Harold O. J. Brown wasn’t one of this country’s most famous evangelicals, and I don’t recall Time putting him on its list of the 25 most influential; but he may well have been one of its most important. A multivalent scholar, writer and teacher, he had a remarkable career, but it’s instructive that those who knew him were less impressed by what he had accomplished than by who he was in Christ. In particular, it’s worth noting that he never had the high public profile of a Jerry Falwell or a Ted Haggard, not because he lacked the gifts—he was a prodigiously gifted man—but because he never wanted it.
Of the various eulogies for the Rev. Dr. Brown, the one I’ve appreciated the most has been this one, from S. M. Hutchens in the latest Touchstone. Since it isn’t available on their website, I reproduce it (by permission) here in its entirety.
At a gathering of Harold O. J. Brown’s friends after the memorial service in his honor, William D. Delahoyde, a Raleigh attorney and protégé from his Deerfield days, rose to state what I am sure was a consensus: While it was doubtful his passing would be noted by the general media, most of us there thought that in knowing him we had a brush with greatness.In that company the observation bore a peculiar taste and weight, for the people with whom I had been conversing at the obsequies, especially the older ones who had known him for many years, were not the sort for whom the attribution would pass easily.Many of them were, after all, members of America’s nobility, old Harvard grads who knew, and often were on familiar terms with, people whom most of us have only read about. Listening to them reminisce was like an evening spent in a well-marked part of my library—but here the books were alive.All of us knew Joe as a brilliant intellect: the valedictorian of a Jesuit high school who took his degree in Germanic Languages and Literature from Harvard College magna cum laude, who absent-mindedly forgot that he had been accepted at the Medical School, instead studying theology on the continent on Fulbright and Danforth fellowships, returning to Harvard after and Evangelical conversion in Germany to take his doctorate in Reformation history under George Hunston Williams. He lectured or conversed in German, French, Polish, Swedish, Russian, Hindi, and several other languages.Like Max Weber, who taught himself Russian to pass the time during a week of convalescence, Joe’s talent for language and the breadth of his literary knowledge were legendary among those who knew him. Conspicuous at the gathering were any members of his Harvard rowing crews, whom he had coached to notable victories, including first-place cups at the Henley Royal Regatta.Most of us there had met him later than the Harvard days, and heard of all this as the prelude to a distinguishe pastoral, teaching, and journalistic career with InterVarsity in Europe, Park Street Church in Boston, Yeotmal Seminary in India, Christianity Today, Trinity-Deerfield, the Religion and Society Report, and finally Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte.A strong Protestant, Joe was a friend of Christians wherever he found them, including us at Touchstone. He wrote several pieces for the magazine, and served as one of the principal speakers at the Rose Hill conference in 1995.He was a particularly bold (sometimes to the point of folly) mountain climber, ran—or if he had to, walked—marathons, despite being plagued with the congenital lower-spine deformity that caused his distinctive posture and gait. He was a loving and attentive husband to Grace—a redoubtable counterpart, fully as remarkable in her way as he was in his—and father to Cynthia and Peter. While perhaps most widely known for his political and intellectual leadership in the pro-life movement, he was in scores of individual lives a paraclete who by dint of his gentle attention and concern became Kierkegaard’s pinch of spice that made all the difference.But this suffices to represent his phenomenal accomplishment. Joe was embarrassed by such notice, and on his deathbed, Bill Delahoyde told us, he emphatically said—or rather wrote, for he could no longer speak—that he did not see in himself the man that others saw in him. His childhood and early family life, of which he spoke little, was odd and less than satisfactory, and what he became cannot be explained except through the glass of redemption. Here, to be sure, was great native ability and desire to achieve, energized by a strong sense of noblesse oblige, and a desire to love so that he might be loved in return.This may become the stuff of greatness, but on reflection I think this is perhaps not really what we are speaking of here. The proper word is “glory,” in which Joe’s observation about what he could not see in himself merges into what he did see in Another, and which we beheld in him.This glory was manifest in a humility that dispersed its gifts—which in others would have gone into the construction of a world-historical character—among his friends as the animating force behind a task to complete. His kenosis was not carried out simply in consent to a divine mission to the world, but in befriending us—making himself of minor repute principally by concentration on the cultivation of others. Thus we beheld his glory, but in its very revelation it was hidden, and so it is with the best of his servants, who, taught in his school and following his example, tend to spend their lives giving away what “great” men have so often learned to keep for themselves.Harold O. J. Brown, whose view of his work at the end of his life echoed that of Thomas Aquinas, saw no greatness in himself because he had lived long in the shadow of his Master, simply doing for others what had been done for him. But he will be happy, I think, when his friends rise up to say that they saw in this the reflected glory of the Lord.