Harvard Divinity Bulletin - 2004 Convocation Address

THE BACKWARD GLANCE AND THE FORWARD LOOK
The 2004 Convocation Address
by Peter J. Gomes

I have waited for some time for the pleasure of this opportunity to speak to the Divinity School at its Convocation, and I am grateful to the dean, who generously responded to my request to do so. At Harvard, unlike at many other learned foundations, we do not have the salutary custom of an inaugural address upon election into a professorship, otherwise I doubtless would have addressed you in 1974, when I became the eighth Plummer Professor of Christian Morals. Over the past thirty years, I have had ample opportunity to think of what I might say on an occasion such as this, and here it is.

The irony in the fact that I speak in Sanders Theatre, and not in the Memorial Church, is not lost upon me; however, it could be much worse, for I could be speaking under the "Tent of Meeting" on Andover Lawn, competing with the traffic as Professor Gyatso did so well last year.

Before I begin, I have a few obligations I would like to discharge. In my first appointment I was made Tutor in Divinity by Dean Stendahl; I became Plummer Professor in the year in which Preston Williams was Acting Dean; Dean Rupp invited me to teach the very first incarnation of ITEM; Dean Thiemann appointed me Dudleian Lecturer just a decade ago, and Dean Graham has now invited me to give the Convocation Address. I thank each for his generosity.

The first Convocation that I attended was in September 1965, in the Memorial Church, and on that occasion all of the new students in the Bachelor of Divinity class attended, for we thought we had no other choice. George Huntston Williams, the Hollis Professor of Divinity, was the speaker, just returned from a stint as one of the accredited "Protestant Observers" at the Second Vatican Council. One of the lessons read on that occasion was from the Apocrypha, a set of books with which I, as a good Baptist, was thoroughly unfamiliar, although I do remember his text, from the Wisdom of Solomon: "And from generation to generation passing into holy souls wisdom maketh men friends of God and prophets."

Professor Williams gave his address the title "Friends of God and Prophets," and more than that I cannot remember, except for the fact that my friends and I remarked on how we scarcely understood a word that he had said. In awe we realized that we were now at Harvard, our ignorance was not surprising, and that we had much to learn. Based upon my experience of my first Harvard Convocation Address, my expectations today are sufficiently modest.

Rather than speaking out of my particular academic or professional competence, I have chosen the broadest possible topic for this occasion: the Divinity School itself. For thirty years as Plummer Professor I have known this School, with my experience dating from my student days which began in September 1965; and with the exception of the two years from 1968 to 1970, I have had a formal association of nearly forty years with it, a span, you will note, of biblical proportions. What I have to say obviously does not have the force of policy, it represents no party or position, and the agenda, such as it is, is mine and mine alone. Thus I have claimed as my own the incredible freedom to think aloud and in public, and to do so candidly, subjectively, and happily, in the sure conviction that neither president nor dean has it in his power to shut me up. Of them, and of you, I ask only an honest hearing.

Although the study of divinity at Harvard is as old as Harvard itself, and although by common consent the formal organization of the School dates from 1816, when professional instruction for the ministry was separated from the routine instruction of undergraduates in Harvard College, the Divinity School, as most of us know it, is hardly more than fifty years old. Thus, although we have a long history, we have a relatively short past.

I will not rehearse some of the sad facts of our twentieth-century institutional history. Despite the heroic efforts of a small but brave faculty, eccentric and distinguished, and the labors of an able but seriously overworked dean, the School had reached a point so critical after the Second World War that at the highest levels a serious proposal had been made to shut the place down. The elderly faculty, it was joked, consisted of a "mystic, a skeptic, and a dyspeptic," the finances were in chronic disarray, and a reputation for a disinterest in the professional ministry, despite repeated efforts, was difficult to overcome and affected recruitment, placement, and financial aid. George Williams told me that when he arrived in 1947 as the new, and only, assistant professor, almost the first words from Dean Sperry to him were, "Mr. Williams, I am sorry to say that there is no future here for you."

In that very year, however, a special commission appointed to look into the future of the Divinity School made its report. The commission was chaired by a distinguished Harvard alumnus, John Lord O'Brian, and consisted of J. Seelye Bixler, former professor of theology and then president of Colby College; Ernest Cadman Colwell, former dean of the Divinity School and then president of the University of Chicago; J. Harry Cotton, president of McCormack Theological Seminary; Reinhold Niebuhr, professor in Union Seminary, New York City; and Palfrey Perkins, minister of Boston's King's Chapel and a member of the Board of Preachers. The report, drafted by Niebuhr, ran to fifty-six pages, and was unambiguous in its claims for the future of the Divinity School and Harvard's obligations to ensure it:

The commission's report is permeated with the conviction that the postwar generation stood in great need of the kind of intelligent and courageous leadership in religion that Harvard could provide. The work of the Divinity School, as revisioned and enlarged, would contribute to the well-being of the world, the health of religious communities, the field of religious studies, and undergraduate education in Harvard College.

It is worth noting that in the year of this report the Faculty of Arts and Sciences was also subject to a report on its educational mission, the so-called "Red Book," and its program designed to educate for a free society, which came to be called "General Education." The notion that a world emerging from the destroyed threat of totalitarianism required a new educational mandate was not restricted to college education; the O'Brian Report claimed a special mandate for religion in this new thinking, and urged that a re-energized Divinity School actually assume responsibility for undergraduate education in religion. The report said:

The School would have a role to play in addressing the obvious defects of the pulpit and the general religious illiteracy of an age of materialist anxiety. Again the report:

The commission deplored the notion of the Divinity School as an inadequately funded dependency of the University, and insisted on its integral part of Harvard in function and responsibility. "We are also convinced," the members say in the Executive Summary, "that the Divinity School, if adequately staffed, can contribute greatly to the enrichment of the University." The report concludes:

Things move slowly at Harvard, and the first fruits of this report would not be seen until both Dean Sperry and President Conant retired in June 1953. On September 30, 1953, the new president, Nathan Marsh Pusey, having accepted the invitation of Acting Dean George Huntston Williams to address this Convocation, did so in an address entitled "A Faith for These Times," and in so doing became the first president since 1909 to venture across to the Divinity School. He seized the opportunity to reiterate one of the central claims of the O'Brian Report, and early in his address remarked: "There is an almost desperate urgency for schools of religion vigorously to do something fresh and convincing to meet the present need." (Pusey, 6)

"It is leadership in religious knowledge," he continued, "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."

Recognizing his audience, similar to this one in its mix of faculty, students, and friends, Pusey said:

This was not just presidential rhetoric or a pious hope. Pusey was arguably even then one of the world's foremost Christian laymen, involved in the ecumenical movement at home and abroad, and on intimate terms with such secular movers and shakers as Henry Luce and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the leading Protestant theologians in both Europe and the United States. Five million dollars in new endowment would be raised, new faculty appointed, and a new dean, Douglas Horton, set in place to carry forward the great plan.

I have read the "Annual Reports of the Dean" from 1953 to 1965, which cover the administrations of George Williams, Douglas Horton, and Samuel Miller. They report twelve years of incredible activity and accomplishment, the prose fairly leaps off the page, and the sense of a destiny in fulfillment is palpable. Added to the faculty in those twelve years, to name but a few, were Krister Stendahl, Amos Wilder, Frank Moore Cross, Jr., George Ernest Wright, Paul Tillich, Helmut Koester, Richard R. Niebuhr, James Luther Adams, Gordon D. Kaufman, Heiko Oberman, J. Lawrence Burkholder, C. Conrad Wright, George Buttrick, John Wild, and John Dillenberger. Many of these men held ordination in their denominations. In this period would also occur the establishment of the Stillman Chair in Roman Catholic Theological Studies, the first in any Protestant seminary and a radical, controversial, and creative move before Vatican II; and there would occur as well the founding of the Center for the Study of World Religions, also the first of its kind in a setting of this kind.

When my classmates and I entered Andover Hall for the first time in September 1965, we assumed that what we encountered had been in place at least since the flood. Just as it is difficult to think of one's parents as ever having been young or having sex, we never imagined that the seemingly stable, secure, and impervious institution to which we had had the privilege of being admitted had taken its present dynamic form not much more than a decade before we arrived. The place seemed both venerable and vigorous, and I have lived off that excitement ever since.
It was not always an easy place in which to be, but no one had ever promised otherwise. We candidates for the ministry in the Bachelor of Divinity program sensed that we were here on sufferance, which perhaps had to do with the fact that the faculty committee with the heaviest firepower was the Committee on Higher Degrees, and that we were thus candidates for "lower" degrees. How well I recall a chapel service in which one of our senior professors, while eulogizing a recently deceased and very young alumnus, said, in effect: "As Mr. Jones was an indifferent student, he went into the ministry." This was not, I am convinced, an intentional snub, but it made clear to all and sundry our place in the unavoidable hierarchy of the School.

Nevertheless, I owe much to this period in my life where I sat under the instruction of nearly all of our members emeriti. At the risk of confessing too much but in hope of sharing a useful truth, particularly with new students who are hoping for the ministry, I became a serious Christian at and because of Harvard Divinity School. I had known pious people who were not very bright, and I knew lots of bright people who were not at all pious, but here, for the first time, I encountered intellectual giants who were also men of deep faith. They somehow seemed able to hold both faith and reason together in such a way that they encouraged me to attempt to do the same. To hear a professor lecture regularly gives one a certain level of insight into the mind of that person; to hear that same person preach regularly and participate as a person of faith in an academic community provides another imperishable insight. It was often pointed out that the Divinity School was not a church, and should not be confused with one; it was rather a place where the relationship between the life of the mind and the life of the spirit was taken seriously, and we students learned as much by observing our professors in that discourse as ever we did from their subject matter alone. The ideal of the "learned ministry," a hoary seventeenth-century Harvard conceit, was personified in the learned ministers under whom we sat, and of many of them could be said what is inscribed on the tablet in honor of President Pusey in Divinity Hall Chapel:

This has been a long backward glance but a necessary one, for as the School grows larger, more complex, and further removed from its renewal of a half-century ago, we must remember that we have come from somewhere in particular, that we are and remain heirs of certain experiences and expectations, and that something of our past may well have something to do with our future. For rising generations of students and faculty to be unaware of these potent origins means that we are deprived, willfully or not, of something that is precious, significant, and uniquely our own. If the story is not told, who will remember it? If we do not remember it, what can we possibly learn from it?

"Tradition?" I can hear some of you muttering up the sleeves of your gowns, "Tradition, the dead hand of the past and the dead white males who ran it." Well, if truth be told—and why not, in a place emblazoned with VERITAS?—it is for the sake of the tradition of the place, however imperfectly understood, that many of our students come here; and those of us who teach here are not ashamed to embrace the beneficial parts of the tradition that accords a certain dignity, panache, or even prestige to us. Tradition is the reassuring conviction that despite our claims to the contrary the place existed before we got here, and we cannot completely reinvent it in our own image. Remember the line of David McCord's about the statue of John Harvard in front of University Hall?

G. K. Chesterton once famously said: "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all our classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around." (G. K. Chesterton, The Ethics of England, 1909)

As I think about this relatively recent past, these fifty or so years of which nearly forty fall within my experience, I am first very grateful to have been here for such a time as this. I am second to no one, dead or alive, in my appreciation of the best this School has had to offer, and I have seen with my own eyes in many and various ways the fulfillment of the best hopes of the O'Brian Report and much of the promise of the Pusey years. As I sat in the first full faculty meeting of the year last Wednesday I marveled at the new and varied gifts that our happily amplified faculty bring to the education of our equally varied and gifted students. In the thirty years since I became Plummer Professor I have witnessed many good and joyful things here, and I have rejoiced in my teaching, where I have discovered over and over again lively minds and loving hearts. I can look across the religious and academic landscape and see significant places occupied by many of our best students, who do us proud wherever they are; and to have had a hand in their formation is a great privilege. I have learned much from the host of colleagues who have passed through this place, and particularly from those who remain. I have not always gone easily with the tides of this School, and I am sympathetic to our late colleague Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who used to give long and reasoned speeches in faculty meetings to explain why he was going to abstain. Whenever he did actually vote for or against something, it was an epochal moment.

When in the early 1970s the School seemingly made a choice between strengthening the place of race and the place of women, and rather than choosing both, chose women, I was unhappy, for I felt then as I feel now that that was a false choice: we should have and perhaps could have had both. It gives me no pleasure to be the only senior person of color on what was once the Professorial Committee. Can I both deplore the situation of persons of color, slowly improving, and celebrate the accomplished place of women here? Of course I can, and I do. I mourn the passing of what in my day was the easy Christian consensus of the School, the Unitarians notwithstanding. Although we were not necessarily good at it, we could speak the lingua franca of the place about God, Jesus Christ, the church, the ministry, and the gospel. We could speak of Christian conviction without being thought unthinking fundamentalists. While some of us in my day felt guilty if we didn't say our prayers, prayer today is more problematic in our community. At the start of our faculty meetings the dean once "led in prayer"; then we observed silence; and now there is nothing.

One of the reasons we are here and not in the Memorial Church today is that one of our students in recent years accused me of praying "too theistically." I'm not sure what she meant, but I knew she didn't like it. I continue to live in the hope that our pluralism will increase our tolerance and affirmation of the religious sensibilities of others so that even a Protestant evangelical Christian could not only be at home here, but feel at home as well. I speak as an out-of-the-closet Protestant Christian with decidedly Trinitarian tendencies, and as such I believe that the well-laid Protestant Christian foundations of this School are broad enough not only to embrace Christianity as its central tradition, but also the great wealth of religious traditions which, because of that foundation, have come now to join us. If this School's future is to be worthy of its past, that future dare not compromise the essential Christian identity of the place, without which no other identity here would be possible.

Having said this, then how might the future look at Harvard Divinity School? I ask this question while wondering what, in our time and capacity, could rekindle that sense of excitement, purpose, and destiny off which the School has lived for now more than a half-century. Surely we cannot go back; the direction in which the O'Brian Report and Mr. Pusey's Address looked was dead ahead. What will be the renewing force in our common life that will cause the generation to come to look back at us and say, "What exciting and interesting times they lived in, and what creative and remarkable things they did"?

Let me remind you that the times in which we live call for the very kind of religious leadership in college, church, and civil society that the post-war climate of the O'Brian Report and the Pusey Divinity School Address contemplated. It is even more urgent now than it was then that thoughtful religious analysis be provided in a world where religions and their policies are front-page news in nearly every cultural climate, whether domestic or foreign. Never more than today have we needed every possible resource available to combat religious illiteracy and the ill-founded prejudices that proceed from them. All too easily we speak of the dangers of radical Islamic fundamentalism, but what about radical Christian fundamentalism? Who will address the fact that many people of goodwill place responsibility for their social prejudices upon their religious convictions? The source of most homophobia in America is religious, and the Bible as the culture's iconic book is read in such a way as to sustain prejudice. Where are the seminary-educated preachers who teach us how to take the Bible seriously without becoming dangerously selective literalists? Where is the theological debate joined on the ethical issues of the day, including everything from stem cell research to just war theory? What do religiously educated public citizens have to say about the fifty-year-old conflict between the Palestinians and the Jews, in what to all of us is still the "Holy Land"?

Surely a theological education is not the solution to all of the ills of the world, but a divinity school worthy of the name responds to the times in which it lives with the best resources it has at hand. Silence is death, and we with our skills and talents have never been needed more than now; that is to say, if we understand our mission to be greater than academic or institutional self-preservation. Surely it was for more than this that we were re-founded, re-endowed, and re-energized.

Let me suggest, by way of the "Forward Look," five areas in which might be found those hopeful and energetic challenges that might help shape for the better the next quarter of a century of our work together. These are suggestive, not exhaustive, and meant to provoke as well as to propose. Your list might be different from mine, but I am the speaker, and it is my list.

I) The Evangelical Chair
It strikes me that the Alonzo McDonald Chair in Evangelical Studies, now remarkably close to full funding, can be to the Divinity School of the twenty-first century what the Stillman Chair in Roman Catholic Theological Studies and the List Professorship in Jewish Studies were to the School at the times of their foundations, proof that the Divinity School is secure enough in its identity and purpose to take to its heart areas of theological inquiry not ordinarily found there, and by persons who are themselves practitioners, and even advocates, of those traditions. The study of Catholic theology here did not begin with the Stillman Chair, for the early church, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas were long a staple of rigorous study in church history, theology, and biblical studies. Catholics were not unknown in this School, and Catholic modernism was a subject familiar to Dean Sperry, who knew many of its leading twentieth-century exponents. The radical innovation, however, was to invite into the faculty a living Roman Catholic theologian. The Chair was established in 1957–1958, not without some concern on the parts of Professors Tillich and Buttrick that the identity of the school was still too fragile to accommodate such a significant change. In a compromise typical of the School, the appointment was designed to be a "Visiting" appointment, and the distinguished English Catholic layman, Christopher Dawson, came to occupy it. The rest, as they say, is history. With the late George MacRae the professorship became permanent, and the present incumbent, Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, has become an invaluable member of our community. He hardly seems to be the Papal Nuncio at Harvard Divinity School! The McDonald Professor, if rightly chosen, will be more noticeable, for he or she will articulate the history of a tradition from which this faculty has been in flight since the 1808 founding of Andover Seminary. The McDonald Professor should be both a historian and a theologian for whom "biblical theology," as evangelicals call it, is a serious and continuing enterprise. Such an appointment should not be seen as sectarian or tokenistic, but as a healthy acknowledgment of a major tradition in world Christianity, one from which come ever-increasing numbers of our own students, and one whose discourse is central to the public conversation about religion in this country and beyond.

The McDonald Professor should not merely be "one of us," who happens to know something about this area, for the fact that the McDonald Professor is not "one of us" is the chief virtue that commends such an appointment. In this, the faculty in its appointment process will have to be more than usually imaginative and creative, and the President in the ad hoc process must understand that if something different is to be done here, something different will have to be contemplated in the ad hoc process. This does not mean a lessening or lowering of standards, which would be a condescending thing to suggest, but that the "usual" standards are simply not going to be sufficient to attract and measure the kind of person we will want to invite to occupy this chair. I was not encouraged by the opinion of the University's General Counsel which, in an unrelated but critical matter, last year suggested that the religious convictions of professors of divinity were irrelevant to the discharge of their duties, and even illegal to consider. Obviously, this School does not subscribe to a religious test, but in the Stillman model we would want the Roman Catholic professor to be a Roman Catholic, and in the List Professor of Jewish Studies we would want the incumbent to know that tradition from the inside. If we are to have an evangelical chair we ought to have an evangelical in it: the sky will not fall in if one of our professors actually professes a belief in his or her subject matter; but, more than this, a season of theological excitement and engagement will be joined when this liveliest of the Christian traditions is addressed from within. I suspect that the effect upon our students and our colleagues, and our general reputation in the world of theological scholarship, will be electric.

II) Undergraduate Instruction as Central to the Divinity School
For many years, a large percentage of the instruction in religion in Harvard College was supplied by members of the Faculty of Divinity, and rightly so: the Hollis and Hancock Professorships, founded in the eighteenth century, were College chairs, and assigned only after 1816 to the Divinity School. The Plummer Professorship was assigned first to the College, and only latterly to the Divinity School. The O'Brian Report urged that a revitalized Divinity School take on the task of undergraduate teaching in the new curriculum, and Krister Stendahl, Paul Tillich, and George Williams, among others, were famous for their undergraduate courses. In more recent times Richard Niebuhr, with his "Kant, Coleridge, and Schleiermacher,”" and Harvey Cox with "Jesus and the Moral Life" were very popular among undergraduates. My predecessors in the Plummer Professorship, Dr. Buttrick and Dr. Price, and I, have always aimed our primary teaching toward undergraduates. Today, colleagues of ours such as Professor Diana Eck rate high for teaching undergraduates. Our shared arrangements with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the administration of the higher degrees in the Committee on the Study of Religion have worked well, and under its aegis the undergraduate concentration has flourished, although I venture to suggest that a potential hardening of the intellectual arteries in the comparativist orthodoxy of the curriculum should be addressed in the current curricular review. What was meant to be a lively intercourse between the professional school, which is the Divinity School, and the graduate school, which is Arts and Sciences, is not well served if the Divinity School to all intents and purposes becomes the familiar of Arts and Sciences.

At the time of the formation of the concentration, the Yard was nervous about a Divinity School "takeover," a professional camel's nose in the academic tent. It was assumed, erroneously, that the Divinity School was a place of proselytization and that "scholarly objectivity" would be subordinated to Christian interests: how little they knew us. The problem now for many is the paucity of Christian Studies in the concentration. The idea of creating a "Christian Studies" track in the existing concentration would meet the needs of many undergraduates without compromising the integrity of the program, and make it increasingly popular, and possible for Divinity School faculty to offer instruction in Arts and Sciences, thus making the concentration one of the liveliest fields of study in the College. Professor Robert Orsi, in assuming the chair of the Standing Committee, has already invited his Divinity School colleagues to consider teaching in College. If this is to be done, consideration of the necessary skills must be given in the making of Divinity appointments, support must be provided for such appointments, and those who choose to do this exciting work must have relief from other duties. Dean Graham has already indicated support in principle for more HDS involvement in undergraduate instruction: the ways and means must now be found, and if they are, a new and exciting era is in store for both HDS and FAS.

III) World Religions and Divinity
The same year in which the Stillman Chair was established, in 1957–1958, saw the foundation of a chair in World Religions. This is how Dean Horton's Report describes it:

Out of this initial gift grew what we have come to know and value as the Center for the Study of World Religions, housed now for many years in the modernist structure built by Dean José Luis Sert next to Jewett House, and known as "God's Motel." Our colleagues in Area III today would hardly recognize their presence here as a mere facilitation of the Christian mission: do not bother to hiss; I can hear you in my mind's ear. There is in this earliest description that felicitous phrase which describes that we do our work here in the presence of one another, which invites us into "mutual witness"; and "mutual witness" is what we have come to value and treasure and appreciate as one of the undisputable riches of the HDS experience.

There are, I understand, efforts underway to draw the work of the Center closer to the center of the work of the School, and that is all to the good. Just as Area III is now more and more seen as having legitimate claims upon Areas I and II, so too are the resources of the Center seen to be more and more a part of our central and essential work as a faculty.

I suspect that in 1957–1958 the notion of the integration of professors of religions other than Christianity into the Divinity faculty was even more dangerous and novel than the thought of including Roman Catholics in the faculty. We needed those non-Christian resources, but at a safe remove and across the street. With all due respect to the present revisioning efforts, and the new administration of the Center, has the time not come for us to declare the Center a victory, and incorporate it and its works into the full faculty program of the Divinity School? If we do this, keeping the best of the capacities for focused and discrete work such as Harvard centers are given to do, could we not conceive of a new way to frame our enhanced identity? Perhaps we could and should be newly denominated "The Faculty of Divinity and of World Religions." We could do this, in my opinion, only if the Divinity side, with its professional formation and Christian identity, were secure enough to overcome the ready-made impression that at last the School had been sold to FAS under our first lay dean, himself an Islamist, and that we had become little more than the "Graduate School of Religion." Such an impression must be avoided, for it would cost us dearly in loyalty and support, and in our ability to participate more fully in the demanding religious issues of the day.

Assurances in tangible form would have to come from Massachusetts Hall that the Divinity School would be secure enough to receive and enhance World Religions, and that both would prosper.

"Mutual witness," in Dean Horton's words, is what we are seeking, with maximum effectiveness. Such a move would mightily enhance our capacity for creative participation in undergraduate teaching, it would enrich the fabric of faculty discourse, it would stimulate professional formation in the ministerial program, and it would be impossible without substantial support, both spiritual and tangible, from the President for the time being. The Faculty of Divinity and of World Religions would by its title confirm the highest ambitions of fifty years ago, but it would have to be established as more than a mere name change: it would have to generate the same kind of investment as sustained the transforming vision of which I have earlier spoken. This we cannot do on our own; we will need the President to take up the mantle of Mr. Pusey: we must become a priority of the presidency if we are to come in from the cold.

IV) Renewed and Continuing Commitment to the Professional Ministry Program
In 1958–1959, Dean Horton began his Annual Report as follows:

As Dean Horton conceded, the growth in the BD program of the Pusey renewal was not as rapid as that in the doctoral program. At the risk of giving even further offense, it is easier to grow a good doctoral program than it is a good professional program, for scholars choose other scholars and there is a benevolent incestuousness at work; but when scholars are meant to choose between persons like themselves and persons who have other credentials equally necessary to the formation of professional ministers, they are likely to establish the priorities in favor of the fields and persons they know, and thus either ignore or relegate to secondary status fields beyond their own competence. It was once brazenly advanced here that every professor was competent enough in the so-called "Arts of Ministry" to teach them. This was not even remotely true when nearly all of our faculty members were ordained in their own traditions, and today the ministerial competence of most of the senior faculty is at best vestigial.

Faculties do not willingly change themselves, for their first and fundamental instinct is of self-perpetuation. We create and re-create faculties much like ourselves, for it is our form of immortality. When HDS was renewed, it was done essentially from the outside by Mr. Pusey, and by the creation of a virtually new faculty. Dean Sperry's old faculty could no more become the "new" Divinity School than this present faculty could reconstitute the "old" Divinity School.

So, what does the future hold? Two things, in my view:
1) Self-conscious and self-denying faculty-building, looking neither at existing fields nor existing personalities but at long-term needs, matters which are far too important to be left alone to departments in which vacancies occur. The only time I can recall giving visible offense to our irenic colleague Richard Niebuhr was when I suggested that vacancies in the Theology Department were too important to be left to that department alone. I was sorry for the offense, but I was right, and feel more strongly about this now than even then.
2) The second thing is a more creative and aggressive use of the concept of Professors of the Practice. How do we attend the needs in preaching, worship, and liturgy, religious education, missions, and music? There are people who know a great deal about these fields; every seminary in the country has them, and we argue that they would not "fit" here, or they would not "sustain" an ad hoc. They won't "fit" because we cannot imagine them fitting, and we do not honor their special fields of competence.

If professors of these so-called "Arts of Ministry" could not be sustained by an ad hoc, then, Mr. President and Mr. Provost, there is something wrong with the ad hoc process, and it ought to be changed. The canons of FAS departments are not the only means of measuring standards, and our professional program will continue to labor under the burden of a dubious reputation until a way can be found to integrate the professors of these disciplines into the full faith and credit of the School. Somehow the Medical School, the Business School, the Law School, and even the Kennedy School have managed to incorporate into the center of their instruction distinguished practitioners in a wide variety of fields deemed to be critical to the professional formation of their students. It is either the inadequacy of the present ad hoc process, or the slavish subordination of HDS to FAS that makes it currently impossible to attend to these needs in such a way as to make them noticed in the street. Should we once and for all address this, then I think we would be well on the way to gaining for our ministry program the recognition, resources, and appreciation that it so richly deserves.

V) Analysis and Advocacy: A Reconfiguration of Mission
Who of us here is not aware of the poverty today of public discourse in matters of religion in the nation and the world? In our HDS classrooms the best of historical and current research is made available to our students: we teach them about the origins and development of scripture, we try to model theological thinking, we place a high value on matters of social justice, we encourage serious analysis, and at times advocacy and witness, but it seems as soon as our students enter into their parishes and professions, whatever they have learned here is deemed too "hot" or too "irrelevant" for general dissemination; and thus the churches and the culture languish in a theological torpor set on one hand by the cultural secularists and on the other by the religious extremists. Where is the unique voice of Harvard Divinity School, its values, its resources, its best tradition, to be found in all of this? There are, of course, some vivid exceptions, one of them being Professor Eck's Pluralism Project, which is a powerful enterprise for religious wisdom and insight in this country; and when I served on the admissions committee many of our best applicants came to us through participation in the Pluralism Project. For years Professor Koester used to share the best of his New Testament work with a group of local pastors who met regularly in New Hampshire to do exegesis with him so that they could better preach to their own people. Professor David Little's world-class experience in public policy brings to a much-needed area of public interest. Preston Williams's long leadership in the Black religious leadership and his summer institute continues to good effect even in his retirement. Our well-regarded program in women's studies set the model for many such programs across the country; and whenever I read the faculty notes and see the books published, lectures given, and institutions visited by our colleagues I am much impressed by our intellectual fecundity and long reach.

All of this is well and good, but what can be done institutionally to take advantage of our capacity for analysis and opportunity for the exercise of advocacy? This summer, for the second year, I found myself at the Aspen Institute among the great and the good taking up the subject "Albert Einstein and Religion." The meeting was held with that of the Aspen Institute for Physics and was a lofty gathering, although the only other theologian present was my colleague Elaine Pagels of Princeton—whose husband was a physicist! The meetings went well, I had fun, learned a lot, and was intrigued when more than one of the secular participants asked why theologians did not take more initiative in these matters of public interest. Well, some religious leaders do: for example, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell marshal their considerable resources on nearly every subject under the sun; but what about us?

For starters, why couldn't Harvard Divinity School enter into league with the Aspen Institute in conferences of mutual interest here, or, preferably, there? It is really not the conference but the conversation that is the point, but there are times when I agree with some of our secular critics who say that we theologians talk only to ourselves, and do not always do that well. Why, for example, are all the hot theological topics critical to our day and of keen interest to the general public usually held in the Kennedy School? It cannot be simply because the Kennedy School has better facilities. Tomorrow evening, for instance, according to this morning's Crimson, there will be a big con-fab on religion and homosexuality, co-sponsored by us but to be held where? You guessed it: at the Kennedy School. Keener minds than mine can figure out how to do what is needed in this area: it is not a matter of resources but of will. We have an opportunity and a mission to be what for lack of a better term I will call "public theologians," modeling how what we do here is relevant to what needs to be done out there. Should we embrace this as an institutional priority, I suggest that we cannot begin to imagine the exciting opportunities that await us.

Dean Sperry began one of his last letters to the alumni of the School with I Corinthians 16:9, where St. Paul remarks: "For a wide door for effective work has been opened unto me, and there are many adversaries." The point is not a subtle one even in Greek, for the connective is the word "and" and not the expected "but," which means that with every opportunity available through the wide door opened for effective work there are always difficulties, opponents, issues, and problems. Adversity is not the exception to opportunity, it is the sine qua non of opportunity, as there are no opportunities without difficulties. Everything I have proposed here today has within it a reasonable argument why it should not, or cannot, or will not be pursued. There is always good and sufficient reason not to do something: I know many of them myself, and no one can accuse me of being a loud shill for cheap change for change's sake. I have probably voted against more good ideas than most of you in this room, but as I glanced back over the relatively brief history of this School, as I have come to know it, and asked myself what it would take in our time to recapture something of that exciting, creative energy that characterized it in its season of renewal, I took some encouragement from some hints and guesses as to where we might be going and to what we might attach our hopes and powers. In years to come successive Convocation speakers, Deans, and presidents will have opportunity to ignore, improve, or contradict what I have set forth today—I only hope they won't have to wait thirty years to do so. My responsibility is small, my powers are few, and my resources already stretched to the limit: I do have a "day job," as you may recall; but because I was privileged to be a member of this School at perhaps one of its most exciting moments in its long history, and still live off the benefits, I long for a replication of that moment in the times that are yet to be, and not for myself alone.

Perhaps I have in mind the words of William Cowper, the hymn-writer, when he asks:

President Eliot closed his epochal 1869 Inaugural Address with the hope that the future of the University would not be unworthy of its past. My prayer for this old School, at the start of its one hundred eighty-ninth year, is that our future will not be unworthy of our past; and I believe that it is in our power, with a little help from God and our friends, to achieve that worthy future.

The Reverend Dr. Peter Gomes, STB '68, is Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church. He gave this address on September 20, 2004, in Sanders Theatre, Memorial Hall. Click here to view a video of this lecture.