Anglican Commemoration
Bishop of New York & Reformer of the Church
September 12 · d. 1830
Second bishop of New York and the founder of American high churchmanship. Hobart took charge of a diocese with a few dozen clergy and left it one of the strongest in the country, founding the General Theological Seminary along the way. His watchword, stamped on a generation of Episcopalians, was "Evangelical Truth and Apostolic Order": the conviction that the gospel of grace and the catholic ministry of the Church were not rivals but a single inheritance.
John Henry Hobart was born in Philadelphia in 1775, the year before independence, into a merchant family. He was bound at first for trade, then for the College of New Jersey at Princeton, where a different vocation took hold. Ordained deacon in 1798 and priest in 1801, he served small parishes in New Jersey and Pennsylvania before coming to Trinity Church in New York, the parish that would be the base of his life's work.
New York's diocese was then a feeble thing. Its bishop was incapacitated, its clergy few, its parishes scattered. When Hobart was consecrated assistant bishop in 1811 at the age of thirty-six, he threw himself at the problem with an energy that astonished his contemporaries. He rode endless visitations, planted parishes up the Hudson and into the western counties, ordained clergy as fast as he could form them, and carried the church to the Oneida people of central New York. By the time he died, the diocese he had found nearly empty counted well over a hundred priests.
He wanted those priests trained, and trained in a particular conviction. In 1817 he was the moving force behind the founding of the General Theological Seminary in New York, the oldest Episcopal seminary in the country, built to form clergy who held what Hobart called Evangelical Truth and Apostolic Order together in one hand. He meant that the Episcopal Church need not choose between the warm gospel of personal salvation and the ancient catholic order of bishops, sacraments, and creeds. The revivalists, he thought, had the first without the second; Rome pressed the second to the harm of the first; the church he served held both. He founded a college in Geneva, New York, that still bears his name.
The labor wore him out. Hobart traveled abroad for his health, came home, and kept working until his body failed. He died at Auburn, in central New York, on September 12, 1830, only fifty-four years old, having built in twenty years a church that would outlast him by centuries.
How we know: Hobart is thoroughly documented, both in his own prolific output and in the memoirs of those who knew him. His annual Charges to the clergy, his Apology for Apostolic Order (1807), and the pastoral manuals he wrote, above all The Clergyman's Companion, lay out his theology in his own words. Within a year of his death his friend William Berrian published a full Memoir (1831), and John McVickar followed with a detailed account of his early and professional years.
Modern church historians, particularly Robert Bruce Mullin in Episcopal Vision / American Reality (1986), have placed Hobart at the headwaters of the high church tradition that shaped the Episcopal Church through the nineteenth century. The institutional facts are beyond dispute: the General Theological Seminary, chartered in 1817, and Hobart College in Geneva, New York, are his monuments in brick and stone.
Hobart is commemorated on September 12, the day of his death, in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church in North America. He is remembered as the architect of American high churchmanship, the man who insisted that apostolic order was not cold formalism but the very vessel of the gospel, and who built the institutions to carry that conviction forward.
The General Theological Seminary still trains clergy; Hobart College still teaches; and his watchword, "Evangelical Truth and Apostolic Order," is still quoted whenever Anglicans argue that catholic order and evangelical faith belong together. He is, in effect, the patron of the via media as Americans received it.
The Clergyman's Companion(English, 1805)
Hobart's standard manual of pastoral and sacramental practice, long a fixture on Episcopal clergy shelves.
An Apology for Apostolic Order and Its Advocates(English, 1807)
His controversial defense of the threefold ministry, the clearest statement of his churchmanship.
A Memoir of the Life of the Right Reverend John Henry Hobart(English, 1831)
The contemporary life, written by a friend and successor at Trinity Church.
Episcopal Vision / American Reality: High Church Theology and Social Thought in Evangelical America(English, 1986)
Places Hobart at the source of the American high church tradition.
Further reading. Hobart's own Charges and The Clergyman's Companion repay the reader who wants his mind unfiltered. William Berrian's Memoir of the Life of the Right Reverend John Henry Hobart (1831) is the contemporary life. For the wider movement he began, Robert Bruce Mullin, Episcopal Vision / American Reality: High Church Theology and Social Thought in Evangelical America (Yale University Press, 1986).
Online resources. Berrian's Memoir and several of Hobart's own works are scanned at the Internet Archive.
O God, by your grace your servant John Henry Hobart, kindled by the flame of your love, became a burning and shining light in your Church, turning pride into humility and error into truth: Grant that we may be set aflame with the same spirit of love and discipline, and walk before you as children of light; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Readings for a Reformer of the Church
Jeremiah 1:4–10Psalm 461 Corinthians 3:10–23Matthew 5:13–20