Editor’s Note: Union Seminary-PSCE dedicated a portrait to James H. Smylie on May 3. Dr. Smylie is a frequent contributor to the Outlook in addition to being professor emeritus of church history at Union/PSCE. We happily share the following excerpts from the dedication tribute offered by Dean Thompson, president and professor of ministry at Louisville Theological Seminary. He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation under the supervision of James Smylie.
The purpose of this event is to celebrate the fruitful ministry of James Hutchinson Smylie, teacher and scholar for the church in the field of church history. Specializing in American church history and American Presbyterianism, James Smylie has served God for one-half century by serving ministerial students, pastors, local congregations, his denomination and his academic guild with remarkable effectiveness and energy.
He was born in 1925 in Huntington, W. Va., where his father was pastor of Second Church. He was educated at Washington University, St. Louis, B.A., 1946; and at Princeton Theological Seminary, B.D., 1949, Th.M., 1950, and Ph.D., 1958. He served as assistant minister, First Church, St. Louis, 1950-1952, where he met Elizabeth Roblee in the summer of 1950. They were married in that church in November 1951. Then they moved to Princeton Theological Seminary where Jim taught during and beyond his years of doctoral study, 1952-1962.
He began his service at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia (now Union/PSCE) as a Visiting Professor of Church History in 1962. He delivered his inaugural address as Professor of American Church History in Schauffler Hall, the precursor of this building, the Morton Library, in 1968. He was named to the Ernest Trice Thompson Chair of Church History in 1986, and he retired from that position in 1996.
James Smylie’s calling as church historian was influenced considerably by Lefferts A. Loetscher (1904-1981), a mentor who taught American church history for 33 years at Princeton Theological Seminary. Under Loetscher’s supervision, James Smylie authored a doctoral dissertation in 1958 that he called American Clergymen and the Constitution of the United States of America, 1780-1796. As James Smylie’s subsequent writings reveal, the dissertation on the U.S. Constitution has undergirded his outstanding work of five decades on the generation of the American Revolution, the generation of the Constitution, church-state relations, human rights, and the impact of Presbyterian theology on American political thought and institutions.
Another major theme in James Smylie’s courses and publications has been the church’s worldwide mission, as presented in his volume Go Therefore: 150 Years of Presbyterians in Global Mission, 1987. Other major currents have been the church’s multiple ministries in education, nurture and pastoral care, and the church as an instrument of reconciliation, justice, and mercy. These emphases were at the heart of his inaugural address as Union’s Professor of American Church History in 1968. Across the years, James Smylie’s courses, lectures, seminars, and publications have contained a prophetic tone and a vision of the church historian’s responsibility to help make sense out of complex moral, social, and political crosscurrents. A speech authored by Professor Smylie and given by Senator Hubert H. Humphrey at a Washington, D.C. seminar in 1976 illustrates this desire to interpret the times, as Karl Barth once remarked, with the Bible in the one hand and the newspaper in the other. …
Professor Smylie’s pilgrimage as church historian has also shown a fascination with biography, presidential piety, the ecumenical movement (especially Protestant-Roman Catholic relations), and Christ-themes in literature. Moreover, while writing and teaching creatively for his guild, seminarians and learned pastors, he has consistently displayed a deep concern for making the lessons of history available to grassroots congregations. His great regard for people in the pews can be seen in his seminars, lectures, and discussions with local congregations, in his publications for parish education, and in his enthusiasm for the pictorial. His “Presbyterian History in Stained Glass” is a captivating visual and print account of how “American Presbyterian and Reformed history is alive in the light and color of stained glass windows found in churches and institutions across the land.” His popular volume, American Presbyterians: A Pictorial History, is filled with splendid Presbyterian photographs and brief commentaries and captions that offer the lay reader an intriguing introduction to the Presbyterian journey, from its beginnings to the mid-1980s.
James Smylie’s faithful stewardship as editor of American Presbyterians: Journal of Presbyterian History for 28 years is perhaps the most impressive example of the breadth and depth of his awareness of the resources in the field of American Presbyterianism.
