Charles Digory Brokenshire (1885-1954)
by Mark Sidwell
This article originally appeared in Biblical Viewpoint 25, no. 1 (April 1991): 69-83. © 1991 Bob Jones University. All rights reserved. Permission to copy or distribute this article must be secured in writing from the editors of Biblical Viewpoint.
The contribution of the Princeton theology to the history of fundamentalism is often acknowledged but not often fully delineated. The impact of the writings of the great men of old Princeton and their heirs—Charles Hodge, Benjamin Warfield, J. Gresham Machen, and others—is quickly owned. What is sometimes less noticed is the contribution of the men who studied under these giants of orthodoxy. A few graduates, such as evangelist William Biederwolf, have drawn some attention from historians. Others, with less heralded roles, have received less. One of the men who helped pass on the best of the heritage of old Princeton in orthodoxy and scholarship was Charles Brokenshire, one of the pioneers of the graduate school of religion at Bob Jones University.
Early Life (1885-1907)
Charles Digory Brokenshire was born in Walnut Hills, Cincinnati, Ohio, on January 24, 1885. Both of his parents were natives of England who had emigrated to Ohio. His mother, Lucy Stacy, was born in 1839 in Yorkshire, England, and came with her family in 1849 to settle in Peebles Corner, Walnut Hills, Cincinnati. There in 1863 she married English artist George Roger Wilcox, but he died around 1866, leaving her with two children: William Wilcox (“Willie,” Charles Brokenshire’s half-brother who figured prominently in Brokenshire’s early life) and George (who died in 1885). Lucy Stacy’s early religious upbringing was under the influence of the Church of England and English Wesleyan Methodists. A eulogy found in Brokenshire’s papers (perhaps written by Brokenshire himself) says, “She brought up her family to love the Savior, the Bible, and the Church. Her life of over eighty-eight years brought many difficult experiences of sorrow and struggle, but her faith enabled her [to] make it a long, inconspicuous, devoted and faithful ministry to others as a godly and loving wife and mother.” After her first husband died, she married again in 1878 in Cincinnati to Digory Brokenshire, who had been born in Cornwall, England in 1831. Charles was the only child resulting from this union.
Due to circumstances not explained in any extant correspondence, Lucy and Digory Brokenshire were living separately by the time Charles was six, mother and son in Marietta, Ohio, and father in Cincinnati. This separation may have been due to financial difficulty; Digory Brokenshire alludes in some of his correspondence to being out of work. Unfortunate as this circumstance was, it does provide the historian with one source on Charles Brokenshire’s life: letters from him and his mother to his father. In his earliest extant letter, written at the age of six (1891), young Charles writes, “I go to Sunday School every Sunday, and I head my class and every one that hears me thinks I can read splendid.” In what is surely a prophetic statement, he adds later, “Mamma says that I am a very good boy and she is going to give me ten cents a week if I would learn to write good and I am going to save it up to buy some good books for I like to read very much.”1 In another letter from that same year, Lucy Brokenshire reported to her husband that Charlie “wants books all the time he has got about a dozen books and he has read them all through two or three times … he would rather have books than play things.”2
An answer to some of Lucy Brokenshire’s problems seemed to arrive when Willie Wilcox, her surviving son from her first marriage, graduated from McCormick Seminary in 1894 and entered the Presbyterian ministry. He pastored the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Rockford, Illinois, from 1894 to 1902, bringing his mother and younger half-brother to live with him. Together they seem to have been happy—until Willie married in 1899. Young Charles took it upon himself to write a plea to his father, who was now apparently running a shoe store in Jackson, Ohio. Willie’s new wife, he wrote, “does not like us, and wants to get rid of us just as soon as she can. She especially dislikes me, as she thinks I eat too much. I think she is a horrid creature.” Charles said, “I want her [his mother] to come and live with you, and if you could send us about fifty dollars, we will come just as soon as we can. We want to get out of this hell right away.”3 He even sent his father a self-addressed, stamped envelope in order to answer. The plea seems to have achieved a reconciliation; Charles was a freshman in high school in Jackson the following year, and his parents were still together at the death of his father in 1913.
Despite what must have been an unsettled home life, Charles Brokenshire excelled in learning. A report card from his junior year of high school shows 100s in nearly all subjects; his lowest score was a single 97 in Algebra. His parents moved to Cincinnati in 1900 and to Marietta again in 1902, the latter move allowing him to attend his final year of high school at Marietta Academy, a prepatory school connected with Marietta College. In the fall of 1903 he entered the college itself and compiled an impressive record. When recommending Brokenshire for a fellowship at Princeton in 1911, Joseph Manley, the Dean of Marietta, wrote, “We do not find such a scholar more than once in ten or twenty years.”4 Four years later, when recommending him for the position he secured at Alma College, Manley said, “Brokenshire is the closest scholar, far and away, to go through Marietta in twenty-two years, or longer.”5
Brokenshire did well at Marietta, revealing his gift for languages that would become so evident in later years. He excelled in classical Greek and German in particular and even served as instructor in classics and ancient history in 1906. In 1907 he received not only his B.A. (summa cum laude) but also an M.A. for special studies in the Greek language. (His master’s thesis was “A Study of Greece in the Fourth Century B.C., from the Peloponnesian War to the Reign of Alexander—404 B.C. to 336 B.C.”) He was also elected to the national honor society, Phi Beta Kappa.
The time at Marietta also provides the first personal glimpse into his religious life. We have no record of Brokenshire’s conversion, and information before his college years is more suggestive than definite. For example, in the letter he wrote to his father in 1899 concerning the situation in Rockford, Illinois, he asked whether there was a Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Ohio. Brokenshire’s pastor during his teen years (probably the two years that he lived in Cincinnati, 1900-1902) wrote some fifteen years later, “He is conscientious and thorough in his work; gentle and kind in manner, tender and loving in disposition. As a Christian gentleman I feel that he is among the highest and best.”6
A surviving personal journal from first half of 1905, however, reveals a little more of his “inner life.” Brokenshire details his work with a church in Watertown, Ohio. He describes preaching to scattered congregations; he notes brief accounts of witnessing to the unsaved in his travels. And scattered throughout are a handful of gems such as “This day I begin to live wholly to God” (15 June 1905) and “Began to read in Anxious Inquirer, with prayer to God for his blessing, that I may be led to a stronger faith & richer Christian life.” (27 June 1905) By the time he graduated from college, Charles Brokenshire was a keenly intelligent, fervently devout young Presbyterian. It was only natural, then, that he gravitated to the citadel of orthodox Christian scholarship in his own day: Princeton Theological Seminary.
Princeton (1907-1913)
Princeton Seminary was still in its glory days when Charles Brokenshire arrived there in 1907. In fact, one of his earlier experiences at the school involved one of its most famous professors: Benjamin B. Warfield. Brokenshire presented himself to the New Brunswick Presbytery for licensure to preach. Warfield himself conducted the Greek examination. After Brokenshire sight read fairly well from the Greek New Testament, Warfield had him recite the principal parts of some verb. Realizing that the young man had a superior knowledge of Greek, Warfield decided to “put on the heat,” as Brokenshire phrased it, and asked him to distinguish in meaning between two words, eleutheros and eleutheroo, as Brokenshire later recalled. Before the student could answer, however, the moderator interrupted and pointed out that the examination concerned the candidate’s ability to read New Testament Greek. Warfield said that his ability was sufficient and left it at that. Brokenshire recalled over thirty years later, “And to this day, I am still wondering exactly what shade of meaning he was demanding of me in that Greek word!”7
Brokenshire spent five years at Princeton Seminary and one year in the graduate school of Princeton University. He earned a Bachelor of Divinity from the seminary and entered the Ph.D. program at the university. He also served for two years as William Henry Green Fellow in Semitic Philology (1910-12), primarily as a teaching assistant in Hebrew under Dr. Robert Dick Wilson. Fortunately for historians, Brokenshire wrote a lengthy letter on his student days at Princeton to John E. Meeter, who was conducting researching for a biography on Warfield. Brokenshire related several anecdotes and observations concerning Warfield. “Sometimes he would use the Socratic method on a reciter,” he noted, “and lead some student disposed to argue into a series of statements which drove the young liberal into the orthodox corner where ‘Benny’ wanted him.” He mentioned how a student from Ireland had been given a list of difficult theological questions by his agnostic brother and said, “Dr. Warfield took time to answer all the problems very ably and cogently.”8 One incident he repeated fully:
Once someone asked the difference between predestination and fatalism. In answer Dr. Warfield told a story of a small boy in Holland who went too near the long revolving arms of his father’s windmill. The father cautioned the lad to keep away from the windmill, lest some day his clothes be caught on the revolving arms and he be dashed to pieces. For a while the boy obeyed, but one day he forgot or just ignored his father’s warning, and went near the mill. After a while suddenly he felt himself jerked up by the clothing and heavily thumped again and again with great force on the seat of his baggy Dutch trousers. His first thought was: “Oh, I am being pounded to pieces, the windmill has caught me!” Then he looked around and saw the angry face of his father over him and realized he was receiving a good old-fashioned Dutch spanking administered by his angry parent.
“Now,” said Dr. Warfield, “if he had been really in the arms of the windmill, that would have been like fatalism, man in the grip of a machine. But in predestination we are in the hands of a Heavenly Father—but the spanking feels just as hard.”9
Although Meeter was most interested in Warfield, Brokenshire referred to several other notable teachers that he had. His professor of New Testament Greek, for instance, was J. Gresham Machen, and he studied Semitic languages under Robert Dick Wilson; he said, “I must have taken almost all the courses that R. D. Wilson ever gave in my time.”10
He also seems to have had a close friendship with Dr. Charles R. Erdman, Professor of Practical Theology at Princeton. When Brokenshire applied for the teaching position at Alma College, Erdman wrote in his letter of recommendation, that Brokenshire was “regarded as one of the most brilliant students who have come to us in recent years.” He added, “Few men of my acquaintance are more proficient in the original languages of Scripture—both the Greek and the Hebrew.”11 In 1929, while teaching at Alma College, Brokenshire wrote to Erdman, asking his former teacher to recommend him for a position at Lane Seminary in Cincinnati. Erdman replied that he had done so but not before trying vainly to secure a position for Brokenshire at Princeton. He wrote, “I hope that Lane will extend you a call, but if so, I do hope you will first let me know before you have accepted it, for I should greatly prefer to have you on the Princeton Faculty.”12 An acquaintance wrote to Brokenshire in 1943, “I told Dr. Erdman today [about Brokenshire’s move to Bob Jones College]. His comment was that he was just sorry that it was not Princeton or Yale to which you were going.”13 In the 1940s Marshall Neal and a few others at Bob Jones College drove Brokenshire to Chattanooga to hear Erdman preach. Greeting his old student afterwards, Erdman praised him generously and told the group, “This man knew more Greek when he came to seminary than I do [now].”
Princeton profoundly influenced Brokenshire. He wrote to Meeter in 1942 of Warfield in particular and Princeton in general: “But his memory is blessed and his influence is still potent in the life and convictions of those who gathered before him in old Stuart Hall; and the Princeton Theology of Paul and Augustine and Calvin and the Alexanders and the Hodges and Patton and Warfield is ever and again most irritatingly alive and dynamic just when its enemies think they have given it the deathstroke.”14
A practical illustration of Princeton’s impact is an incident Brokenshire related to his mother in a letter in 1910. In that year he went to Buffalo to interview for a religious education position in a church there. He found the “Rev. Mr. Boocock” to be “liberal” in his views. Brokenshire was suspicious of the minister’s philosophy of religious education for children: “Learn how to live in this world & the other world will take care of itself.” Looking over the materials to be used in the program, Brokenshire asked, “What is the attitude of these [lesson helps] to the early narratives of the Old Testament?” Boocock replied, “It is that of modern scholarship,” to which Brokenshire added “—which meant, I suppose, the Higher Critics. So children may get the impression Abraham, etc. was a fairy tale or a Santa Claus story!” He concluded blandly, “I don’t think I’ll do for the place.”15
In 1912 Brokenshire entered Ph.D. program in Semitic Philology at Princeton University, giving as the proposed topic for his thesis: “A Study of the Text of the Prophecy of Habakkuk in the Light of the Ancient Primary Versions.” He got as far as his final exams but then failed to finish. In the mid-1920s he entered the Old Testament Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago, announcing exactly the same topic as he had at Princeton. Despite doing three summers’ work (1925-1927) and passing his comprehensive examination (1934), leaving only the dissertation to be done, he again did not finish. As late as 1941, Brokenshire checked into picking up again his Ph.D. work at the University of Chicago. After outlining what would be required, an official of that school wrote that Brokenshire could pursue the degree once more if he wished, but noted, “I take the liberty of raising the question whether it is wise for you in your present circumstances to begin now after so long an interval the completion of the arduous program leading to the Ph.D. degree.”16 Despite never finishing a Ph.D., Brokenshire did engage in a course of study that was nearly as prestigious in that day, study in a European university, in his case the University of Heidelberg in Germany.
Middle Years (1913-1942)
Brokenshire spent three semesters at the University of Heidelberg as a Proctor Traveling Fellow from Princeton, studying primarily Semitic languages and ancient history. He served at the same time as pastor of the American Presbyterian Church in Frankfurt, Germany. World War I, however, interrupted his work in Germany. His only recorded personal experience with the war he related to Joseph Manley: “In fact, we have had a little taste of the war ourselves—the French aviators flew over the railway station, a magnificent building in Frankfurt, while I was stopping only half a square away, and although the attack proved a failure, the rattle of the machine guns and rifles of the guard defending the great railway center was a fearful din at two o’clock in the morning.”17 He left by way of the Netherlands, where he was delayed for a period of time; typically, he spent it learning Dutch so that he could read the newspapers. He endured further delay when the ship on which he fled, the Rotterdam, was held off Dover for three weeks while British went through checking on and arresting Germans and Austrians.
Back in America, Brokenshire had to make a career decision: the ministry or teaching. Before pastoring the American congregation in Germany, he had served as a supply pastor before with some success at Union Presbyterian Church in Schenectady, New York (1911), and the Fourth Reformed Church in Philadelphia (1913-1914); he had even considered becoming regular pastor of the Philadelphia church. A member of the church in Schenectady said in an unsolicited letter of recommendation to Princeton that “his sermons are not only instructive, but he holds his audience because of the manifest knowledge of God’s word, and his desire to win his audience into the Kingdom of God. He preaches without notes and shows feeling in all he says. He is as good in the Prayer Meeting as in the pulpit.”18
Brokenshire’s first love was teaching, however, and in 1915 he applied for and secured a position as a professor of Biblical Literature and Religious Education at Alma College, a Presbyterian school in Alma, Michigan. On his faculty record (dated 1930), one finds an impressive list of the languages of which he had mastered a reading knowledge or better: French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Norse, Latin, Greek (classical and koine), Hebrew, “Chaldee” (Biblical Aramaic), modern Greek, Yiddish, Arabic, Syriac, Samaritan, Ethiopic, Babylonian, Coptic, Egyptian Hieroglyph, and Esperanto (an artificial “universal language”). By the end of his career he had added Chinese, Japanese, and Russian to this list. Marshall Neal recalled an incident during the 1940s when Brokenshire was teaching at Bob Jones. The professor said on some subject, “Well, I don’t know too much about that; that’s Greek to me.” Neal responded, “Doctor, you shouldn’t say that’s Greek to you; you know all about Greek. You should say, ‘That’s Eskimo to me.’” Brokenshire paused and then replied, “Well, I have an Eskimo grammar in my room. I think I could read a little bit of it.” It was with good reason that Brokenshire wrote to Bob Jones, Sr., in 1942, “I am grateful to my Maker for giving me unusual ability with languages.”19
Brokenshire seems to have been happy in the Alma community. He was able to provide a home for his mother, who lived with him from the death of her husband until her own death from a cerebral hemorrhage on October 12, 1927. He never married; he once jokingly explained the reason to one of his classes at Bob Jones University: “Well, every time I saw somebody that I thought I could be interested in, I discovered she was already taken.” In reality the care of his mother may have been a major factor. During his time at Alma (probably after the death of his mother), Brokenshire also kept ten students in his home at different times at no charge—mostly ministerial students.20 In addition from 1920 to 1925 he served as pastor of the First Congregational Church of Stanton, Michigan.
Brokenshire’s relations with the school were on the whole good, but a little uneven. Before Brokenshire arrived at Alma, Acting President James Barkley told him, “We are conservatives hereabouts” and that “the view point of our College, and of our Synod under whose auspices the College is conducted, is, in general, that of Princeton Seminary, and not Union”21 (the latter being a more liberal seminary in New York). Such a statement was doubtless reassuring to Brokenshire. There were tendencies in the college, however, of which he did not approve—so much so that he applied for a teaching position at Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin, in late 1919 or early 1920. Harry Crooks, president of Alma, told the president of Carroll that Brokenshire’s wish to leave probably resulted from some policy and rule changes that Alma had instituted. “Prof. Brokenshire is for strict discipline, for the most rigid rules of conduct, and for severe penalties,” wrote Crooks.22 According to Alma College’s official history, one change that took place at that time was the school’s decision to permit chaperoned dances for the students,23 a move that probably did not please the conservative Brokenshire. Indeed student behavior there may have not been ideal to the devout Brokenshire. Some indication of this fact may be found in a 1943 letter to Brokenshire from Francis E. West, a former teacher at Alma who had gone to Bob Jones College. On hearing that Brokenshire was coming to BJC, West wrote, “You will find a different Christian atmosphere here than we had at Alma College and after about 14 years I have never seen a student smoke, drink, or hear use of any profanity,”24 the implication being that such behavior was not unknown at Alma.
Although Brokenshire chose not to leave in 1920, his correspondence with Carroll College did result in Alma’s president writing two letters that gave his view of Brokenshire as a teacher. Crooks said, “Professor Brokenshire’s mind is one of the most brilliant and best furnished minds I have encountered in our College faculty.” He mentioned that the young professor had filled in for Latin and French classes in addition to his Bible teaching and said, “The truth is I think he teaches any of these subjects well enough to hold a chair in College.” In the classroom, Crooks said, “He is a good teacher. … He knows his Bible and teaches the facts of it well”; he added that Brokenshire got “a considerable amount of work” from his students but was an easy grader. “I doubt if you can find a keener mind, or a better furnished one, or a better class-room man than Brokenshire,” the president concluded. “His mental qualities make him a very valuable man in the faculty.”25 (Fifteen years later, Crooks wrote on another occasion: “He has … taught in most superior fashion courses in his own department and has substituted when various other professors were on Sabbatical leave, so that I count him an almost dangerous substitute—likely to teach French, philosophy, history, ancient languages or German better than the regular professor.”)26 In some matters, Crooks was not so glowing: “He does not seem to be of greatest possible aid to them [students] in matters of their own religious thinking; I doubt whether many of them have ever cared to discuss a single personal question in religion with him.” He also noted, without indicating whether he considered this quality a benefit or a hindrance, “He is extremely conservative in his religious views. No Synod would ever be likely to quarrel with his attitudes. The Liberals at any Synod might think him too conservative.” Still Crooks mentioned some indications of the warmer side of Brokenshire’s character: “Our students call him ‘Uncle Charlie.’ Once in while he opens up a new chamber in his mind and makes a speech that convulses them all with laughter. They laugh the more because the thing is unexpected.”27 This humorous aspect is also found in the only anecdote about Brokenshire contained in Alma’s official history; on one occasion when he was preaching in chapel, an alarm clock that a prankster had planted in the podium went off five minutes before the end of the service. Brokenshire stopped, waited for the alarm to run down, and then said, “Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, that you are all awake, I shall begin.”28
The climax of Brokenshire’s career at Alma came in 1937 when the school awarded him the honorary degree Doctor of Divinity. After that happy moment, his relations with the college became strained. A primary source of difficulty seems to have been his relations with new college president, John Wirt Dunning (1938-1942). The school had been suffering financially in the depression years, often showing deficits in the annual budgets. Dunning was not able to improve matters; in fact, Brokenshire even sent a letter to several members of the Board of Trustees implying that the administration had misused pension funds. Whatever the reality of these charges, the situation at Alma was unpleasant to say the least. Roy W. Hamilton, Dunning’s replacement and a friend of Brokenshire’s, later summed up the period as “that unprintable atmosphere of the years 1938-42.”29
The crisis came in mid-1942, when Brokenshire and several other professors were released. “I am probably ending my long career at Alma in a few weeks,” wrote Brokenshire to John Meeter, “because of a financial crisis, to meet which, as they say, the trustees are cutting salaries and letting go professors.”30 When Roy Hamilton took over as acting president he reinstated Brokenshire in August. To Dr. Brokenshire, however, enough was apparently enough. He taught the first semester of the 1942-1943 school year at Alma, but he left before the second semester for a school which he had contacted during his temporary dismissal: Bob Jones College in Cleveland, Tennessee.
Latter Years (1943-1954)
It is not known how Charles Brokenshire became acquainted with Bob Jones College, then scarcely fifteen years old. In his original letter of inquiry to Bob Jones, Jr., acting president of the college, he said,
I am … a clergyman of the Presbyterian denomination, but I am in sympathy with all evangelical and orthodox, genuinely Christian workers who adhere to the inspired Word of God. And I am heartily in sympathy with the doctrinal platform of your own fine institution. … I wish to teach in a distinctly Christian and orthodox evangelical atmosphere, where I will be found a loyal supporter of policies encouraging Christian ideals and fidelity to Scripture.31
When Bob Jones, Sr., answered and asked for further particulars (such as whether he as a Presbyterian would have any trouble teaching Methodist students), Brokenshire elaborated on his sympathy with the young college:
I like your statement of Christian Doctrine and heartily approve your position as to Christian belief and Christian conduct and character, including opposition to certain common vices and indulgences and undesirable amusements. I hold myself the doctrines of your College Creed and as to the Methodist brethren, I have worked with them for years and should not think of wounding their views of God’s grace and human free agency or of stirring up controversy with those who hold the Fundamentals—as I hold them myself. I am thoroughly acquainted with evolution and modernism and I am their enemy—I learned that in Princeton.32
Brokenshire arrived at the school in January 1943, in time to begin teaching for the second semester. Marshall Neal recalled the unusual “heralds” of his arrival at the campus. Several days before Brokenshire came, a mail truck unloaded several boxes near the empty apartment in one of the halls where Brokenshire would be living. Each day the truck brought more boxes, so that in a few days there was an impressive stack along the wall. It turned out, unsurprisingly, that the boxes contained books.
Dr. Brokenshire’s coming was providential for the young college. In that very school year BJC, wanting to provide an orthodox alternative to increasingly undependable denominational seminaries, had launched its graduate program in religion, offering an M.A. in either Christian education or theology. In 1943 Brokenshire became the first Dean of the Graduate School of Religion. In 1947, when the college moved to Greenville, South Carolina, and became Bob Jones University, he became the first Dean of the School of Religion. (Due to failing health he stepped down in 1950 and was “Dean Emeritus” of the School of Religion for the rest of his life.) Thus Brokenshire oversaw the expansion of the graduate program: an increased number of M.A. programs, the launching of the Ph.D. programs (1943-1944), and the establishing of the school’s first regular seminary degree, the Bachelor of Divinity in 1949 (later changed to the Master of Divinity). In addition, he was the dean of a department that saw a remarkable growth in numbers after World War II, when hundreds of veterans came to the school to study for the ministry.
Much of Brokenshire’s reputation at BJU today rests on anecdotes about him and his charm and eccentricities. Because of a circulation problem in his legs and his overweight condition, he took up bicycle riding. Students soon became familiar with the sight of a round little man perched on a bicycle, tooling around campus with books bulging from the pockets of his jacket. Alumni fondly recall how he chortled and rubbed his mustache after he had indulged in some bit of dry wit in his high-pitched tenor voice. Some former students confess that their first thought when remembering him was how he constantly, voraciously read books wherever he went, even when walking around campus.
Brokenshire impressed as well as charmed those who knew him. His knowledge of languages (and ability to learn new ones) probably drew the most attention. Even Dr. Bob Jones, Sr., would walk over to Dean Brokenshire before chapel and ask his opinion on some point concerning the Biblical languages before using it in his chapel message. Brokenshire’s precision in language was legendary; not only was he careful himself, but any student who mispronounced a word in class would be called to the front, asked to take out an unabridged dictionary from his desk, find the word, pronounce the word, and write it on the board. Few made the same mistake twice. (It is said that most of the Bible faculty at BJU still say “SEP-tuh-jint” for the Greek translation of the Old Testament instead of the more common “SEP-too-ah-jint” as a result of his influence.) He was reverent man, but any “aloofness” that he might have manifested at Alma in the early 1920s had long since dissolved. Yet he never displayed any overly casual familiarity with the sacred. Former student Edward Panosian recalled Dr. Brokenshire as having an “awe … for the character and person of God.”
In 1935 President Harry Crooks of Alma College had written: “Some persons would feel that Professor Brokenshire could have written more.”33 The historian may tend to agree, for Dr. Brokenshire left no extensive writings. In reality, writing does not seem to have been his specialty, certainly not a keen interest. (Former student and colleague Marshall Neal offered the opinion that teaching mattered more to him than writing, although he added that Brokenshire once expressed a wish to write a small Hebrew lexicon.) An unpublished work survives, part of a manuscript from c. 1930 entitled “Moral Instruction in the Junior High School: Importance, Aims, Methods.”34 This and his few printed works—a handful of articles on topics such as mercy killing and popular pseudepigraphal writings—show intelligence, care, and an easy style of writing, but none is of particular brilliance or originality.35 One exception is a lengthy sermon preached at the 1944 Bible Conference at Bob Jones College, “The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.”36 This sermon, although not an ostensibly “scholarly” work, demonstrates his grasp of Biblical literature and history, a skillful eloquence of expression, a keen ability in apologetical argument, an unquestioned evangelical warmth, and solid doctrinal orthodoxy.
Brokenshire’s health declined after 1950. His last year of life was perhaps the most difficult, although he taught as normal and even took over the graduate church history class when that professor left during the first semester. He spent the last few months of his life living in a special apartment in the campus hospital, where he could be more easily watched and cared for. Edward Panosian recalled one poignant moment when the old professor actually fell asleep in church history class while listening to a student recite his lesson. On May 28, 1954, he was found dead in his apartment, only hours after turning in his final grades.
Conclusion
After Dr. Brokenshire’s death, the University named a new men’s dormitory after him and dedicated a pulpit in his honor in the War Memorial Chapel. These small remembrances are more notable when one realizes that Brokenshire taught at the school fewer than a dozen years. In a comparatively brief time, he had made a deep impression on those knew him. Perhaps it was his combination of saintliness and scholarship. Edward Panosian called his character “a happy marriage of scholarship and devotion, scholarship and spirituality.”
In a recent work W. Andrew Hoffecker argued that the lives of Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, and B. B. Warfield illustrate that piety was as much a part of the Princeton heritage as scholarship and theological orthodoxy.37 Charles Brokenshire, then, was certainly a true heir of old Princeton: a mixture brilliant scholarship, intelligent and unyielding orthodoxy, and evangelical warmth. As Dr. Bob Jones said at the dedication of the Brokenshire pulpit, “He was a man who knew the Word of God in all the languages in which it is written, but more than that he knew the Word of God in its quickening power in the lives of men.”
Notes
The author would like to thank several individuals for their contributions to this article. Four people contributed documents: Mr. John Mark Hall of Huntington, West Virginia, lent the author the bulk of Dr. Brokenshire’s surviving papers, which provided the majority of the materials for this article; Mr. Peter Dollard, Library Director of Alma College, provided photocopies of numerous items from the archives at Alma; Dr. Bert Wilhoit of the archives in the Mack Library at Bob Jones University found a few surviving items of Dr. Brokenshire’s, such as the incomplete manuscript on moral instruction in the junior high school; and Dr. Marshall Neal provided the letter in which Dr. Brokenshire described his days at Princeton Seminary. Dr. Neal and Dr. Edward Panosian also kindly consented to be interviewed concerning their relations to Dr. Brokenshire; quotations without citations in this article are from these interviews. In addition the Audio-Services Department of Bob Jones University provided a recording of the dedication service for the Brokenshire Memorial Pulpit (12 January 1955).
1 Charles Brokenshire to Digory Brokenshire, 29 Nov. 1891.
2 Lucy Brokenshire to Digory Brokenshire, 1891.
3 Charles Brokenshire to Digory Brokenshire, 3 April 1899.
4 Recommendation, 11 Sept. 1911.
5 Joseph Manley to Thomas C. Blaisdell, 14 Aug. 1915.
6 Charles E. Walker to Thomas C. Blaisdell, 14 Aug. 1915.
7 Charles Brokenshire to John E. Meeter, 25 June 1942.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Charles R. Erdman to Thomas C. Blaisdell, 5 Aug. 1915.
12 Charles R. Erdman to Charles Brokenshire, 3 Sept. 1929.
13 Wendling H. Hastings to Charles Brokenshire, 23 Jan. 1943. Erdman obviously meant the comment as a compliment.
14 Charles Brokenshire to John E. Meeter, 25 June 1942.
15 Charles Brokenshire to Digory and Lucy Brokenshire, 13 June 1910.
16 Ernest Cadman Colwell to Charles Brokenshire, 8 May 1941.
17 Charles Brokenshire to Joseph Manley, 9 Aug. 1915.
18 Charles E. Merriam, “To Whom It May Concern,” 19 Oct. 1911.
19 Charles Brokenshire to Bob Jones, Sr., 3 July 1942.
20 Ibid.
21 James Barkley to Charles Brokenshire, 13 Sept. 1915.
22 Harry Crooks to Herbert Houghton, 29 Jan. 1920.
23 [Alma College,] Within Our Bounds: A Centennial History of Alma College, 1986, p. 7.
24 Francis E. West to Charles Brokenshire, 10 Jan. 1943.
25 Harry Crooks to Herbert Houghton, 29 Jan. 1920, 19 Feb. 1920.
26 Harry Crooks to Edward Smith Parsons, 24 April 1935.
27 Harry Crooks to Herbert Houghton, 29 Jan. 1920, 19 Feb. 1920.
28 Within Our Bounds, p. 80.
29 Roy W. Hamilton to Charles Brokenshire, 5 June 1946.
30 Charles Brokenshire to John E. Meeter, 25 June 1942.
31 Charles Brokenshire to Bob Jones, Jr., 27 June 1942.
32 Charles Brokenshire to Bob Jones, Sr., 3 July 1942.
33 Harry Crooks to Edward Smith Parsons, 24 April 1935.
34 Also found in his papers is a nine-page, undated, typewritten essay with no author’s credit entitled “John Knox and the Scottish Reformation.” However, because Dr. Brokenshire could not type and the style of the essay is not distinctively his, the essay may have been written by someone else. Perhaps it is a student paper which Dr. Brokenshire worthy of saving.
35 The short pieces by Dr. Brokenshire include the following: “The Spurious Letter of Publius Lentulus and Other Pious Frauds,” The Fellowship News, 30 March 1946, pp. 2-3; “May Christians Sanction Mercy Killing? No!” The Fellowship News, 2 November 1946, p. 3; “The Heidelberg Christmas Tree,” Little Moby’s Post [former alumni magazine of Bob Jones University], December 1950, pp. 1-3. The last of these is a short piece of fiction. However, its plot, concerning an American studying at Heidelberg at Christmastime in 1913, sounds as though it contains some autobiographical details.
36 Charles D. Brokenshire, “The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ,” The Fellowship News, 20 May 1944, pp. 2-4; 27 May 1944, pp. 2-4. [This sermon was reprinted in Biblical Viewpoint 25 (1991), no. 1, 85-94, and no. 2, 107-13.]
37 W. Andrew Hoffecker, Piety and the Princeton Theologians (Philipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1981).