pastor, scholar, professor
by Doug Kutilek
When Thomas Armitage published A History of the Baptists in 1887, he chose to place on the cover an embossed, gilded portrait of John Albert Broadus (1827-1895) as the representative Baptist. Such a choice carried inherent risk, inasmuch as Broadus was still very much alive and only of those already dead can we be certain that they have finished life well. But Broadus did not embarrass Armitage in this regard, and indeed finished the final years of his life as he had lived the previous decades, with full and faithful commitment to the Savior.
Broadus was a native son of Virginia, a scion of a family with its share of Baptist preachers (the other branch spelled the family name Broaddus). Converted to Christ at 16, and called into the ministry, he studied in preparation at the University of Virginia (M.A., 1850), with special emphasis on Latin and Greek. Briefly tutored in Latin and Greek there, he served as campus chaplain for two years, and pastored a church in Charlottesville for most of the 1850s.
Seeing the great need for a seminary to provide advanced training for the Baptists of the South, Broadus became a founding faculty member of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Greenville, SC, in 1859. Broadus carried the responsibilities of teaching Greek, New Testament Interpretation, and Homiletics. He would remain at the seminary the rest of his life. The seminary’s operation was interrupted by the War between the States, but resumed in a greatly reduced condition after the war. After years of severe financial distress, the seminary was relocated in 1877 to Louisville, KY, where it remains to this day.
Broadus’s class preparations for homiletics led to the publishing of On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons, which went through numerous printings and editions. Though designed for preachers, that volume was widely used in university public speaking classes. The last edition to preserve intact the book as written by Broadus is the 23rd edition (1899), edited by Broadus’s successor in homiletics, E. C. Dargan.
During the war, Broadus pastored several churches simultaneously, and for a time was a chaplain in the Army of Northern Virginia, being a favorite preacher of both Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. He was one of the preachers in the famous revival in the Confederate army in 1862-1863.
Though not a prolific writer, Broadus maintained a high level of quality in what he did write. His commentary on Matthew’s Gospel in the American Commentary set, though more than 125 years old, is still very much worth consulting. He also wrote a briefer commentary on Mark’s Gospel, which I sought for decades before finding a copy. He compiled and edited A Harmony of the Gospels, later editions of which were revised and edited by his son-in-law A. T. Robertson, and in turn by Robert Thomas and Stanley Gundry. He published one book of sermons, two series of lectures, Jesus of Nazareth and Lectures on the History of Preaching, and a biography of his seminary colleague J.P. Boyce. He, along with Alvah Hovey and Henry G. Weston, produced an improved edition of the American Bible Union’s New Testament translation (1891). Broadus was also a regular contributor to Baptist periodic literature, especially The Religious Herald, the Virginian Baptist State Convention paper.
One famous and very painful incident at Southern Seminary involved the dismissal of Crawford Toy, professor of Old Testament and an early graduate of the seminary. Toy had studied in Germany, become infected with rationalism, Darwinism, and destructive higher-critical views of the Old Testament, and had step-by-step apostatized from the faith he had once embraced. Though Toy was dear to him, Broadus insisted that he should be dismissed from the school because of his embracing heresy. With tears in his eyes, Broadus saw Toy off at the train station, declaring that he would agree to have his arm amputated if Toy would return to his former beliefs (see Thomas Ray, “Crawford Toy,” Baptist Bible Tribune, May 2012). This principled act, motivated by Biblical conviction, no doubt spared Southern Seminary for a couple of generations from the inroads of modernism that infected Baptist seminaries in the North generally before the end of the 19th century.
Broadus’s last lecture at the seminary was on Apollos, in which he urged his students to be, above all, “mighty in the Scriptures.”
His first and still best biography, The Life and Letters of John Albert Broadus (1901), was written by his successor as professor of Greek and New Testament Interpretation, A. T. Robertson. This biography is available from Sprinkle Publications.