Ordained a Baptist, Fosdick had been called in 1915 to preach in the pulpit of New York City's First Presbyterian Church. Fosdick continued as a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and agreed to preach at First Presbyterian with the understanding that he would have only preaching duties there.
On May 21, 1922, during the height of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, which involved, among other issues, the evolution-creationism conflict, Fosdick peached a pro-modernist sermon, S hall the Fundamentalists Win? In his sermon, Fosdick, by then a leading modernist proponent, insisted that the bible was not to be taken literally, but was rather, a record of the unfolding of God's actions.
The 1923 General Assembly ordered an investigation of Fosdick's "views." When it became a strong probability that delegates to the 1924 GA would censure Fosdick after the commission's investigation, he resigned from First Presbyterian and returned to his own Baptist fellowship. He was immediately called to the pastorate of the New York Park Avenue Baptist church, where John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was a member.
Rockefeller, one of the world's richest men, and provided funding to construct the non-denominational Riverside Church in the Columbia University neighborhood, which still stands as one of the nation's most significant religious centers. When the church building was completed in October, 1930, Fosdick became its preacher, a position from which he preached, lectured, wrote books, and became one of the major Protestant voices of the 20th century.
Fosdick also wrote the words for a hymn which became a rousing liberal Protestant rallying call, God of Grace and God of Glory.
Any delegate who reflects back on Fosdick's period of service as a Presbyterian preacher, should take a careful look at the opening line of the fourth verse of that hymn, words that should resonate with General Assembly delegates. That verse begins:
"Save us from weak resignation to the evils we deplore."
The vote between investment and divestment by the Pittsburgh General Assembly will involve a decision on whether or not the Presbyterian Church will continue its financial support of Israel's occupation. From Fosdick's perspective, whose sermon on fundamentalism ended his career as a Presbyterian preacher, if there is an evil we deplore out there, we should never resign ourselves to it.
It is hard not to conclude that Fosdick would have vigorously opposed a permanent military-enforced occupation of another people. He would certainly have been appalled at the story that appeared in the Guardian newspaper a few days before the 2012 GA opened.
The story involved a delegation of eminent British lawyers who reported to the Foreign Office their findings from a trip to the West Bank and Israel.
The report concluded that Israel treats every Palestinian child "as a potential terrorist." This belief, the report notes, may be leading to a "spiral of injustice." It also "breaches international law in Israel's treatment of child detainees in military custody."
The nine-strong delegation, led by the former high court judge Sir Stephen Sedley and including the UK's former attorney-general Lady Scotland, found that "undisputed facts" pointed to at least six violations of the UN convention on the rights of the child, to which Israel is a signatory. It was also in breach of the fourth Geneva convention in transferring child detainees from the West Bank to Israeli prisons, the delegation said.
Its report, Children in Military Custody, released Tuesday, June 26, was based on a visit to Israel and the West Bank last September funded and facilitated by the Foreign Office and the British consulate in Jerusalem.
Pictures like the one above, and distributing findings of the mistreatment of Palestinian children, provide a troubling background against which one segment of the GA Presbyterian delegates will attempt to make their case against divestment by promoting "investment" in the Palestinian economy. That case is on shaky moral ground.
As a start, investment in an occupier's prison economy sanctions an illegal occupation, which is immoral and evil at its core.
Those church bodies that refuse to divest from Israel's occupation support Israel's oppressive treatment of the prisoners of that occupation. They are also failing in their moral duty to confront the American public and the American government with a prophetic proclamation that, as Jimmy Carter wrote in the New York Times, we have since September 11, 2001, "extended our nation's violation of human rights."
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