social teaching of Phillips Brooks, The

Historical Background and Recent Studies of Brooks

Phillips Brooks (December 13, 1835-January 23, 1893) is widely recognized to be one of the great preachers in American church history. Indeed, Sydney Ahlstrom describes Brooks and Henry Ward Beecher of Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn as "the princes of the pulpit" and "in a class by themselves" in nineteenth-century American Christianity.1 After serving two pastorates in Philadelphia, Church of the Advent (1859-1862) and Holy Trinity Church (1862-1869), Brooks was rector of Trinity Church, Boston, from 1869 until he was consecrated Bishop of Massachusetts in 1891. He died in Boston less than eighteen months after becoming Bishop of Massachusetts. Brooks is widely remembered as the author of the Christmas carol, "O Little Town of Bethlehem" (Hymns 78-79 in The Hymnal 1982), which he wrote after a visit to the Holy Land in 1865.2

Brooks was prominent in the Broad Church Movement in the Episcopal Church. One commentator noted that Brooks "sought to make Christian truth relevant to the changing conditions of the modern world" and that his sermons "carry on the great tradition of evangelical conviction and Christian humanism which are the hallmarks of his church."3 He is commemorated with a "lesser feast" in the Calendar of the Episcopal Church on January 23. The tribute to Brooks in Lesser Feasts and Fasts notes that the new building

for Trinity Church, Boston-built under Brooks's leadership as rector after the previous building was destroyed by fire-was a "daring architectural enterprise for its day" and "a fitting setting for the greatest preacher of the century."

In recent years scholarly attention has been given to the meaning of Brooks's contribution and witness. This has meant a qualitative change in the kinds of material available concerning Brooks. For example, Gillis J. Harp notes that Brooks's "few biographers have rarely attempted to place his thought or career in their social or intellectual contexts."4 He adds that "most older studies of Brooks have been remarkably uncritical."5

Harp does not understand Brooks in strictly evangelical terms. Brooks was "very unhappy" at Virginia Theological Seminary, which was a center of Low Church Evangelicalism when Brooks was in Alexandria for seminary between 1856 and 1859.6 Harp sees in the response of the young Brooks to VTS "a movement away from core elements of the traditional evangelical position" and the emergence of "a Romanticized and moralistic form of Christian belief that was underwritten by an exceedingly pragmatic view of dogma."7

Much of the moralism in Brooks's preaching was drawn from Romantic literature and Romanticized evangelicals. The young Brooks's spirituality "owed more to the literary or poetic than to the narrowly biblical or theological," and he was appreciative of Carlyle, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.8 Brooks's private writings during and shortly after his seminary days reveal "very few references" to evangelical themes such as the Cross, the role of faith for an individual believer, or religious conversion.9 Chesebrough notes that Brooks was "basically indifferent to systematic theology," although he believed that preaching doctrine was necessary for powerful preaching. But for Brooks the test of a doctrine "was its influence on life."10

Harp notes that Brooks's "critique of dogmatic systems naturally led to a new emphasis on moral behaviour over and above right belief."11 Harp also concludes that not enough scholars "recognise how little appeal evangelicalism held for Brooks even at the start," and he describes as "misleading" the position of Alexander V G. Allen that Brooks freely accepted the leading evangelical truths by the end of his seminary training.12 Harp urges that an understanding of Brooks as an example should "inspire a further rethinking of the conventional Whiggish story of the progressive translation of Evangelicals into Broad Churchmen within the Episcopal Church."13

One recent study of Brooks that Harp does commend is John Woolverton's The Education of Phillips Brooks,14 which he describes as a "welcome departure" from the approach of the older studies of Brooks and "by far the most satisfying," although "Woolverton does share some of the interpretative assumptions of the earlier works."15 Woolverton identifies the two strands of tradition that influenced and nurtured Brooks to be "New England (Puritan/Reformed) theology and nineteenth-century Romanticism, which, taken together, are arguably the two principal sources of American Victorian culture."16

Woolverton describes in detail Brooks's characteristics as a great preacher, including his clear thinking, freedom from apathy, breadth of reading in the classics and contemporary literature, energy, discipline, sincerity, commitment, and other attributes. Woolverton notes Brooks's assumption that the Gospel of Christ "stood on its own merits" with "its own intention, consistency, and way of speaking." In this context, Woolverton states his position that "it was not so much that Brooks rejected the doctrines of evangelicalism as he refused to argue or state them as doctrines."17 However, Woolverton's assessment of Brooks is no mere hagiography concerning a great preacher. Woolverton's "final theological word" is "quite critical." He states that "the claims of such Romantics as Brooks about the powers of human consciousness appear naive" and that the individual self placed at the center of their attention "has come to be seen as having no inherent truth within it to disclose."18