NEW EMPHASIS ON STUDY OF RELIGION

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 27990, 9 June 1956, Page 11

NEW EMPHASIS ON STUDY OF RELIGION

Change Of Policy At Harvard University

WIDE INTEREST THROUGHOUT UNITED STATES ,4

[Specially written for “The Press” by DAVID M. TAYLOR]

Few things could be more exciting to a New Zealander than to enter the stately gates of Harvard, and wander through the Yard with all senses open to catch the spirit of this, the oldest college in the United States.

More than three centuries ago, Harvard was established when an eighth-of-an-acre house-lot and a one-acre cow-yard were purchased. This slip of land was promptly christened “the College Yard” to distinguish it from the cow-yards on either side. Other American colleges, springing up later, also had their Yards; but in 1774 Princeton’s became a “campus,” and others followed suit, except Harvard which alone retains this old name.

In this area today are Massachusetts Hall (the oldest building left), the Widener Memorial Libraries, the Memorial Church, and 25 other buildings, illustrating three centuries of college architecture, and named after such figures as Phillips Brooks, the famous preacher-bishop.

But Harvard long ago outgrew its Yard, and now spreads over Cambridge, Massachusetts. Across on the Boston side of the Charles river is the Graduate School of Business Administration. Opposite the Unitarian First Church with its old burying-ground is the School of Public Administration; and opposite the Common is Rad cliffe College for women. Thus ancient and modern rub shoulders together: Queen Victoria, George the Third, and Charles the First; traditional professions and twentieth century technology. New England history grasps the heel of aeronautics, and the Divinity School looks over the grass to the Nuclear Laboratories.

In spite of the modern danger that specialists will be completely ignorant of each others’ fields, I got the feeling that in Cambridge there were forces at work to remind men that other fields than their own exist and deserve respect. Take theology, for example. It has had a hard time this century, but now is holding its head high once more. Theology has from the beginning been taught and studied at Harvard. The origin of this university was thus described in 1643:

“After God had carried us safe . to New England, and wee had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, rear’d convenient places for God’s worship, and settled the civill government: One of the next things we longed for and looked alter was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity: dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.” “Not all Plain Sailing” But although Harvard, like most of the great universities of the world, was founded as a direct result of men’s religious faith, the actual teaching of religious subjects within its walls has not been all plain sailing. One by one. all the problems raised by such teaching within a university have presented themselves in a series of crises. The period in which theology ' received its heaviest blows coincided with the years when James Bryant Conant was President of Harvard (1933-1953). For, wide as were his sympathies, he never believed that religion was other than a divisive force. Throughout this period, he exercised an influence that became world-wide; but the Divinity School looked in vain to him for encouragement or help. While many departments were rejoicing in rapid expansion, this school was told, “It is our rule here for every tub to stand on its own bottom.” All the efforts of enthusiasts were stultified by lack of sympathy at the top. Sometimes when chairs fell vacant, they had to stay vacant, because there was no money, and no approval given for an appeal for new money. Thus by 1944, the Divinity teaching staff fell to nine men, compared with (1954 figures) 40 Yale, 38 at Chicago, and 43 at

Union Seminary, New York. This was indeed the heyday of secularism at Harvard, when men believed that higher education made religion unnecessary, and that the proper treatment for theology was to leave it alone and let it die. Long after many other universities had moved out of this era, Harvard lingered on.

Yet while Dr. Conant was still in office, respect for theology was reasserting itself within the other disciplines, and in 1946, the university appointed a special commission to conduct a thorough study of the place and function* of the Divinity School within the University. This commission reported in 1947: ‘‘Harvard has no obligation, explicit or implicit, to any single religious denomination or church. But as a national educational institution, Harvard does have a national responsibility, and in fulfilling that responsibility, Harvard cannot ignore the religious needs of the people. . . . Millions of people in this country and in every country are seeking religious leadership and guidance today. They are entitled to have it. Harvard is morally obligated to help advance religious leadership; to provide an educational seed-bed for the religious life of our times, a solid foundation of sound and liberal scholarship.”

Four years later, the President and Fellows of Harvard approved the recommendations of the commission, and an appeal was launched for e.OOO.OLX* dollars, of which 1.000.000 dollars was to be given by the university itself. In 1953, when Dr. Conant resigned, the first public act of his successor, Nathan Marsh Pusey, was to give an address at the Divinity School in which he made known his intention to be a leader in- strengthening the school. He described how, as soon ft; his appointment was announced, he began to receive letters in a flood from graduates and from all sorts and conditions of men, from all parts of the country and from abroad, from everybody who had ideas about what Harvard needed most from its new President. He said: ‘‘No alleged shortcoming of the university was more frequently nor more insistently called to my attention than what was referred to as ‘the present low state of religion at Harvard.’ A good many of my correspondents also spoke with feeling about what they called ‘the neglected condition of the Divinity School’.”

“Must Always Serve Truth”

He then analysed the situation as he saw it himself: “There is an almost desperate urgency for this and for other schools of religion now vigorously to do something and convincing to meet the present need. It is leadership in religious knowledge, and even more in religious experience —not increased industrial might, not more research facilities, certainly not these things by themselves—of which we now have a most gaping need. And it. is because of this that you who haveychosen to study religion and to give your lives to the ministry stand

again where many times before your illustrious predecessors have stood, in the very centre of the fight. The Divinity School is not on the periphery of Harvard University: it is not remote from any region where the serious business of men is done, and it cannot be permitted to become so. . .

The University must always serve truth, but we must make a fresh effort and learn again to do this more fully.” Since that day, gifts have poured in. and the programme of development has moved steadily forward. The new Dean of the Divinity School is Dr. Douglas Horton, who visited New Zealand not long ago on World Council of Churches business. Other famous scholars who have now taken chairs in the school include the philosopher J. D. Wild. Amos Wilder from Chicago. Paul Tillich and George Florovskv from Union Seminary, George Buttrick from New York. John Dillenberger from Columbia University, and Krister Stendhal from Uppsala. Sweden.

Here then we see a great contemporary university, one of the last strongholds of the view that theologv is not the responsibility of the university, making a sincere effort to regain its former reputation for breadth and wholeness. It is endeavouring to supply something indispensable to man in his present condition, since (to use the words of General Macarthur) the world’s problems are ‘‘all basically theological.”