Baptists from great city congregations, from lonely mountain missions and from comfortable smalltown pastorates, gathered in Washington last week for the Northern Baptist Convention. They gathered to state opinions that were burning within them and to ask questions that had been troubling their reins this long time. And they gathered in pity and fear, for they faced a problem that might rive their church to its foundations.
Fundamentalism. A most elementary and powerful tenet of the Baptist faith insists that, to be received into the fold, an applicant must be completely immersed in holy water. Yet certain churches—most particularly the Park Avenue Baptist Church of Manhattan, pastored by Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, attended and largely financed by John D. Rockefeller Jr.—have formed a practice of admitting members from other denominations without immersion, accepting a profession of faith as an equivalent of the ordered cleansing. "Let us read these churches out of the faith," fundamentalists have insisted through their leaders, Dr. John Roach Straton of Manhattan and Dr. William B. Riley of Minneapolis. Prolonged applause hailed every fundamentalist speaker. "Praise the Lord," shouted the delegates. The modernists, themselves true and loyal brethren, sat silent. Clearly the fundamentalists had a majority. On the third day excitement reached its height. Yet when the count was taken, it was found that the fundamentalists had more cheers than votes. They were beaten, 2,020 to 1,084. Mr. Rockefeller's church could stay in the faith.
Yet there was many an unmeasured invective hurled at Mr. Rockefeller personally. He was the bogeyman of the fundamentalists. The week before this convention the fundamentalists, unrestrained by any show of amity, had met, also in Washington, at the Baptist Bible Union of North America.
"Can we not get a test from Heaven so that God will destroy the enemy?" one cried.
The enemy was Mammon incarnated for the moment's argument —"capitalized with the wealth of Rockefeller coin and the aid of Marshall Field and others in order that Mammon may win the battle [for modernism]. . . . The establishment of Chicago University was the beginning of Rockefeller wealth to mammonize the Baptist Church." The works of these philanthropists were "the works of the Devil." So the flaying went on.
When another, Dr. J. Frank Norris of Fort Worth, Texas, a stanch American, cried, "we want Rockefeller to keep his bloody money," the Bible Unionists applauded. Yet in the larger convention the vote was cast and for the next twelvemonth Mr. Rockefeller and the other modernists may pass their way before the contemning eyes of the fundamentalists.
Meanwhile the latter will use all their persuasiveness and all their religious politics to bring the individual Baptist congregations throughout the country to their own way of thinking. The polity of the Baptist denomination is not definite. In fact a Baptist church has never been defined. Each congregation, provided it carries the aspects of Baptistry, goes its own individual way. Their sectional organizations are only to further what common ends they can agree upon. This status of individuality the modernists would leave. The fundamentalists really are tending towards a condition in which the sectional organization will dominate the constituents.