Thursday, December 25, 2003

By Ann Rodgers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The Rev. Phillips Brooks, an Episcopal priest, penned those words for a Christmas pageant in 1868, recalling his visit to the Holy Land a few years before.

	The Rev. Phillips Brooks

Though he is now known best for this Christmas carol, Brooks was a superstar among 19th-century American preachers. His sermons were reprinted in major newspapers. When Mark Twain wanted to poke fun at the clergy, he would tweak Brooks.

Beyond that, Brooks epitomized the conflict between evangelical and liberal theology that marks mainline American Christianity to this day.

"He is someone who constitutes an interesting window on his time, both within the Episcopal Church and American Christianity in general," said Gillis Harp, a history professor at Grove City College, who has written "Brahmin Prophet: Phillips Brooks and the Path of Liberal Protestantism." Harp sees Brooks as a transitional figure whose famous song reflects these theological tensions.

Brooks was born in 1835 to an upper-crust Boston family, his mother an evangelical Congregationalist, his father a Unitarian. But under his mother's influence the family became Episcopalian. It was not social climbing, Harp said. At the time the Episcopal Church in Boston was very small, humble and evangelical.

Brooks graduated from Harvard College intending to teach. But his first job did not go well. Without telling even his closest friends, Brooks abruptly enrolled at Virginia Theological Seminary, then the headquarters for the evangelical movement in the Episcopal Church, much as Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Ambridge is today.

But the Bostonian Brooks did not adapt well to Virginia on the eve of the Civil War. Like most northern evangelical Episcopalians, he held abolitionist sympathies. The Southern evangelicals viewed the world differently. As Brooks argued with his fellow students, he became critical of what he viewed as their shallow, formulaic understanding of the Christian faith.

"He becomes at an early age, not a shrill critic, but a gentle critic, of some traditional, evangelical views," Harp said. "He didn't believe God could be summed up in neat little theological formulas."

Ordained in 1859, Brooks served two parishes in Philadelphia, where he quickly became an advocate for the rights of black people. Not content to condemn slavery, he fought Philadelphia's efforts to enforce segregation.

"I think he's fairly courageous," Harp said. "Episcopalians in Philadelphia in that period were known to be conservative on racial issues and fairly sympathetic to the South."

He was devastated when one of his brothers died of disease while serving in the Union Army. In 1865, with the war over, his congregation gave him a year's paid leave to rest, study and recover his spirits. Brooks traveled to the Holy Land.

There he rode on horseback to Bethlehem, attending a midnight Christmas Eve service in the Church of the Nativity. He would later write of how moved he was to hear choirs singing hymns of praise to God for hours on end as he stood close to the spot where Jesus was said to have been born. He was struck that God would have chosen to manifest himself in such a little village.

Three years later, when the children of his church needed a song for their Christmas pageant, he drew on those memories to write one and drafted his organist, Lewis Redner, to write the tune.

The children of that parish sang it every year, to the delight of parishioners. It was first published in 1874. But it took at least a decade to gain a wider audience and begin to grow in popularity. Later in life he wrote to a friend, "It has been printed in hymn books and sung at a good many Christmases. Where the newspapers found it all of a sudden, I do not know."

In 1892, the year before Brooks died, it was incorporated into The Hymnal of the Episcopal Church. In 1903 it was included in a collection of other songs he wrote, "Christmas Songs and Easter Carols," but it is the only one to remain popular 100 years later.

"I've always thought of 'O Little Town of Bethlehem' and 'Silent Night' as the two quintessential Christmas carols," said John Walker, organist and choir director at Shadyside Presbyterian Church. "It's hard for me to comprehend that it was written such a brief time ago. It's hard to imagine how people regarded the whole Christmas celebration before they knew those texts."

The stanza beginning "How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given" distills the theology of the incarnation into one line, Walker said.

Brooks' evangelical heritage is evident in lines such as: "No ear may hear his coming, but in this world of sin / Where meek souls will receive Him still, the dear Christ enters in."

But there are subtle hints of a more liberal direction, biographer Harp said. He was becoming part of a movement that was much more interested in Jesus' life on earth than in the meaning of his death and resurrection. The hymn celebrating Jesus' birth flowed from that.

"It's a beautiful hymn. There's nothing in it that, from an orthodox Christian perspective, is offensive in any way. But having read more of Brooks' sermons than I care to admit, you do see some of these other themes," Harp said.

Brooks was associated with what became known as the "broad church" movement in the Episcopal Church. Although the term is used in different ways, originally these were Episcopalians who shared the evangelicals' preference for simple, Protestant liturgy, but not their emphasis on biblical authority.

Most broad churchmen of the 19th century would appear fairly conservative today, and that was generally true of Brooks, Harp said. He would have had nothing to do with 20th-century modernists who rejected every supernatural element in Christianity.

"There are places in his sermons and letters where he says that if Christianity isn't miraculous, it isn't anything," Harp said.

"He's never an in-your-face liberal. Brooks is very much a man of genteel manners. He hates controversy and he's tactful about things. But by the 1880s it has become clear that he's moved some distance from his evangelical moorings."

After Brooks accepted an 1869 call to Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Boston, he emerged as a bright light of the broad church. He was a devoted pastor to his parishioners and to many Harvard students. But it was his preaching that really stood out.

He used traditional, theological words in new ways. He would speak of the Bible as an inspired text, but didn't mean word-for-word direct inspiration. And while he spoke of sin, he no longer viewed it as the fatal disease that destroyed people's relationship with God and with each other.

But his major theological shift was that be no longer believed that faith was founded on scripture and the creeds, but on personal on personal religious experience. While this might seem to resonate with the evangelical emphasis on a personal conversion experience, Brooks quietly severed faith from doctrinal standards, Harp said.

"He would say that traditional creeds and confessions are helpful in their own way, but that they are limited. In today's parlance, he would have said that we shouldn't try to put God in a box, that God is greater than that," Harp said.

As Brooks' theology became more liberal he became less of a social activist. Theological liberals who didn't see sin as a huge problem "had a deep and profound faith in human progress and human perfectibility. You can see this very strongly in Brooks. Because of that, his attitude toward social upheaval -- what they called 'the labor problem' -- was that society was going to grow out of it," Harp said.

"Sometimes those liberal Protestants ended up sounding more like cheerleaders for the economic status quo than critics of it. Their evangelical ancestors had been more willing to stand outside the social order and be critical of it."

Most evangelicals had left the Episcopal Church by 1891, when Brooks was elected bishop of Massachusetts. Two years later he died unexpectedly after a bout with the flu. The day of his funeral was declared an official day of mourning in Massachusetts, with stores and the stock exchange closed.

Brooks had known he was changing religious thinking in his day, Harp said, but may not have envisioned all of the consequences. Nor the enduring popularity of the Christmas song inspired by his Christmas Eve visit to Bethlehem.

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