All Things Human: Henry Codman Potter and the Social Gospel in the Episcopal Church (review)

A graduate of Virginia Theological Seminary, where he was a classmate of Phillips Brooks, Henry Codman Potter (1835-1908) was rector of Grace Church, in New York City, from 1868 to 1883, and then bishop in the Episcopal diocese of New York from 1883 to the end of his life, serving the last 21 years as diocesan. His father was Alonzo Potter, the third bishop of Pennsylvania. Henry Potter is known for transforming Grace Church—widely regarded at the time as the most fashionable Episcopal parish in Manhattan—into an early example of an "institutional church." He built Grace House in 1877 as a headquarters for mission programs on behalf of the residents—mostly Germans—who lived in the surrounding neighborhoods. Soon Grace House was recognized as a vital social center, and its programs were carried on and developed by Potter's successor, William Reed Huntington. Henry Potter is also known as a representative of the Broad Church movement and as an advocate of the social gospel. He supported the Church Association for the Advancement of the Interests of Labor (CAIL), labor unions and the fair arbitration of labor disputes, and better living and working conditions for laborers.

Bourgeois focuses on Potter as a representative of those Episcopal leaders who prodded the white establishment toward a greater social awareness during the years from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Great War. He sees Potter as a nineteenth-century evangelical liberal who "helped to institutionalize the social gospel within the Episcopal Church" (p. 21). Potter's theological liberalism was reflected in his acceptance of the higher criticism of the Bible and specifically in his ordination of the controversial biblical scholar Charles A. Briggs, who, as a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, had fallen afoul of that institution's conservative board of directors.

This book, the eighth volume in the distinguished series Studies in Anglican History, sponsored by the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church, is based on Michael Bourgeois's doctoral dissertation. It is not a biography of H. C. Potter but an analysis of his moderately progressive social views on such topics as labor, international and domestic politics, temperance, and women. Regrettably, this book's origins as a doctoral thesis are all too apparent. The writing is wooden, repetitive, devoid of any sense of rhythm or style. The paragraphs are long and tedious. The indented quotations are long (like many of the author's sentences) and too numerous. Some background statements are of questionable value: "The conflict over slavery reached its peak in the Civil War. . ." (p. 5). Sometimes when one is reading the main text it is hard to know who is uttering the words of a particular quotation, and even the endnote may provide little help in identifying the author of the quoted statement (e.g., p. 28, n. 11). Some word choices are infelicitous: e.g., "utilize" (p. 88). This book would have benefited from more careful editing.

A chore to get through, this study does not overflow with compensatory rewards. A better approach would have been to take the dissertation and use it as the basis of a fully fleshed-out biography: one that offered an engaging account of this man's personal and professional story—its problems, its motivations, its trials and triumphs. Thereby some life could have been injected into the narrative, even some drama, and the book would consist of more than the quoting and analysis of a bishop's statements, which, then as always, tend to be too bland and general to really bite. In this book there is no rhythm at all; instead, the sound of the prose becomes a constant thrum, like that of heavy machinery.