Gabriel Fackre

Personal life

Fackre was born in Jersey City, New Jersey and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He and his spouse, Dorothy Ashman Fackre, married in 1945, were students together at both Bucknell University and the University of Chicago Divinity School and later the parents of five children and grandparents of eight. Dorothy, also an ordained minister, served with Gabriel in congregations in the Chicago stockyards district and in the greater Pittsburgh steel mill towns of Homestead and Duquesne, Pennsylvania for 12 years. Having been involved together in theological, ecclesiastical, and social issues throughout their marriage, they are writing a joint memoir.

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.

Doctrine and ecumenism

Fackre was raised a Baptist by his mother, Mary Comstock Fackre, whose husband, Toufick Fackre, was Syrian Orthodox. Later, he and his Episcopalian spouse, Dorothy, sought an ecumenical denomination in which to carry out their anticipated ministry. They moved to the Evangelical and Reformed Church in 1950, the denomination of Reinhold Niebuhr, whose thought much influenced them in a journey out of an earlier pacifism to a post-war period of “neo-orthodoxy.” In 1957, that Church merged with the Congregational Christian Churches to form the United Church of Christ, in which they both now hold their ministerial standing.

Ecumenism has been a leading commitment for both Fackres, given expression in their first book, Under the Steeple, relating the “life together” themes of the two early World Council of Churches assemblies they attended—Amsterdam, the Netherlands in 1948 and Evanston, IL, USA in 1954—to parish life and mission. Professor Fackre was one of the representatives of the United Church of Christ in the nine-denomination Consultation on Church Union (predecessor to the current Churches of Christ Uniting) and the Lutheran-Reformed Conversation, the latter eventuating in the full communion agreement of 1997 of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church, USA, the Reformed Church of America and the United Church of Christ. He also has been engaged as an “evangelical catholic” in outreach, on one hand, to Churches in the Great Tradition as a co-founder of the Mercersburg Society and board member of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology, and on the other, to contemporary evangelicalism in a variety of conferences and book projects of the same. Kindred to the latter, he has written extensively on evangelism, seeking to wed social concern to that outreach.

The conjunction of concern about Christian doctrine and commitment to the ecumenical project has led Fackre to invest himself deeply in efforts at theological renewal in his own denomination. Prominent among them have been the founding in 1984 of the annual Craigville Theological Colloquies on Cape Cod and in 1993 the Confessing Christ movement in the United Church of Christ. Also since 1962, he has encouraged teacher-pastor dialogue on current theological topics by launching “Theological Tabletalk” groups in both seminaries and in retirement on Cape Cod.

A Festschrift for Gabriel Fackre, with recognition as well of his close partnership in life and mission with Dorothy, appeared in 2002, edited by their daughter Skye Fackre Gibson.