In the Masonic temple at Seattle, 2,000 Baptists assembled for the 19th annual session of the Northern Baptist Church Convention. They gazed up over the platform where were emblazoned the words of the Convention motto: "On Earth, Peace."
The keynote address was given by the Rev. Clinton Wunder, pastor of the $2,000,000 Baptist Temple at Rochester, N. Y., who said:
"Those who framed this program and selected the convention motto had a sense of humor. . . .
"We spread out our banners, 'On Earth, Peace,' while the whole nation reads of our conflicts in the Church. We must be done with heresy hunting. It never brought peace anywhere. Burning at the stake, being cast into prison did not cure heresy in the older days and anathemas will not cure heresy today. Why should our denomination be made the laughing stock of the world? Let us surprise those who are looking for trouble by the way in which we will exemplify our motto."
Indeed there was battle brewing between Fundamentalists and Modernists. The matters in controversy were chiefly two:
1) A special committee of the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions reported that numbers of foreign missionaries, including many of the older men, were weak in the faith. This was followed by a resolution offered by a Fundamentalist, the Rev. Walter B. Hinton of Portland, Ore., proposing that all missionaries should be obliged to affirm their belief in the Baptist creed.*
2) That the delegates from the Park Avenue Baptist Church, Manhattan, should not be seated at the convention. The reason offered for this was that, recently, that church invited Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, Modernist, to its pulpit, opened its membership to persons of other denominations and announced that it would not make complete immersion in baptism compulsory (TIME, May 25).
On the first point, the verbal struggle was keen. Dr. G. A. Huntley of the Chinese mission field asserted that 49 out of 50 missionaries in China would resign rather than submit to being catechized as to their faith. Dr. Meigs of Illinois, on behalf of the Modernists, proposed to amend the resolution by striking out the insistence on the creed, leaving the statement that the New Testament is the basis of the Baptist faith. The cohorts were summoned to vote. The Modernists polled 742 to the Fundamentalists 574. So the resolution was shorn of its point—and adopted.
On the second question, the Fundamentalists attacked Dr. Fosdick and John Davison Rockefeller Jr. (pillar of the Park Avenue Church), as well as Dr. Cornelius Woelfkin, pastor of the church. Dr. Woelfkin will retire when Dr. Fosdick assumes the pastorate next January, but the question was of unseating the pastor because of his rich parishioner (Rockefeller) and his prospective successor. The Fundementalists in caucuses proposed "a continent-wide war to emancipate the Baptist denomination from the deathlike grip of the powerful combination of Mammon and Modernism," and asked: "Shall the Baptist denomination become the religious department of the Standard Oil Company ?"