God & Man at Harvard

In the harried hassle over Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey's pro-religion policy at the university (TIME, April 14), the most incendiary charge was that the Rev. George Arthur Buttrick, chairman of the Board of Preachers, refused in 1955 to permit a Jewish student to be married by a rabbi in Harvard's Memorial Church. On another occasion, Dr. Buttrick made his position plain: "It is intellectually dishonest for Jewish and Christian marriages to be conducted under the same roof."

The issue brought almost everybody out swinging--Christians, Jews and unbelievers, graduates, undergraduates, faculty members and plain kibitzers. "The only interpretation," snapped Jerome Davis Greene, '96, longtime Harvard overseer, in a letter to the Harvard Crimson, "is that in spite of generous gifts from Jews toward the erection of the Church, and in spite of the sacrifice of Jewish lives of which it was a memorial,* the gifts were somehow impressed with a trust that forbade any contamination of the premises that might compromise the claims of Protestant Christianity to a monopoly of ultimate truth." Wrote Psychology Professor Jerome Seymour Bruner: "The Memorial Church now becomes a symbol of disunity . . . There has been exclusion. I cannot avoid the feeling that matters of sectarian religious doctrine have been put ahead of concern for the Harvard community." A delegation of top faculty members paid a visit to President Pusey to object to the policy.

Others argued for the simple proposition that a Christian church--memorial or not--ought to be limited to Christian services. Such a restriction, contended Eastern Church History Professor Georges Florovsky of Harvard Divinity School, is "quite normal." Wrote Philosophy Professors Raphael Demos and Donald C. Williams: "A church is not a cafeteria in which all religions may be served to all comers. Any church is some Church ... As such it has its own order of worship and other rules. It has its own sacred symbols; its cross is not something to shift around like a piece of stage scenery ... By welcoming, without query, the services of all faiths, the church would in effect exclude everyone whose religion is more than a gesture; it would be making itself into a shrine to the one unifying faith of Harvard indifference."

Last week Dr. Buttrick backed down. On his recommendation, the Harvard Corporation announced: "The Harvard community is today a mixed society. It contains numerous groups with religious loyalties other than those which gave shape to Harvard's ceremonies of public worship." Therefore, "such private services (as weddings and funeral services) may be conducted in Memorial Church by an official of an individual's own religion when this is desired, provided he is willing to do so notwithstanding the church's essentially Christian character."

*Dedicated on Armistice Day, 1932, to the Harvard dead of World War I, the roll of honor included, after much controversy, four Germans who, though they fought for the Kaiser, were, after all, Harvardmen.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.