Gabriel Fackre - Theology, Ethics, and Mission

Theology, Ethics, and Mission

Fackre has written in the fields of theology, ethics, and mission in thirty books and monographs, among them five volumes of a projected seven-volume series in Christian doctrine, The Christian Story, and chapters and encyclopedia entries in another ninety volumes and over three hundred articles and book reviews. He is past president of the American Theological Society. Fackre has been involved, often with his spouse, in various efforts in social action, beginning with their spearheading a campaign to bring Nisei students from World War II internment camps to Bucknell and taking part in a Quaker “peace caravan” in the closing year of the war. At Chicago, Fackre and another Divinity School student led a walk-out and protest at the Quadrangle (faculty) Club, where they worked as waiters, at the refusal by the majority of its members to include in membership an African-American professor, a policy shortly thereafter overturned. While at Chicago, after a summer student trip to study “The Church and the Working-Classes in Great Britain,” Fackre and his wife served a mission congregation in the back-of-the yards district, then spent a decade in a two-point mission charge in the steel mill towns of Homestead and Duquesne, Pennsylvania addressing issues of the working poor.

In the decade of the 1960s when Fackre was a professor at Lancaster Theological Seminary in the same state, they, with their children, helped to found a network of “freedom schools’ for young black and white Lancastrians, and participated in demonstrations for civil rights in the city. Fackre also took part in the initial civil rights demonstration in the city protesting hiring policies at downtown department stories in the summer of 1963, joined the March on Washington in 1963, and was part of a United Church of Christ contingent that assisted in the registration of black citizens in Canton, Mississippi in 1964. Later, the couple led in campaigns to integrate the city’s de facto segregated junior high schools, helped to found a citizen’s newspaper, The Lancaster Independent Press, and a coffee house, Encounter, out of which much of the foregoing activity emanated. After moving to the Boston area where Professor Fackre was called to teach systematic theology at Andover Newton Theological School, efforts at social change continued with Fackre chairing a committee that founded another citizens' newspaper, The Newton Times, and both he and his wife participated in peace and justice activities during their twenty-five years in Greater Boston. Retired on Cape Cod, they continue to take part in advocating for the homeless, efforts in environmental amelioration, and peace concerns.