Religion: Push at Princeton

"We are entering a new stage in the evolution of the theological seminary. The period of relative isolation and protection, when seminaries were expected to live a sheltered existence, has passed." So said Dr. James Iley McCord last week at his inauguration as the fourth president of U.S. Presbyterianism's most prestigious ministerial school, Princeton Theological Seminary. For bustling Texan McCord, the ceremonies were purely formal: he has been hard at work at his new job for seven months, since taking over from President John A. Mackay. But to his listeners, McCord last week gave a sharp preview of how he intends to run his school (enrollment: 485) in the future.

"The seminary cannot be a trade school," says McCord, and the first task is to cut down on proliferating specialized courses. In their place the faculty must achieve some sort of philosophic unity for the students. "We cannot go on expecting each student to achieve a synthesis on his own when we as a faculty cannot do it." The second task: finding "some way to avoid sweeping surveys, and rethinking the preponderance of lecture courses." To underscore his point, McCord quoted David Hume: "There is nothing to be learned from professors which is not to be met with in books." Continued McCord: "If theological seminaries are to stand with integrity in the academic world," there must be encouragement to "pursue some problems to the depths. Intellectual innocence is not a Christian virtue." Later, puffing on his pipe in the com fortable "President's Cottage," a century-old Gothic house recently remodeled by his wife Hazel, President McCord ex panded on his thesis. "There has been a theological parenthesis for some three decades or more. The church was chal lenged on her source of authority, and theology began to go on the defensive.

For all their weaknesses, the igth cen tury theologians engaged the world in relevant conversation, but we have be come disengaged." And, as he put it in his first chapel address last year, "we have not yet faced up to many of the issues raised by the igth century and posed by the new sciences. The result is that theology has become largely irrelevant in many quarters and often incredibly dull." Presbyterianism itself, added Presbyterian McCord, "is still too large ly a bourgeois phenomenon. It has not touched the masses, nor has it challenged a rising generation of intellectuals."