Universities: Doubts & the Divinity School

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Nathan Pusey's first speech as president of Harvard in 1953 was a call to revitalize the Harvard Divinity School, an institution that seemed to be dying in the face of secular criticism. Last week Pusey returned to the school for a convocation speech on its 150th anniversary at a time when the quality of its students and faculty has never been higher. Yet, Pusey noted sadly, "the world of unbelief is all about us," and doubts about the school's role seem to be rising with "increased poignancy, in new and awful forms."

From its beginning, said Pusey, the Divinity School has been torn between the need to devote itself to theological scholarship and the desire to provide the "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." Pusey fears that all the arguments over religious doctrine and the place of religion in a university have never really been settled and still lie in wait to ambush today's theologians.

Men have always, and rightly, "scorned older formulations of belief,"

Pusey said, but the mounting problem now is that "belief itself is consciously eschewed. We have all become doubting Thomases." Although most men "want to believe in something worthy of belief, many simply cannot or will not find this something in Christianity." It is ironic, Pusey added, that just when men are becoming cynical about much of contemporary culture, Christianity is being diluted by "a new kind of humanism."

In the face of all such doubts, Pusey ringingly reaffirmed his own devotion to the divinity school—an attitude that has not always been appreciated by all of Harvard. Scholarship at the school, he said, "must be the equal of this or any other university," and the school must also help create "the conditions where the faith can flourish." Pusey conceded that faith cannot be willed and salvation cannot be found in the study of theology. But, he pleaded, "can we not now, when occasionally we sense the Holy Spirit, undertake to be a little less luminous in our doubts, a little more ready to receive than to resist?"