Who is Fosdick?
Harry Emerson Fosdick was a “preacher” from a century ago. He taught against the actual fundamentals of the faith. But he was not (for quite some time) overt about it because he worked in an environment where people still knew the Gospel. what he and other were doing was inserting points of compromise in their teachings, a little spiritual leaven here and a little spiritual leaven there, and surrounding himself with others he’d recruited to do the same.
Just as he had been recruited at one point.
WHY Fosdick is notable to this day and not just well known in his own is that one day in 1922 he stood up to deliver a sermon he called “Shall the Fundamentalist Win?” where he basically let the cat out of the bag that the “modernists”, whose various departures from sound doctrine were far from modern, had snuck in and what they were teaching.
He had obviously believed that the sermon was going to sweep up his own congregation to openly follow him, and he may have thought that the modernist infiltration was far enough along that it was time to come out of the shadows ... BUT instead he lost his job at that congregation and as news spread across the land congregations realized this had been going along there too and rather than go along to get along, as I think Fosdick must have believed would be the case, there were church splits ... sometimes the believers would leave and sometimes the modernists would leave.
From then until now many big splits we see in the “church” ... those who believe the Gospel or those who believe in things like social gospels or teachings like good people will be saved ... are still being influenced in relation to those splits.
Now don’t get me wrong, others have continuously been trying to sneak in to congregations and seminaries to teach error besides the “modernists”, like the commies or homosexuals or race radicals, and all of these have encountered success directly in proportion how far astray from the Gospel where they are going in has previously gone. In many places they no longer feel the need to hide, in others they do still hide, and all levels in between.