Lyman Beecher

Life

Beecher was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of a blacksmith. His mother died early in his life, and he was raised by an uncle, helping with blacksmithing and farm work. He entered Yale College in 1793 and graduated in 1797. While a student he studied theology under President Timothy Dwight, and during this time he developed a zeal for revivalism. In 1799 he was ordained to the ministry at the Presbyterian church in East Hampton, Long Island, New York.

In 1810 he moved to the Congregational church in Litchfield, Connecticut. Beginning in 1826 he served as pastor of the Hanover Street Church in Boston. In 1832 he became president and professor of theology at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he served until 1850; during this period he was also pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church of Cincinnati. He returned to the East in 1851 and died in Brooklyn in 1863. He married three times and had thirteen children, among them the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe and the preacher Henry Ward Beecher.

Ministry and Achievements

• Revival preaching: He was one of the leading preachers of the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century. He initially opposed the "new measures" employed by Charles Finney but later came to accept them.
• Temperance movement: In 1825 he preached a series of six sermons on intemperance, which were collected into a widely read book. He called for total abstinence from distilled spirits and urged the formation of voluntary associations to promote this cause. He also took part in founding the American Temperance Society. The sermons were reprinted or translated in Britain, Ireland, and elsewhere, influencing temperance movements there as well.
• Moral reform societies: In 1813 he led the formation of the Connecticut Society for the Reformation of Morals, which sought to suppress Sabbath-breaking, profanity, and intemperance. He was also at the forefront of organizing Bible, missionary, and educational societies.
• Mission to the West: In Boston he preached against Unitarianism, which denied the Trinity. At Lane Theological Seminary he sought to train Protestant ministers to evangelize the American western frontier.

Influence on the Korean Church

There is no record confirming that Beecher had any direct connection with the Korean church. However, the temperance movement and the voluntary-association movement he championed became prominent features of nineteenth-century American evangelicalism. American missionaries shaped by this tradition began arriving in Korea in the 1880s, and the temperance tradition of Korean Protestantism is often attributed to that influence (see Alcohol and Tobacco).

Assessment

• Theological controversy: Although a Calvinist, Beecher aligned himself with the so-called New School, which emphasized human responsibility and effort in salvation. In Boston he was regarded as strict, but to conservative Presbyterians in the West he appeared too lax. In 1835 the Rev. Joshua L. Wilson and others charged him with heresy and slander; he was tried before the Presbytery and Synod of Cincinnati and was acquitted. The trial exposed tensions between Presbyterians and Congregationalists, and it is also regarded as having contributed to the 1837–1838 division of the Presbyterian Church into the Old School and New School.
• Slavery: He regarded slavery as a sin but did not advocate immediate abolition. Instead he supported gradual emancipation and the colonization movement, which sought to resettle freed slaves in Africa. After debates on slavery took place at Lane Theological Seminary in 1834, the school prohibited discussion of the issue, and many students, including Theodore Weld, left for Oberlin. The seminary did not recover from this blow for many years.
• Anti-Catholic preaching: Some critics charge that his sermons attacking Catholic immigrants helped foster the atmosphere that led to the burning of the Ursuline convent near Boston in 1834.
• The theologian Theodore Parker reportedly called him "the father of more brains than any other man in America."