Modern and Fundamental Factions Arguing in Five Denominations, Dec. 19, 1923

Five Denominations Drawn Into Row Between Modern and Fundamental Factions. . . Debate Hinges Principally Around the Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ. . . Tenets Opposed. . . Baptist, Methodist, and Unitarian Sects Side with he Modernist Forces. . . Stratton Is Involved. . . Bishops Manning and Lawrence Maintaining a Strict Silence—Dr. Parks Is Not Adding Anything to His Remarks—Rector Stires Says Trial of Heaton Has Been Avoided—Quite and Patience Urged in Battle Between Bishops and Rectors—Roosevelt Issues Statement

By the Associated Press

New York, Dec. 18—Modernists and fundamentalists today pressed their ecclesiastical warfare,w ith New York the chief battleground.

In all, five denominations to date have been drawn into doctrinal debate concerning chiefly the virgin birth of Jesus Christ and physical resurrection. While debate has progressed furthest in the Protestant Episcopal church, where charges of heresy have been made, it became known that Presbyterian modernists, defeated in the last assembly last May, were planning vigorously to oppose adoption of five tenets held by fundamentalists.

In a greater or less degree, clergymen associated with the Baptist, Methodist and Unitarian sects have taken sides in the question of modernism versus fundamentalism. Thursday evening, for example, the Rev. D. John Roach Stratton, pastor of Calvary Baptist church and fundamentalist leader, debates the question with Rev. Dr. Charles F. Potter, pastor of the West Side Unitarian church.

With these rumblings in the other protestant faiths distinctly audible, the chief engagement in progress today was between the Episcopalian factions.

While Bishop William T. Manning of New York, fundamentalist; and Bishop William Lawrence of Massachusetts, modernist; here to attend a meeting of the church pension fund, maintained strict silence, certain clergymen aligned with the fundamentalist faction issued statement designed to heal the breach which opened when charges of heresy were brought against the Reverend Lee M. Heaton of Ft. Worth, Tex., and 500 Episcopalian clergymen rose to his defense.

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From the front page of the Durham Herald, N.C., Dec. 19, 1923