Upon graduation from Yale Divinity School in 1894, Proctor responded to “the lure of the New South” when he accepted the call to Atlanta’s First Congregational Church and became its first Black minister. All would selectively appropriate and employ the tenets and methodologies of the “New Theology” in their efforts to forge ministries responsive to the challenges facing the Black church and community at the cusp of the twentieth century. His efforts place him among a small cadre of Black theological liberals that at the turn of the century included Reverdy Ransom, William De Berry, Richard R. Insights gleaned from Proctor’s broader studies at Yale would also have significant impact as he began to forge a theological synthesis that would provide a cogent and compelling rationale for an intellectually progressive, socially active, and racially aware ministry. One was a pioneering examination of “The Theology of the Songs of the Southern Slaves” in which he “tried to show how the slaves built their songs on a real theological system.” His continued exploration of the dialectic of race and theology also resulted in a Graduation Day address titled “A New Ethnic Contribution to Christianity” in which he argued that “in the historic development of Christianity, race and religion have had a reciprocal relation.” This provocative and prophetic thesis provided additional warrant for Proctor’s subsequent efforts to develop a progressive and socially active ministry that was attuned to the rapidly changing needs of the Black community at the dawn of the twentieth century. Two papers he authored during the course of his studies had special implications for his unique theological synthesis and orientation. Miller” (one of YDS’s first Black graduates (1885) and pastor of Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church), he and other YDS students had been given the opportunity to hear some of the most progressive and “ablest preachers of the country.”Įven as a student at Yale, Proctor began appropriating his new academic and theological skills and insights in exploration of his Black religious heritage. Notably, the theological transformations taking place at the Divinity School were accompanied by courses that exposed Proctor and his classmates to the methodologies and insights of emergent disciplines such as comparative religion, biblical criticism, philosophy of religion, and sociology. The school’s growing concern for the social application of Christianity was evident in its addition of a course on “social ethics” to the curriculum during Proctor’s first year of study.Īlso significant was Proctor’s public recollection that at Battel Chapel and local churches “presided over by Munger and Smyth…Phillips, Tywitchel, Luckey. Their responses made Yale Divinity School one of the seedbeds of the “New Theology” of Protestant Liberalism. Proctor’s matriculation at Yale Divinity School was essential in shaping his subsequent ministerial activism.Īs a student from 1891 to 1894, he studied under scholars who strove to clarify the issues and challenges presented to their faith and theology by the era’s new scientific and intellectual currents. This diverse theological lineage would subsequently be refined and adapted over the course of his almost forty-year ministry in the Congregational Church. Du Bois) and the emergent, socially engaged theology of Protestant liberalism that he embraced as a student at Yale Divinity School. Moreover, Proctor’s prophetic vision and accompanying ministry arguably made him one of the most prominent Black YDS alumni of the early twentieth century and placed him in the vanguard of one of the nation’s most innovative religious-based reform efforts-the social gospel movement.īorn to former enslaved people near Fayetteville, Tennessee, on December 8, 1868, Proctor’s religious and theological lineage included the rural southern Black Methodist piety of his parental home and youth a reform-oriented evangelicalism imbibed during seven years of study at Fisk University (where he was a classmate of W.E.B. Pennington and has extended into the twenty-first century. Proctor’s efforts place him in a long lineage of Black reform-minded attendees of YDS which began in the mid-nineteenth century with the abolitionist activism of the Rev. William Barber illuminates the “applied Christianity” that marked the ministry and legacy of Henry H.
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The social and political activism of contemporary clergy such as the Rev.