley called it holiness or sanctification.

The word "transformation" stirs our hope and raises our anxiety. It seems such an impossible thing, a faraway thing. But Jesus brings it close. We may worry about how little transformation we’ve experienced, but I think we’re often unaware how much difference Christ has made. As the old preacher put it: "I’m not what I want to be, I’m not what I’m going to be, but thank God, I’m not what I used to be!"

The Gospel text for today is a quite stunning picture of this transformation at work as Jesus calls us to follow.

As Jesus taught, the crowds grew. On this day, as he was teaching by the seashore, the crowds were so great they pressed him nearly into the water. He spied a couple of boats and borrowed one for a makeshift pulpit. When he finished and the crowd left, he turned to Simon Peter, the owner of the boat, and said, "Put out into the deep and let your nets down for a catch."

Transformation does not come in the shallows. Transformational Christianity goes deep.

Peter resists at first (he thinks Jesus is talking only about fish): "Master, we’ve been at it all night and caught nothing, but at your word I will." There’s something about Jesus that makes him want to try one more time.

When they did, their nets were so full they began to break. Peter called to James and John in the other boat to help, and when they tried to haul the nets in, their boats began to sink. It got scary in a hurry. Peter says: "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man." He experiences this moment as an encounter with the Holy. He is not ready. He has come, as we all sometimes come, to the end of his rope. But as John Claypool reminds us: "God lives at the end of our ropes."

Here is Peter standing like Isaiah in the temple when God’s presence filled the temple and who said, "Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips." Like Moses of the burning bush when the voice said, "Take off your shoes; this is holy ground." Like Mary when the angel came and said, "Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you."

And Jesus gave two words which are at the heart of transformational Christianity.

The first: "Be not afraid." Fear is so often that which stymies the spiritual life. But the Holy One is a gracious God.

And then he said the word of call: "From now on you’ll be catching people!"

This change, this transformational change, is not just for you, but for the whole world. We are like the monk in the Buddhist story who, reaching the gates of Nirvana, does not go in, but turns back to the world to bring others there as well.

And the text says that Peter, James and John, upon getting their boats to shore, "left everything and followed him."

Why, I ask myself, do I, do we, love so this hymn from Iona, "Will You Come and Follow Me?" I think it’s because it’s about transformation, "the promise of transformation at the heart of Christianity," about Christ living in us and changing us, about our new chance every day to change our world, person by person, gracious thought by gracious thought, act of courage by act of courage. I think it’s because it’s about, as hard as it is to imagine some days, Jesus calling us to follow, calling us by our name.