A Theologian Speaks:

Remembering GeorgiaHarkness

by Gary Dorrien

The first woman to crash the ranks of U.S. American professional theologians, Georgia Harkness was a peace activist and pioneering advocate of women’s ordination.As a theologian she was a prolific popularizer. As a peace activist she opposed every war in her lifetime.As a feminist she played a leading role for forty years in advocating women’s equality in the successive denominations of the Methodist Episcopal, Methodist, and United Methodist churches.

Her life had four turning points. The first came in 1918, after she had been teaching unhappily as a public school teacher for six years, when Boston University launched a graduate program in religious education. Seizing a new career option, Harkness enrolled at Boston University and turned a second corner the following year, when philosopher Edgar S. Brightman joined its faculty. Brightman’s powerful lectures inspired Harkness to become a religious philosopher. Fortunately, he was a feminist of sorts, which made it possible for Harkness to earn a doctorate in the philosophy of religion.

She taught for fifteen years at Elmira College, converted to pacifism in 1924 after touring war-ravaged Germany, and was ordained to the ministry in the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1927. From the beginning Harkness wrote constantly about the abolition of war, the rights of women, and other issues in church and society, speaking frequently to church and civic groups.

To some extent these commitments thwarted her intellectual ambitions. She wanted to write major works of philosophical theology and win a position at a prominent divinity school, but her ceaseless activism left little time for major books. In addition, the rise of neo-orthodoxy forced her to recalibrate her theology; for years she endured the sneers of colleagues who believed that women had no place in the academy or ministry; and in 1937, the same year that Harkness finally won a coveted appointment at Mount Holyoke College, her beloved father told her on his deathbed that he wished she would write less about causes and more about Jesus Christ.

These words struck Harkness deeply, pulling her back to the evangelical wellspring of her faith. Grieving and lonely, she resolved to write more about Jesus Christ.That was her third turning point; number four saved her life. In the early 1940s, after Harkness joined the faculty of Garrett Biblical Institute (later, Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary), she suffered a devastating nervous breakdown. For many years she had struggled with mounting depression, insomnia, and physical distress; then she hit bottom. Harkness felt ashamed at drowning in her private drama while the world was at war; to her it felt like a spiritual defeat.

Her fourth turning point began when her pastor, Methodist social gospeler Ernest Fremont Tittle, introduced Harkness to a parishioner, Verna Miller. Tittle reasoned that Miller’s friendly sociability might be a saving tonic for Harkness, an intuition that proved to be true. For the rest of her life Harkness shared her home and a loving friendship with Miller, writing vivid descriptions of spiritual desolation without explaining how she came to know so much about it. She had survived her harrowing trauma by finding a loving companion and by leaning upon the gospel truths of spiritual death and new birth in Jesus Christ. In this experience Harkness found her calling for her later career:To explicate the gospel center of progressive Christianity.

Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. An Episcopal priest, his many books include a critique of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, Imperial Designs, and a recently completed trilogy, The Making of American Liberal Theology.