Henry Boynton Smith

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Henry Boynton Smith (November 21, 1815 - February 7, 1877), United States theologian, was born in Portland, Maine.

He graduated at Bowdoin College in 1834; studied theology at Andover, where his health failed, at Bangor, and, after a year (1836-1837) as librarian and tutor in Greek at Bowdoin, in Germany at Halle, where he became personally intimate with Tholuck and Ulrici, and in Berlin, under Neander and Hengstenberg.

He returned to America in 1840, was a tutor for a few months (1840-1841) at Bowdoin, and in 1842, shut out from any better place by distrust of his German training and by his frank opposition to Unitarianism, he became pastor of the Congregational Church of West Amesbury (now Merrimac), Massachusetts. In 1847-1850 he was professor of moral philosophy and metaphysics at Amherst; and in 1850-1854 was Washburn professor of Church history, and in 1854-1874 Roosevelt professor of systematic theology, at Union Theological Seminary. His health failed in 1874 and he died in New York City on the 7th of February 1877. His son Henry Goodwin Smith was also a theologian.

Of the old school of the New England Theology, Smith was one of the foremost leaders of the new school Presbyterians. His theology is most strikingly contained in the Andover address, "Relations of Faith and Philosophy," which was delivered before the Porter Rhetorical Society in 1849. He always made it clear that the ideal philosophy was Christocentric: he said that Reformed theology must "'Christologize' predestination and decrees, regeneration and sanctification, the doctrine of the Church, and the whole of the Eschatology."

See EL (Mrs HB) Smith, Henry Boynton Smith, His Life and Works (New York, 1881), and Lewis F Stearns, Henry Boynton Smith (Boston, 1892), in the American Religious Leaders series.