Protestant Architect

(See Cover)

The 40 Lenten days that began March 3 and will end at Eastertide* have been for Christians a time for prayer and devotion, and for all men a time of urgency and stress. History, poised between Ivy and Jughead, between the 38th parallel and Dienbienphu, has enforced a Lenten mood upon the nations with the sack cloth of political conflict and showers of radioactive ash. The chocolate bunnies, the dizzy eggs and the pretty bonnets of Easter are the more incongruous for it. For Lent looks to the real Easter; and to lift high that great light in man's darkness is the holy challenge of the churches. How are the churches of America meeting the challenge? The change -- in a generation -- is enough to make wiseacres blink. Twenty-five years ago, traditional Christianity seemed to many an American intellectual to be rolling up the scroll. The Good Life was a matter of well-planned getting and spending, and all the answers were to be found written down, from Hegel to Freud to Keynes. Professor John Dewey and his fellow philosophers were preaching a heady trial & error pragmatism. The up-to-date intellectual was so uninterested in Christianity that he rarely found it worth while even to be antireligious.

Today in the U.S. the Christian faith is back in the center of things, with an intellectual respectability that has not been accorded it in generations. Membership in U.S. churches has risen almost 70% in a generation, outstripping the population increase by 2 to 1. Bestseller lists are crowded month after month with books with religious themes. The seminaries are crowded with the kind of young men the secular world competes for.

Thanks to such men of the mind as Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich and dozens more, theology has become an exciting topic again, whether in the pulpit, the meeting hall or at the luncheon table. Even among the skeptical, the Western world considers the question: Is it possible that Christianity is really true, after all?

Most significant sign of all, perhaps, is the postwar surge toward unity among the Protestant and Orthodox churches. At Amsterdam, in 1948, came the greatest gathering of Protestantism since the Reformation, and there, in a historic decision by representatives of 147 communions, the World Council of Churches was formed. This summer the World Council will meet again for its second Assembly in Evanston, Ill.--1,500 delegates and observers from 161 communions and 48 countries.

What will they talk about? For four years, from Asia to Europe to America, Protestant and Orthodox leaders have been exchanging memoranda, sifting agenda and preparing to discuss six themes, for which the Assembly will divide itself into six commissions: 1) Our Oneness in Christ and Our Disunity as Churches, 2) The Mission of the Church to Those Outside Her Life, 3) The Responsible Society in a World Perspective, 4) Christians in the Struggle for World Community, 5) Racial and Ethnic Tensions, 6) The Laity: the Christian in His Vocation. The very fact that 161 Protestant and Orthodox communions can meet to discuss such themes, with some hope of agreement, is vivid testimony to how far the worldwide movement for church unity has marched.

The Persuader. One of the most single-minded and effective forces behind the movement for church unity is an intense, snap-eyed man of 56 named Henry Pitney Van Dusen. From a desk in Manhattan, he directs the most influential school of theology in the U.S. --Union Theological Seminary. Taking leave of that desk, he is a tireless traveler on missions of fact-finding, teaching, persuasion--from such things as an exhaustive tour of Protestant mission stations in Asia and Africa last year to endless speaking tours along the U.S. college and university front. At his desk and after hours, he turns out some of the clearest and most muscular Christian writing of his time.

But energetic Pitney Van Dusen is also a theologian and a pastor of theologians, and Theologian Van Dusen has a special concern for the forthcoming world Assembly at Evanston.

The "Main Theme" of the Assembly, which all delegates will discuss together during the gathering's first week, sounds noncontroversial enough: Christ--the Hope of the World. Yet it contains a question that--before it is answered-- may draw a dramatic line between theologians of the Old World and the New. How much of the Christian hope depends upon the Second Coming of Christ?

European theologians may have Van Dusen in mind when they complain--as Norway's famed Bishop Eivind Berggrav did last year--that "the outlook of American Christianity often looks . . . rather earthbound, expecting the fulfillment of God's Kingdom here on earth--one might even say, expecting its realization in the U.S.A." To such European Protestants, the Christian hope rests more on the Biblical expectation that Christ will one day return to end the earthly enterprise.

The Van Dusen answer is one that draws on the whole hope-filled history of the U.S.--from the generations of missionaries who have gone out to preach the Gospel to U.S. aid for underdeveloped countries, from the abolition of slavery to the conquest of poverty. To hope solely in the Second Coming, says the typical U.S. Protestant theologian, is to encourage "too meager hopes for what Christ may accomplish in history here and now."

A Sense of Responsibility. Nobody around Philadelphia's fashionable Chestnut Hill, least of all Henry Pitney Van Dusen, expected that he would become a minister. "Pit's" classbook prophecies, both at William Penn Charter prep school and later at Princeton, were that he would wind up as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Dutch-descended Van Dusens had a habit of becoming successful lawyers, and Pit's Uncle Mahlon was a Supreme Court Justice from 1912 to 1922.

Even Pit Van Dusen's "conversion" was an accident. In his senior year at Penn Charter, Evangelist Billy Sunday held a special meeting for Philadelphia schoolchildren, to which a school delegation was sent. When the youngsters were invited to march up and sign pledge cards at the end of the service, the Penn Charter contingent was chagrined to see the pennant of a rival school moving toward the front of the hall. Not to be outdone, the Penn Charter standard-bearer took off, too. And Pit Van Dusen, mindful of his responsibilities as class president, hustled up the sawdust trail with the rest.

Other boys were joking about it as they left the hall, but Pit sat down by himself to think it over. He felt far from being a Christian, decided to do nothing about his pledge, just wait and see what would happen. What happened was that the local Episcopalian minister, who got Pitney's pledge card from Evangelist Sunday, spoke to his mother, and Pitney honored his word by joining the church. "If it hadn't been for that, I don't know when I'd have joined, if ever," he says.

The same year, Pit's well-developed sense of responsibility gave him another nudge. An earnest young man from Princeton Theological Seminary turned up at Penn Charter one day to recruit delegates to a youth conference. When he asked for volunteers, he was greeted by stony silence; when he asked if anyone would like to hear more about the conference before making up his mind, the silence became even stonier. Desperately, the seminarian asked if any boy would agree to receive promotional literature just in case someone might develop an interest, and at this point Class President Van Dusen spoke up. The result was that when Van Dusen turned up at Princeton the next year, the seminarian promptly recognized him and persuaded him to serve as assistant business manager of the next youth conference. In this casual way began the career of one of the great conferees of modern Protestantism.

Islands of Inactivity. In Van Dusen's day at Princeton (it was also F. Scott Fitzgerald's day), the contemptuous tag for fellows like Pit was apt to be "Christ-er." Pit spent two summers as counselor at a Princeton-run camp for underprivileged children, and became so interested in social problems that he followed up some of the families during the school year. He joined a boycott of the undergraduate eating clubs, in a vain attempt to force them to offer membership to any and all upperclassmen. Exclusion, he maintained, was "undemocratic and un-Christian."*

Undergraduate Van Dusen captained the Debating Team, headed the Undergraduate Council, the Bric-a-Brac and the International Polity Club, was valedictorian, Ivy Orator, Phi Beta Kappa, and an active member of the Student Christian Association. But for all sober purpose about him, Pit Van Dusen, when he graduated in 1919, still did not know what he wanted to do. The law, of course, beckoned, "but something made me hold back from it." He toyed with the idea of being a social worker, "although it was, and is, primarily a woman's field." His approach to the ministry was characteristic: "Most social problems are ultimately problems of character," he said to himself. "What institution gives its whole time to these problems?" Answer: the church.

But Van Dusen was a young man of his time. The very word church, he wrote later, evoked "two vivid pictures, each heavily charged with repellent associations. First, large numbers of great, dark, often ugly, almost always locked, unused buildings set down at some of the busiest and most valuable corners of the world's life while quick and fascinating currents of thought and life surged around and past them . . . islands of slumbering inactivity amidst the urgent flow of public affairs . . . Second, two particular churches where [I] sat on under dull, mournful, interminable preaching by two elderly gentlemen in funereal black robes--undoubtedly sincere but . . . rather futile . . . The peripheral lethargy if not laziness of the church, the ineptitude if not stupidity of the ministry--irrevelance and futility--these are the two most ineffaceable deposits from early associations."

It was not surprising that Van Dusen hesitated to take the plunge. The Student Christian Association asked him to stay on for a couple of years as graduate secretary, and he accepted. During those two years, there came to Princeton an odd, owl-faced man with a quiet voice and a burning desire to get young people to "change," to "get right with God" in group confession and accept the daily guidance of the divine. Frank Buchman, whose "Oxford Group" later became Moral Re-Armament and mushroomed into the best-financed and most-discussed evangelistic enterprise of the '20s and '30s, helped convince Van Dusen that there was some life in the old church yet. Though he soon outgrew Buchman's group, Pit had made up his mind, and he started on his way.

Avoiding the Flesh pots. The question of which church to serve posed no problem. His lawyer father was a casual Episcopalian,-- his mother a devout Presbyterian. Pit unhesitatingly chose the Presbyterian for his ministry. "I wasn't keen about the liturgical emphasis in the Episcopal Church," he says. "I also thought it contained more charming nominal Christians than any other. I missed its lack of moral drive. My religious motivation is primarily moral, and always will be. I didn't have to read Reinhold Niebuhr to know about original sin. The forces of evil are always gaining ground, and must be stopped again and again. This is a continuous battle."

Van Dusen turned for advice to the greatest Presbyterian preacher and pastor of his time, Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin. Coffin advised him to do what he himself had done: study for a year at Edinburgh, then return for the rest of his training at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan. Van Dusen agreed, and thereupon began walking in Dr. Coffin's footsteps.

At Edinburgh he took lodgings with two other Americans, and impressed them with his Spartan indifference to the deficiencies of Scottish heating, his zeal for theology, and his scrupulousness about accounting for every groat he spent from the trust fund in Philadelphia on which he was drawing.

He managed to find time for some mild social life in Edinburgh; at one party he met Elizabeth Bartholomew of the Scottish mapmaking Bartholomews, whom he married in 1931 when he went back to Edinburgh for his Ph.D. But relaxation, social or otherwise, is not one of Pit Van Dusen's talents. Once, when his friend Erdman Harris and another classmate with some extra cash planned to visit Rome for a splurge during a winter recess, 23-year-old Van Dusen heard about it and quickly revised the plans.

He urged them to avoid the "fleshpots" of Europe; instead, he suggested, they should travel in second-class accommodations to the cities of Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, to study conditions under the postwar inflation and observe how U.S. relief money was being spent. Van Dusen ended by setting up the entire itinerary and going along.

Seclusion & Solitude. Back in the U.S., Van Dusen was licensed by the New York Presbytery, and almost at once found himself involved in the controversy then raging between the Fundamentalists and their liberal opponents. On the ground that young Van Dusen declined to affirm the literal Biblical account of the virgin birth, a conservative-minded judicial commission of the Presbyterian General Assembly challenged the right of the Presbytery to ordain him. The issue dragged on for two years before his ordination was officially recognized, with the help of a brief in his support by a Presbyterian lawyer named John Foster Dulles, who argued for the right of a Presbytery to determine the qualifications for ordination.

In 1926, when Dr. Coffin became president of Union, he asked his energetic young friend to join the faculty as instructor in philosophy of religion and systematic theology. Van Dusen turned down a teaching job at Princeton to accept. He has been at Union ever since, becoming dean of students in 1931 and president on Dr. Coffin's retirement in 1945.

In the two square blocks of Manhattan's Morningside Heights enclosed by Union's grey Gothic buildings, Pit Van Dusen lives the fragmented and busy life of a corporation president, multiple board member, personal counselor and theologian. His day begins in his sunny, comfortable, ten-room apartment at 7:15 with a hot (then cold) shower, and ends there around midnight with a bedtime glass of ginger ale and milk. The period between is a hectic but orderly scramble of board meetings (he is a trustee of ten educational institutions, plus the Rockefeller Foundation and the General Education Board), lectures, student interviews and faculty meetings; day's end leaves his two secretaries with a thorough sense of having earned their pay. Van Dusen himself, likely as not, "takes his desk home" to catch up on his correspondence after dinner, with the help of a dictating machine.

Official dinners bore him; he accepts no more than three or four such invitations a year. The nearest thing to real relaxation for Van Dusen comes in the summer, when he takes about six weeks off to spend with his wife and three college-age boys at his country place at Sorrento, Me. Even here, he spends at least three hours a day studying and writing in a remote and tiny cabin named Seclusion, where he has written most of his twelve books and countless articles. (His wife has a similar cabin. Its name: Solitude.)

Glory & Despair. Van Dusen's biggest job at nondenominational Union has been reorganizing the seminary to meet the doubled postwar enrollment, plus the influx of students' wives. He rearranged housing facilities, started a program by which churches would finance Union students from their own budgets, increased the number of foreign fellows from about 20 to 64 this year, and upped the budget from roughly $500,000 to $1,100,000. Union has come a long way from that December day in 1836 when the seminary first opened its doors to 13 students who wanted, as the preamble to Union's charter put it, "to live free from party strife, and to stand aloof from all the extremes of doctrinal speculation, practical radicalism, and ecclesiastical domination."

Union students are no cloistered intellectuals. One of the original provisions in the Union charter was that the seminary should be subjected to all the pressures of city life. Today, this means exposure to slums and subways, to politics, raucousness and muggers, as well as to lectures on theology. Union, explains Dean of Students Bill Webber, wants its students to be shocked into asking: "What can the Gospel have to say to this incredibly pagan city?" And then it wants them to sit down and figure out the answer.

The glory of Union--and sometimes its despair--is its cherished tradition of complete theological freedom. Union theologians have periodically been denounced as heretics by each other as well as by outsiders; like workers in a boiler factory, they become alarmed at any sudden spell of quiet.

Van Dusen himself has been something of an upstream swimmer against the intellectual current prevailing at the seminary during the past two decades. These have been the "neo-orthodox" years of theological through-the-looking-glass, when the wildest radicals were the most Biblically conservative, and the mark of old fuddy-duddyism was a relaxed attitude toward dogma. Students jampack the classes of Reinhold Niebuhr to hear that man is not good and never will be, and that humans must be content to strive for conditional and imperfect ends.

Unknown but Close. One of the knottiest of Protestant doctrines, to modern minds, is the one raised by the main theme this summer at Evanston: Christian eschatology--literally, "the doctrine of last things," which includes, among other things, the Second Coming and the end of the world.

How will it happen--and when? The Judaism of the Old Testament contains three different concepts of the world's end: 1) God's destruction of the universe, 2) God's destruction of the universe, preserving some or all men for later judgment, 3) God's ending of the earthly order of things in history and the establishment of His kingdom on earth.

According to the New Testament--and the classic creeds--Christ, who has already come, will return a second time "to judge both the quick and the dead." The earliest Christians seem to have expected Christ's Second Coming and the end of the world as something that was just around the corner.

Later, from time to time, the imminent expectation of the Second Coming stirred up new flurries. Joachim of Flora speculated that Christ would return in the year 1260. In the 1590s, John Napier, the Scottish inventor of logarithms, predicted the Second Coming between the years 1668 and 1700, and Sir Isaac Newton, though unwilling to set a specific date, announced that he felt certain the time was at hand.

"Adventism," as it is sometimes called, has had a lively history in the U.S. as well. Its best-known prophet was William Miller, a New York State farmer who announced, after careful study of the Scriptures, that Christ would return and the world would end between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844. When the deadline came, with business as usual, Miller made a recalculation and revised the date to Oct. 22, 1844. Hundreds of Millerites dutifully sold their property, settled their accounts, and turned their faces skyward on the fateful morning.

Even after this second disappointment, there were still enough Millerites left to form the first Adventist organization the following year. Today there are half a dozen Adventist groups in the U.S. Largest of them: the Seventh-Day Adventists (membership: 268,533), who believe in the personal, visible return of Christ "at a time unknown but close at hand," when a new earth will be created out of the ruins of the old as an eternal dwelling place for the redeemed. The Seventh-Day Adventists will not be represented at Evanston. Reason: they consider their message unique and not to be submerged in the ecumenical movement.

Here & Now. When, in 1950, the World Council's central committee selected as the main theme for discussion at Evanston the subject, Christ--the Hope of the World, Pit Van Dusen was pleased. Most of us, he wrote later, would expect such a theme to result in a "restatement of what Christians are entitled to hope for the future of human society" and "a strong reaffirmation of the Christian assurance of eternal life." But the 25 theologians of an advisory commission, whose job it was to prepare a preliminary paper on the main theme, saw the hope in a different light.

Said one continental theologian, as they began their discussions: "We know that our American colleagues speak much of the First Coming of Christ. What troubles us is, we cannot be sure that they affirm His Second Coming."

As a leader of the ecumenical movement, Van Dusen could only deplore anything that might lead to Protestant disunity. But as a theologian, it would be difficult to remain silent on a question of emphasis so fundamental to his faith. And as director of the Evanston sessions that will discuss the theme, he could not allow himself openly to take sides.

Pit Van Dusen solved his dilemma by publishing in the Christian Century a succinct statement of the two principal Protestant positions on the Second Coming of Christ: 1) that the whole of Christian hope must be stated in terms of the ultimate eschatological hope; 2) while affirming Christ's Second Coming, "this expectation by no means exhausts the whole of Christian hope" but finds important elements in "the presence of Christ as empowering reality here and now."

To these he added a third proposition, and its fuller development indicated that it was Van Dusen's own. This view "does not deny the possibility of Christ's return to end history. But it does not believe this expectation to be an essential element in Christian hope for the world, and for at least two reasons. It points to the indubitable fact that the early church anticipated the imminent return of Christ and that that expectation was not fulfilled . . .

"On the other hand, this third view questions whether the whole idea of a 'future fulfillment' of history is a conception that . . . can be given any intelligible or valid meaning whatsoever. In what sense would the return of Christ in some distant tomorrow fulfill the centuries of history which have already intervened since His First Coming, not to speak of the millennia which may well pass before history ends?"

Van Dusen's concluding advice to Christians in a Lenten era: "American Christians [at Evanston] must come to grips with [a] term almost as unfamiliar to their ears as was the term 'ecumenical' 20 or even 10 years ago--the term 'eschatological.' Not only must they accustom their ears to the sound of the word; they must give their minds and hearts to the attempt to comprehend it and why it holds so decisive, so pivotal a place in the hope of fellow Christians in many lands and of many traditions.

"But above all, they should re-examine critically the nature and ground of their own hope as Christians, in order that they may give a clear, convinced and convincing account of the faith that is in them."

* Actually 46 days by the calendar, but Sundays are not included in Lent. * Since 1950, by undergraduate decision, all upperclassmen are invited to join a club. * Pit is still a lay member "in fairly good standing" of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Chestnut Hill.

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