Posted on 09/10/2001 7:53:58 AM PDT by theoverseer
Robert McAfee Brown, a Presbyterian theologian who played a prominent role in the ecumenical and liberation theology movements, died on Tuesday at a nursing home in Greenfield, Mass. He was 81.
He lived in Palo Alto, Calif., and had a summer home in Heath, Mass. His wife, Sydney Thomson Brown, said he had never recovered from a fall three weeks ago.
Dr. Brown began his career as a student of theology but widened his mission again and again, as he saw wrongs to right and causes to fight. He was jailed as a Freedom Rider during the civil rights movement, protested the Vietnam War and visited Central America during struggles there in the 1980's to support friends he feared were in danger.
Elie Wiesel made Dr. Brown one of his first appointments to the Holocaust Commission after President Jimmy Carter named him chairman.
"Never did we disagree on any moral issue," Mr. Wiesel said.
Dr. Brown wrote extensively, taught at seminaries and secular universities and for years was a fixture at conferences of thinkers from many religions. He was also known for his sly wit, once writing an essay called "Six Elegant Proofs for the Existence of Santa Claus."
His involvement in Roman Catholic issues, from rebutting Protestants worried about John F. Kennedy's religion during his presidential campaign to serving as an official Protestant observer to the Vatican Council II at the invitation of Pope John XXIII, led Time magazine to call him in 1962 the "Catholics' favorite Protestant."
Dr. Brown, the son of a clergyman, was born on May 28, 1920, in Carthage, Ill. He graduated from Amherst College in 1943, was ordained as a Presbyterian minister the next year and in 1945 earned a bachelor of divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary.
Toward the end of World War II, his wife said, he put aside his pacifist convictions because of the Holocaust and joined the Navy, serving as a chaplain. He next returned to Amherst, where he was an assistant chaplain and religion instructor.
He studied at Columbia University, then won a Fulbright grant to study at Oxford for two years. He returned to Columbia and completed his doctorate.
His dissertation, on a 19th-century Scottish clergyman, was published as a book, "P. T. Forsyth: Prophet for Today" (Westminster, 1952), the first of his 28 books. These ranged from Biblical interpretations to a Sunday school primer to humorous essays by a fictitious St. Hereticus.
He once said his goal was to translate the ideas of theological thinkers "to those who haven't had three years in a seminary."
James C. Hough, president of the Union Theological Seminary, said, "Bob wrote books an intelligent person who was not a specialist in theology could read and understand and appreciate."
His goal, a fellow theologian and friend, William Sloan Coffin, said, was not to become "a splendid splinter." Dr. Coffin explained, "He wanted to talk to the church at large."
When the two men and other religious people coalesced in a group called Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam in 1965, Dr. Brown wrote the group's 38-page manifesto, intended for a national audience. It began, "There comes a time when silence is betrayal."
In 1951, he became professor of religion and head of the department of religion at Macalester College in St. Paul. He became friends with Representative Eugene J. McCarthy, a Catholic who was encountering outbursts of Protestant bigotry as he ran for re-election. Dr. Brown's wife said this was the beginning of his crusade for improved relations among Christian denominations.
In 1953, he was appointed to teach at Union, where he stayed until 1962, when he accepted a teaching position at Stanford University. He returned to Union for several years before going back to California to teach at the Pacific School of Religion at Berkeley.
He managed to range far from academia in his efforts to influence larger events. In 1960, he and Gustave Weigel wrote a book in an effort to blunt anti-Catholic prejudice against John Kennedy, "An American Dialog: A Protestant Looks at Catholicism and a Catholic Looks at Protestantism."
In a review in The New York Herald Tribune, Kenneth D. Miller said the book would anger many readers. It was aimed not at a reunion of the two faiths, Mr. Miller wrote, but at "a friendly coexistence."
Dr. Brown loved carpentry and designed and built his summer home. He also learned to play a more than passable cello after he turned 50.
Dr. Brown's wife suggested that he went from arena to arena as causes came to his attention, not from any plan. For instance, his passion for the struggles of the poor in Latin America resulted from listening to his daughter, Allison Brown Ehara of Richmond, Calif., who studied in Chile. Over the years he often wrote about the subject, beginning with "Gustavo Gutierrez: An Introduction to Liberation Theology" (Orbis Books, 1990).
In addition to his wife and daughter, Dr. Brown is survived by three sons, Peter, of Houston, Mark, of Mountain View, Calif., and Thomas, of Chesterfield, Mass.; two sisters, Harriet Brown Baldwin of Hanover, N.H., and Elizabeth Brown McAfee of Berkeley; and six grandchildren .
Friends said Dr. Brown seldom retreated on matters of conviction. But Dr. Coffin mentioned a three-week fast he and Daniel Ellsberg staged at the United Nations in 1997 to protest nuclear weapons.
Dr. Brown's doctor ordered him not to participate. So he fasted for one week.
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