Primary readings focus on the historical, cultural, political, philosophical, and, above all, theological context of the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy (otherwise known as the “Presbyterian Controversy”) of the early decades of the twentieth century, as well as the voices of two of its primary protagonists (J. Gresham Machen and Harry Emerson Fosdick).
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41. THE FUNDAMENTALIST–MODERNIST CONTROVERSY
Seminar Readings
Longfield, Bradley J. The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and Moderates. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. 333 pp.
Burnett, Richard E. Machen’s Hope: The Transformation of a Modernist in the New Princeton. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2024. vii–xviii + 620 pp.
Fosdick, Harry Emerson. “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” In American Protestant Thought in the Liberal Era, ed. William R. Hutchinson, pp. 170–182. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.
Machen, J. Gresham. Christianity and Liberalism. New York: Macmillan, 1923. 189 pp.
Marsden, George. “The Evangelical Love Affair with Enlightenment Science.” In Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, pp. 122–152. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991.
Supplementary Readings
Coffin, Henry S. Some Christian Convictions. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1915. ix + 222.
Hutchison, William R. The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. i–xvi + 347 pp.
Loetscher, Lefferts. The Broadening Church: A Study of Theological Issues in the Presbyterian Church Since 1869. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954. 195 pp.
Marsden, George. Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. xiv + 306 pp.
Mathews, Shailer. The Faith of Modernism. New York: Macmillan, 1924. i–vii + 182 pp. Speer, Robert E. The New Opportunity of the Church. New York: Macmillan, 1919. 111 pp.
Worthen, Molly. Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 376 pp.