Brahmin Prophet: Phillips Brooks and the Path of Liberal Protestantism
Gillis J. Harp
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0847699617
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Reverend Phillips Brooks, author of the beloved Christmas Carol, O Little Town of Bethlehem, was undeniably one of the most popular preachers of Gilded Age America. However, very few critical studies of his life and work exist. In this insightful book, Gillis J. Harp places Brooks's religious thought in its proper historical, cultural, and ecclesiastical contexts while clarifying the sources of Brooks's inspiration. The result is a fuller, richer portrait of this luminous figure and of this transitional era in American protestantism.
during the Gilded Age. Brooks appears to have entered this discourse at a point somewhere midway between Bushnell and Beecher. “Christ’s whole conception of life is Personal ,” Brooks declared but “that personality becomes clear” through “responsibility and duty,” that is, through the cultivation of individual character.205In this regard, Brooks was following one of his favorite English Broad Church preachers, F. W. Robertson. In a confirmation class catechism he composed, Robertson explained
divergent views, some denominations have embraced a doctrinal pluralism that would have been unthinkable in earlier times. Examining Brooks and his generation of liberal Protestants can illuminate the beginnings of this larger story and, perhaps, shed light on the current situation. Although Brooks’s brand of theological liberalism was chastened considerably by neoorthodoxy after World War I, its method and agenda did certainly shape American Protestantism for much of the twentieth century. 4
William, 12 September 1862, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooh, vol. 1,414. 20. PB, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,438. 21. PB to William, 27 September 1861, quoted in Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, vol. 1,372. 22. John R. McKivigan, The War against Proslaveiy Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830-1865 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 165. McKivigan comments here: “The Protestant Episcopal church was
Obviously, there was not a single, monolithic position on justification among American Protestants by midcentury. Still, it is illuminating to compare the traditional approach of a leading evangelical Episcopalian like McIlvaine to that taken by Brooks. 25. McIlvaine, Preaching Christ, 35. My emphasis added here. Also quoted in Webber, History, 27 1. 26. McIlvaine, Preaching Christ, 11. Also quoted in Webber, History, 270 27. We only have a stenographer’s report for the second series, though it
Philadelphia in 1863 and pronounced him then “of the best kind of our m i n i ~ t r y . ”Also ~ of Congregational background, Washburn had been received into the Episcopal Church in the 1840s and had become the Rector of St. Mark’s in Philadelphia in 1862. Washburn embraced The Modem Christian 157 higher criticism and became a significant biblical scholar!’ During the 1860s in Philadelphia, Brooks and the “younger clergy . . . formed themselves into a club, called the ‘Clericus,’ meeting