In the summer of 1930, while he was on vacation in Maine, Harry E. Fosdick (1878-1969) wrote this hymn for the opening of Riverside Church in New York City on October 5 of that year. It was sung at the dedication of the building in February 1931. Of this prayer for wisdom and courage in the face of warring madness, pride, selfish gladness, and poverty of soul, Fosdick said,
“That was more than a hymn to me when we sang it that day — it was very urgent personal prayer. For with all my hopeful enthusiasm about the new venture there was inevitably much humble and sometimes fearful apprehension.”
Harry Emerson Fosdick was born in Buffalo, New York, and studied at Colgate University, Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and Columbia University. He was ordained into the Baptist ministry in 1903, served First Baptist Church in Montclair, New Jersey, from 1904 to 1915, and became a chaplain during World War I. From 1919 to 1926 he was the pastor at First Presbyterian Church in New York City, but he was forced to resign because his views were regarded as too liberal in the disputes between “Fundamentalism” and “Modernists.” John D. Rockefeller invited him to become the pastor at Park Avenue Baptist Church in New York. When he refused the offer because the church was “too wealthy,” Rockefeller retorted, “Do you think more people will criticize you on account of my wealth than will criticize me on account of your heresy?” He accepted so long as a new church was built in a “less swank district,” which led to Riverside Church in 1930, next to the Hudson River on one side and Union Seminary and Columbia University on the other. He was pastor of Park Avenue Baptist and Riverside from 1926 until 1946. Riverside Church cost $5 million and seated eighteen hundred people. Large congregations gathered there to hear Fosdick preach. His preaching was also heard on the radio; he published sermons and wrote 32 books; from 1908 to 1915 he taught homiletics at Union Seminary; and from 1915 to 1946 he was professor of practical theology there. Fosdick was one of the most influential twentieth-century American Protestant ministers.
This hymn was written with the tune REGENT SQUARE in mind. When asked about its use with CWM RHONDDA he replied, “My secretary had already written you the answer to your question about my hymn’s divorce from ‘Regent Square’ and re-marriage to ‘Cwm Rhondda.’ The Methodists did it! And both here and abroad they are being followed.”
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At the request of Bishop John H. Vincent, for use at the Chautauqua Bible Study Hour, Mary A. Lathbury (1841-1913) wrote the first two stanzas of “Break Now the Bread of Life”. It was published in Chautauqua Carols (1878) for use in Sunday school services. The Service Book and Hymnal (1958) gives the two stanzas Lathbury wrote. Lutheran Book of Worship (1978) updated the language and added two stanzas by Alexander Groves (1842-1909) that were first printed in the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine. Evangelical Lutheran Worship retains Lathbury’s two and the
first of Groves.
This hymn is derived from John 6, which is where the gospel’s eucharistic theology is found, but the hymn itself, as Donald Hosted points out, “is more closely associated with the opening words of the first chapter of John, in which Jesus is presented as the dynamic wisdom and mind of God- the logos, or the living Word of God.” Evangelical Lutheran Worship properly locates it therefore in the Word section of the hymnal and makes a helpful move at the beginning of stanza 2 by slightly recasting the text toward what seems to be Lathbury’s intended meaning, from “truth” into “word of truth”.
