Henry Ward Beecher

Life

Beecher was born on June 24, 1813, in Litchfield, Connecticut. He was one of the thirteen children of the minister Lyman Beecher and the younger brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. After graduating from Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1837, he began his ministry at a Presbyterian church in Lawrenceburg, Indiana. Around this time he married Eunice White Bullard, with whom he had ten children. After his ministry in Indiana, he moved to Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York, a congregation in the Congregational tradition. Congregationalism is a form of church government in which the assembled members of each local congregation hold final authority over church affairs. Beecher served as pastor there for about forty years and died in Brooklyn in 1887.

Ministry and Accomplishments

• Preaching: His emotionally compelling sermons, which emphasized moral renewal, drew large audiences. He is regarded as the best-known minister in American Protestantism in his day.
• Opposition to slavery: He was one of the most prominent clergymen to oppose slavery publicly. When armed conflict over slavery broke out in Kansas in 1856, he supported a fundraising effort to send Sharps rifles to antislavery settlers. He remarked, in effect, that in dealing with proslavery forces a rifle was a more powerful moral argument than the Bible, and the rifles thereafter became known as "Beecher's Bibles." His church is said to have supplied a group of settlers bound for Kansas with rifles along with twenty-five Bibles. The church these settlers founded survives today as the Beecher Bible and Rifle Church. The episode is remembered as a notable moment in the abolitionist movement.
• Faith and science: He accepted Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and sought to reconcile it with Christian faith. For this reason he is cited as one of the figures who led the discussion of creation and evolution in late nineteenth-century American Protestantism.

Influence on the Korean Church

There is no record that he had any direct connection with the Korean church or any involvement in missions to Korea. In Korea he is mainly mentioned in connection with his sister Harriet Beecher Stowe and the history of the American abolitionist movement.

Assessment

Supporters praise him for leading the church to speak out on social issues such as slavery and for seeking a dialogue between science and faith. He has also drawn criticism:

• Because he placed emotion and morality ahead of doctrine and accepted evolution, conservative theologians regard him critically as a forerunner of the drift toward liberal theology. This trend later led to the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy.
• His support for arming opponents of slavery remains controversial as conduct for a minister.
• Some studies argue that during the Panic of 1873 he defended the ethics and interests of the middle class that made up Plymouth Church's membership.
• In the 1870s he was accused of adultery with the wife of a church member, and the matter went to a civil trial, but the jury reportedly failed to reach a verdict. The affair severely damaged his reputation.