Faith’s Waning Power to Enthrall

Excerpts from President Nathan M. Pusey’s comments at the September 28, 1966, convocation of Harvard Divinity School

It was decided one hundred fifty years ago at Harvard that preparation for the professional ministry demanded something more than undergraduate liberal learning followed by some desultory reading under the guidance of an active clergyman. But what was this to be? A study of the sources and history of the Christian faith more intensive and specialized than a general undergraduate education could provide? This of course. But somehow it had to be more. The spirit of that age, which prompted the founding of schools of mechanic arts, together with manifest human need, demanded that it had also to be useful learning—a kind of learning, not wholly gained from books, that a man could take with him into the world to help him in the care and cure of souls. The notion was hard to refute, but with its acceptance, trouble began. Granted the reasonableness of the claim, just what kind of learning, precisely, should this be? There has been tension over this issue in the School since its beginning.

Despite the School’s earnest efforts to provide a more professional training, the day before the celebration of its fiftieth anniversary an intemperate critic told a Boston audience that the faculty of this School “feed their students morning, noon, and night on nothing but theology”; and he went on to charge that the members of the faculty of that time were not at all interested in “imbuing men with the pastoral spirit.”

Other episodes were to follow in the long controversy between those at the School who, especially sensitive to the pull of the University, were content, if not actually determined, to expend their full effort on scholarship; and those others, Hebraists as well as Greeks, who felt a more pressing immediate obligation to Church and World. At one time some who thought the Harvard Divinity School was too much a creation of the Academy established a short-lived rival institution, the Boston School for the Ministry, to provide an education more concerned for the practical needs of ministers. On another occasion one of the compelling arguments offered for joining the Andover Theological School to the Divinity School at Harvard was that the former was closer to the churches and less captivated by purely scholarly pursuits. But the claim that the Harvard Divinity School was more interested in scholarship than in what God was doing in the world would not die. Apropos of this charge, which has been leveled at the Divinity School again and again throughout its history, I find a certain wry humor in Professor Ahlstrom’s characterization of the School’s “middle Period” as a time of comparative stagnation when “only the Library grew.”

Not only have differences of opinion about educational aim and emphasis marred the School’s history throughout its hundred fifty years of separate existence; even more troublesome have been differences over doctrine. These have been many and various.…

The recent history of the Divinity School starts with the sketch for a revitalized program which was drawn by a committee of experts appointed by President Conant in 1946 to consider the future of the School. Their report insisted: that the School could not be abandoned; that a first-rate school of religious learning was needed at Harvard (the old, and honored and indispensable emphasis on graduate education once more); that toward this end money would have to be raised to make possible an enlarged faculty; and, among several other more specific recommendations, that increased attention be given to Practical Theology. It appeared almost that we were back at the beginning once more. And so we approach the present day.

During the twenty years succeeding the committee’s report, most of its limited objectives have been attained. For this we can be grateful. But is it too much to say that the old divided interests and controversies, in new form, about educational emphasis, and more especially about faith and mission, remain? And is it not equally true that the larger goals, to the attainment of which a revitalized school of religious studies at Harvard was expected to contribute, continue to elude us? Has the place of religion here and in other universities, and, in a much more ambitious frame of reference, within American culture, been notably improved or clarified? Has a countervailing force to the materialistic power of our culture even gained a beachhead during these years, let alone begun to have fanned out from such a base? Perhaps this kind of achievement was and is too much to ask. But something of the kind was hoped for—early and late—has always been hoped for throughout the history of this School; and small as the School is—and unimpressive as is the assemblage of such schools in the totality of our culture with its massive secular educational enterprise—the goal, though still elusive, nevertheless remains urgently desirable.

Uncertainty and doubt remain inside and outside the School, inside and outside the University. Men continue to scorn older formulations of belief—and rightly so, now as in the past; but now belief itself—professedly—is consciously eschewed. We have all become doubting Thomases. But not quite all of us, everywhere. Certainly the great majority of men and women want to believe, want to believe in something worthy of belief—and need to—though of these, many simply cannot or will not find this something in Christianity. I expect a careful review of the history of the Harvard Divinity School would show that this is no new problem, not even among its faculty and students. But would a careful scrutiny of the School’s present situation reveal that doubts concerning its enterprise exist now, inside and out, with increased poignancy, in new and awful forms? I have no right to say. I hope not. But from what I hear and read I suspect it might.

A new kind of humanism seems to be engulfing even recently updated formulations of the faith. To many no creedal formulation now seems possible because, it is insisted, there can be no supernatural reference to undergird such a creed. And if creeds go, what then becomes of the Church? I do not find many clear statements on this.…

The item in the heritage of the Divinity School to which I have wished especially to call attention today is its recurring sense that to fulfill its task this School has to be both an excellent place of study, and, at the same time and above all, a place of immediate and continuing service to the Church, which Church, we need repeatedly to recall, was put into the world that men may believe.

What could be a more urgent or more important task in this time than this, when the faith that has sustained so much of what man has attempted in the world in recent generations, and which has obviously led to many magnificent, we would say, indispensable achievements—the belief that he must and can make his way on his own—is losing its power to enthrall? Disenchantment begins to show itself everywhere. It is not only the young who are asking, what is contemporary culture doing to me, and to my neighbor? and what should it be doing? Many are beginning to have doubts. Being less impressed by our culture’s accomplishments, or rather more impressed by its oversights and its debilitating by-products, they are developing an indifferent, even a cynical attitude toward it. Would it not be supremely ironical at such a time, when our culture is almost fatally in need of saving grace, if theology, victimized by a new humanism, should choose to run off in pursuit of another man-made delusion?

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