George Arthur Buttrick

George Arthur Buttrick (March 23, 1892 – January 23, 1980) was an English-born, American-based Christian preacher, author and lecturer.

George Arthur Buttrick
Born	March 23, 1892 Seaham Harbour, England
Died	January 23, 1980 Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.
Education	Victoria University of Manchester
Occupation(s)	Christian pastor Christian author Academic lecturer

Early life

Buttrick was born in Seaham Harbour, England on March 23, 1892. He attended the Victoria University of Manchester and later emigrated to the United States.

Career

Buttrick served as a pastor in Quincy, Illinois, Rutland, Vermont, Buffalo, New York, and in 1927 he succeeded Henry Sloane Coffin as minister of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City.

In 1936, Buttrick officiated the wedding of Fred and Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, the parents of Donald Trump.

Buttrick gave a lecture series at Yale University. From 1955 to 1960 he was Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Preacher to the university at Harvard University. He was then a guest professor at the Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York and went on to teach at Garrett–Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. He later taught at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina, Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He also taught classes on preaching at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

While at Harvard, Buttrick served as advisor to Phillips Brooks House, the student-run social service organization, and was greatly admired for his dedication to the cause of social justice. This admiration was put to the test when he denied the use of Harvard's Memorial Church to a Jewish couple who wished to be married there by a rabbi. His reasoning, strongly supported by Harvard president Nathan Pusey, was that the church was a Christian institution, and that permitting it to be used for non-Christian activities would be to secularize it. An intense controversy erupted involving both faculty, students, and donors to the university, ending in 1958 when Buttrick reversed his position on the ground that "The Harvard community is today a mixed society. It contains numerous groups with religious loyalties other than those which gave shape to Harvard’s ceremonies of public worship."

Buttrick was also Commentary Editor for The Interpreter's Bible, a twelve volume set of the Holy Scriptures, in the King James and Revised Standard Versions with general articles and introduction, exegesis and exposition, first published by Abingdon-Cokesbury Press in 1952.

Death and legacy

Buttrick died in 1980. His son, David G. Buttrick (1927–2017), was a Presbyterian minister who later joined the United Church of Christ and became the Drucilla Moore Buffington Professor of Homiletics and Liturgics at the Vanderbilt University Divinity School.

Frederick Buechner has often cited Buttrick as a central influence on his career, including his decision to become himself a Presbyterian minister. Buttrick's influence was also cited by Eugene Peterson, who was raised Pentecostal but became an intern at Madison Avenue during Buttrick's ministry and was inspired by his preaching. In fact, according to Peterson's biographer Winn Collier, both Buechner and Peterson were sitting in the pews of Madison Avenue Presbyterian that same year, having their shared epiphanies under Buttrick's preaching.

Bibliography

• Parables of Jesus (1928)
• Jesus Came Preaching: Christian Preaching in the New Age (1931)
• Christian Fact and Modern Doubt (1934)
• Prayer (1942)
• Christ and Man's Dilemma (1946)
• So We Believe, So We Pray (1951)
• Faith and Education (1952)
• Sermons Preached in a University Church (1959)
• Biblical Thought and the Secular University (1960)
• Editor, Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, 4 vols (1962)
• Christ and History (1963)
• God, Pain, and Evil (1966)
• The Beatitudes, A Contemporary Meditation (1968)
• The Power of Prayer Today (1970)