The Hunger of the Heart

While the country rang last week with commencement exhortations to cherish the spiritual legacy of the past, the graduating class at Princeton Theological Seminary heard that ancient dogma is a dangerously heavy burden. From the dean of Harvard Divinity School came the suggestion that Christianity may be at death's door, and that its spiritual legacy is more likely to push it through the door than the atheism of the present.

Tall, grey Dr. Samuel Howard Miller, 61, Harvard Divinity's former professor of pastoral theology and the first Baptist to be dean of the 149-year-old seminary, told Princeton's fledgling ministers that if religion is to have any real place in the modern world, it will have to "undergo a radical revolution." In fact, he warned, "the critical point of no return may have been passed." The churches are addressing themselves in a dead language to situations and issues that no longer exist. "The ancient dogmas no longer dominate the imagination; the shape of life has changed; the patterns of truth are different; the questions have new terms; the doubts have deeper dimensions; the hunger of the heart and mind has been enlarged."

Three Dark Areas. Specifically, said Dean Miller, there are three developments with which religion must cope :

P: The "Freudian probe" that has unveiled "an abyss within man, full of new embarrassments and a new terror."

P: The space probe, and the danger that man's new power to colonize the stars will turn demonic and destructive.

P: The interdependence of the technological world, in which human beings must somehow live in new intimacy, "although as races, religions and continental blocs, we simply do not know the first ABCs of understanding each other."

If religion cannot illuminate these three dark areas of modern life, said Dean Miller, "it should then in decency get out of the way so that men will not be tripped up by its frumpery or fooled by its solemnity. There is serious work to be done, lest the world descend into darkness deeper than we have ever known before."

An example is the new relationship between atheism and belief in God. Many a modern intellectual who calls himself an atheist is really engaged in a creative search for the divine, said Miller. He recalled that Albert Camus once said he did not believe in God but was not an atheist, for "that is far too easy an answer." Wrote Gabriel Marcel: "When we speak of God, it is not God we speak of."

Living Revelation. Said Miller: "If atheism marks the honest recognition of insufficient representations in the light of new dimensions of reality, then atheism is not by itself an irreligious stance. It is the movement of the spirit by which religion itself may be saved from itself. Nothing could be more tragic than to find ourselves hugging our own sanctified, even pseudo-Christian idol, blind and hostile to the living revelation of God's mystery in our own time."

The only kind of religion that counts in these days, thinks Miller, is one which is "radical enough to engage in this world's basic troubles. If it cannot do that, then it can do nothing which merits God's concern or the world's respect. Religion which is interested only in itself, in its prestige and success, in its institutions and ecclesiastical niceties is worse than vanity; it is essentially incestuous. Religion is to help the world fulfill itself."

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