George Boardman the Younger

George Dana Boardman
Born1828
Burma
DiedApril 28, 1903
Atlantic City, New Jersey, U.S.
NationalityAmerican
EducationWorcester Academy
Alma materBrown University,
Newton Theological Institution

George Dana Boardman the Younger (1828 – April 28, 1903) was an American clergyman.

Early life and education

Boardman was born in Burma, the son of the Baptist missionaries George Dana Boardman and Sarah Hall Boardman. He returned to the United States as a boy and attended Worcester Academy in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he graduated in 1846, and then Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he graduated in 1852. He continued his education at the Newton Theological Institution and graduated in 1855.[1]

Career

In 1855, Boardman became pastor of the Baptist church in Barnwell, South Carolina, but his views on the slavery question impelled him to exchange his charge in 1856 for a church further north. He was pastor of the Second Baptist Church in Rochester, New York, until 1864,[2] and pastor of the First Baptist Church, Philadelphia, from 1864 to 1894.[3] Boardman was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1880.[4] In 1893, Boardman was the closing presenter to speak at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago; delivering the lecture, Christ the Unifier of Mankind.[5]

In June 1899, he established the permanent lectureship known as the Boardman Foundation in Christian Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He was president of the Christian Arbitration and Peace Society and of the American Baptist Missionary Union. His most important production is a monograph, Titles of Wednesday Evening Lectures. It embraces 981 of his lectures, delivered between 1865 and 1880, and comprises a complete exegesis of the Bible.

Brotherhood of the Kingdom

Boardman was a founding member of the Brotherhood of the Kingdom[6] in 1892, a group of the leading thinkers and writers of the Social Gospel movement at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Other pastors and authors who founded the group with Boardman were leading Social Gospelers Walter Rauschenbusch, Samuel Zane Batten and Leighton Williams.

Boardman is probably best remembered for the quotation attributed to him as:

The law of the harvest is to reap more than you sow. Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny.

He died in Atlantic City, New Jersey and is buried at The Woodlands Cemetery in Philadelphia.

Published works

  • Titles of Wednesday Evening Lectures
  • Studies in the Model Prayer D. Appleton & Company
  • Studies in the Creative Week (New York, 1878) D. Appleton & Company
  • The Epiphanies of the Risen Lord (New York, 1879) D. Appleton & Company
  • Disarmament of Nations (1880)
  • The Ten Commandments (1889)
  • The Kingdom (1899)
  • The Church (1901)
  • The Golden Rule (1901)
  • Our Risen King's Forty Days (1902)
  • The Problem of Jesus (new edition, 1913)

References

  1. ^ Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Boardman, George Dana s.v. George Dana Boardman, the younger" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 4 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 95.
  2. ^ Wilson, J. G.; Fiske, J., eds. (1900). "Boardman, George Dana" . Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. New York: D. Appleton.
  3. ^ New International Encyclopedia
  4. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2024-04-15.
  5. ^ Barrows, John Henry, The World’s Parliament of Religions: An Illustrated and Popular Story of the World’s First Parliament of Religions, Held in Chicago in connection with the Columbian Exposition of 1893, Volume 2. Chicago: The Parliament Publishing Company, 1893, 1338-1346.
  6. ^ Gary J. Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805-1900 (Published by Westminster John Knox Press, 2001) page 91
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