Travel Letter...
RETURN
TO PRINCETON
I
am writing this account from historic Princeton. Across the street from
where I sit in Erdman Hall on the campus of Princeton Seminary is the
charming old house where Albert Einstein once lived. When I was a student
here 40 years ago I would now and again see the famous scientist slowly
walking along the tree-lined Mercer Street with some renowned visitor at his
side, his silky white hair blowing in the breeze. They came here to see him
from all over the world.
Tourists
are forever asking where Einstein lived. "That doesn't mean they're
interested in physics or the theory of relativity," a professor said to
us, "but to see where 'one that made it big' lived." Then he
added, drawing upon an idea from Blaise Pascal, "They reduce Einstein
from the order of the mind to the order of the body," by which he meant
they esteem bodily desires (fanfare) above intellectual virtue.
A
few blocks away is Princeton University with Nassau Hall at the heart of the
campus. British troops were quartered there during the Revolutionary War and
George Washington returned there after winning the battles of Princeton and
Trenton to receive expressions of gratitude from the local citizens. A
painting of Woodrow Wilson, who was a president both of the university and
the United States as well as governor of the state, graces one of the
elegant walls in Nassau.
The Institute for Advanced Study, where Einstein worked, is nearby, as is Westminster Choir College and the Center of Theological Inquiry. The latter is a new institution, the purpose of which is to discover ways in which faith, learning, and life can be integrated. Its staff has no responsibilities except to think and write about how to narrow the gap between faith and reason, and science and religion.
Ouida
gave me a 10-day leave of absence from home so that I could come here and
attend my 40th class reunion and remain to do research in the seminary's
great library. I'm seeking to learn more about the meaning of the Lord's
Supper, part of which I share in this issue. The library is now
computerized. When I asked the computer how many items the library had on
the Lord's Supper, the answer was 1,054, which should he enough to
keep me busy. It will on command bring the items to the screen one by one
and tell you where they are in the library.
When
I asked it if it had anything by Leroy Garrett, it told me yes, two items:
my book on the Stone-Campbell Movement and on microfilm my Ph.D. thesis at
Harvard. A Ph.D. student here at Princeton did her thesis on the same
subject as mine and the faculty advised her to study mine, and so they
ordered a copy from Harvard on film. I met her on graduation day, and she
told me she disciplined herself not to read my thesis too carefully lest it
influence her own conclusions. The independence of these women! We had our
picture taken together and she is going to send me a copy of her thesis,
which is entitled The Eschatological Jerusalem, while mine is The
New Jerusalem. She is the
age of my daughter. Her grandmother, in a wheel chair, was there to see her
graduate, and she told me that when her granddaughter received her Ph.D. she
nearly came up out of that chair!
Another
newly-made doctor that interested me was an oriental who was converted to
Christ in Singapore by Ira Rice, missionary of the Church of Christ. After
attending Rice's Four Seas College, he went to Pepperdine, which was the
beginning of his fall from grace. Coming to Princeton was the end. Now
withdrawn from by the ones that brought him to Christ, he is referred to as
"a man without a church." He knows of course that he still belongs
to Christ and his church, but most of us suppose that we should work within
some denominational structure, and we all do. Our oriental brother will
probably identify with the Presbyterians. Do we destroy the work of God with
our traditions?
Another
interesting new Ph.D. is Paulos Gabre Yohannes, a bishop of the Ethiopian
Orthodox Church, who spent seven years in prison in Addis Ababa before
coming to Princeton. He was imprisoned by the Communists because he was a
Christian leader, and he was severely persecuted in an effort to get him to
renounce his faith. He told me that his bed was a concrete slab, but, he
added, "That is better than a soft bed!" There is no more
religious freedom in Ethiopia than there is in the Soviet union, and many
are in prison, their crime being that they are Christians. When the bishop
received his degree, in clerical attire rather than an academic gown, he
turned to the audience and gave his blessing, extending the gold cross that
hung on a chain about his neck. He has little hope for freedom in his
homeland, and should he return he would again be imprisoned or even
executed.
My
main reason for coming to this area at this time is to conduct a seminar at
the Liberty Street Church of Christ in Trenton in celebration of the
bicentennial of Alexander Campbell's birth, which follows my sojourn in
Princeton. Ouida and I served that church when we attended Princeton, and it
was we, for while Ouida was not enrolled she went to class with me and took
the lectures in shorthand. Each day I'm here alone I not only wish for her
but see her in my mind's eye, walking the campus as a young woman. She and
I, along with Ralph Graham, with whom we worked at Trenton, would brown-bag
it for lunch in the old library basement. I figure that that great
fellowship took place just under where the bank of computers now stand in
the new library.
Through
the years I've teased Ouida about how she once cornered the then young Prof.
Bruce Metzger in our car and plied him with Scriptures on baptism by
immersion for remission of sins. He had no way of escape! To his credit, he
listened respectfully. Ouida of course was right as well as polite. The
other night when I saw the now aged professor, recognized widely as an
eminent New Testament scholar, he remembered Ouida. But who wouldn't
remember Ouida, especially someone she once cornered in the backseat of an
old Chevrolet!
But
we've all come a long way. While I was the first from the Church of Christ
to graduate from Princeton Seminary, though not the first to attend, there
are now several every year, and there is now one of us on the faculty. Time
lays a heavy hand on men and institutions alike. Virtually all my professors
of 40 years ago have passed on and many of my classmates. And the life of
each alumnus has been smitten by some tragedy, divorce not being the least.
I was surprised to learn that the most prominent member of our class, a
powerful Presbyterian preacher, divorced his wife after decades of marriage
and took another wife. The reason? Neglect of the wife, according to the
minister who told me the story. Something is terribly wrong when our
spiritual leaders, presumably the best educated in heart and mind, choose to
renounce their conjugal vows and dissolve their marriage.
Several
of the speakers during alumni week referred to the marriage crisis, the key
word being commitment. Our whole culture is increasingly described as bereft
of commitment, whether toward family, work, country, God, or any worthy
cause. Our culture is now seen to be so secularistic that it is described as
"post-Christian." But if Christianity is dying in the West, there
is hope for it in the East. In Buddhist Korea, for example, one in five has
become a Christian in recent decades, and the churches are large and
vibrant. And it is estimated that by the turn of the century there will be
more Christians in Africa and India than in all the West.
This
being a Presbyterian seminary (though 40% of the students are from other
churches), several references were made to the decline in membership of the
United Presbyterian Church. The president of the seminary, a Presbyterian
educated at Pepperdine (He told me that Ralph Wilburn was his mentor), told
the alumni that their denomination is smaller and older, and if the present
decline continues that by 2025 the membership total will be zero. He gave
two reasons for this: "We've never been good at evangelism and we
cannot keep our kids, who don't seem to care. One of the professors added
these figures: the UPC has lost an average of 58,000 yearly for the past two
decades, or 21% of the membership. Most all mainline Protestant churches
have declined in about the same proportion, including Churches of Christ.
The
highlight of alumni week was four lectures by Prof. Diogenes Allen, who
favored us with one of the jokes about his first name. You remember that
Diogenes was an ancient philosopher who trod the streets of Athens with a
lantern looking for an honest man. Well, when the old philosopher was
recently seen on the streets of Paris and was asked what he was looking for,
he said he was looking for an honest man. When he was afterwards seen in
London and was asked what he was looking for, he replied that he was looking
for an honest man. When he was seen in New York and was asked what he was
looking for, he said, "I'm looking for my lantern!"
Speaking
on "Apologia A.D. 2000," Prof Allen really challenged us to do
some hard thinking about the church's mission in our post-Christian,
secularistic world. Here are a few of the goodies that I jotted down.