Dear Editor,
I have often enjoyed the hymns featured under ‘New Music’, but I am rather disturbed that your June edition promotes a hymn written by Harry Emerson Fosdick. He was the liberals’ champion in the battles of the 1920s, and the hymn was written to celebrate the opening of his Rockefeller-sponsored Riverside Church in New York – and in a sense, the ‘triumph’ of liberalism.
While the hymn uses the word Christ, Fosdick’s Christ was not virgin-born, he did not atone for the sins of his people, nor did he rise physically from the dead, and he is certainly not coming again. For Fosdick, ‘Christ’ had become what Francis Schaeffer called a contentless banner.
Fosdick was a good wordsmith, and the hymn is carefully written – without knowledge of its background the first four verses are just about plausible. But Fosdick shows his true colours in verse five: ‘let the search for your salvation be our glory…’. No! We are lost, dead, without hope apart from God’s rich mercy. Our salvation is without works, lest we should boast. Soli Deo Gloria!
Kevin DeYoung has called this ‘a hymn worth not singing.’ I agree with him.
Yours respectfully,
