Successful Misunderstanding

In 1926, the young Presbyterian minister Henry Pitney Van Dusen wrote a congratulatory letter to his friend and mentor, Henry Sloane Coffin, newly elected president of Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary. In it, Van Dusen, a recent past president of Union's student body, innocently offered his assistance to Coffin in any matter concerning the students. Although Van Dusen had no thoughts of an academic career, Coffin with mistaken shrewdness concluded that the young cleric was fishing for a job. Later, Coffin wrote Van Dusen, urging him to take an instructorship at Union, and made the offer so warmly courteous that Van Dusen accepted, believing that his revered adviser really wanted him to do so. "And so," says Van Dusen, who years later unraveled the confusion, "I got on the faculty through a misunderstanding."

That kind of mistake sometimes produces a classic mating of man to institution. Shortly after he presides at Union's 127th annual Commencement this week, Van Dusen will retire, after 37 years as instructor, professor and (since 1945) president of the nation's leading nondenominational seminary. Earnest, vigorous "Pit" Van Dusen, 65, will live with his wife Betty in a home they bought last year in Princeton, but is not likely to settle merely for the "three Rs" he once proposed as ideal for his state of life: rustication, reading and reflection. As a farewell gesture of respect, Union named Van Dusen to a brand-new traveling professorship, which will start by taking him on a tour of churches and seminaries in Africa.

Constellation of Scholars. A committee has spent more than a year vainly trying to find a new president, hopes to get its man by June 30, when Van Dusen leaves. The long search stems partly from the seminary's rigidly high standards, partly from the fact that few men alive can match Van Dusen's diverse ecclesiastical talents. A superb administrator, he has seen Union's faculty change from a sometimes tempestuous aggregation of individual stars (including Harry Emerson Fosdick and Bible Scholar James Moffatt) to what he calls "a constellation of scholars in intimate fellowship." During Van Dusen's presidency, Union's enrollment doubled (to 640), its endowment grew by $10 million, and bright new scholars inaugurated lively departments dealing with psychiatry and religion and religious drama.

Van Dusen was almost as active outside Union's quadrangle as within it. He is one of the century's undisputed ecumenical giants--a chairman of the Study Program for the World Council of Churches' first two General Assemblies, a major force in the negotiations that fused the Council and the old International Missionary Council in 1961. After office hours, Van Dusen has been a popular, effective preacher--his grainy bass baritone still seems capable of shattering stained glass --and a prolific theological writer: he has edited nine books, contributed to at least 14 others, and the 15th volume in his own uncollected works, The Vindication of Liberal Theology (Scribner's; $3.50), came off the presses last week.

Barth to Bultmann. The book is an appropriate valedictory, for during years in which the needle on theology's compass swung wildly from Barth to Niebuhr to Tillich to Bultmann, Van Dusen has stoutly maintained his belief in the religious wisdom of such neglected sages as Eugene William Lyman and Robert L. Calhoun. Open-minded enough to read (and learn from) the neo-orthodox theologians and the "demythologizers," Van Dusen argues that the evangelical, middle-of-the-road theology of the late 19th and early 20th centuries provided man with history's "least inadequate, most credible and cogent interpretation" of the central reality of Christianity: Christ as Lord and Savior.

Today, his profound Christian faith is modified by a radical skepticism about certain aspects of churchly life. As a lifelong ecumenicist, he deplores the persistence of narrow confessional concerns among churchmen, and regards as "a monstrous heresy" the widespread view that to be genuinely ecumenical, a person must first be a good denominationalist. "On the contrary, to be a good Methodist or Presbyterian," he argues, "one must be first a disciple of Christ's universal church." Practicing what he preaches, Presbyterian Minister Van Dusen is a communicant of St. Mary's Protestant Episcopal Church in upper Manhattan.

Van Dusen is even more disturbed by the widespread influence of German Form Critic Rudolf Bultmann and his disciples, thinks that current trends in New Testament study tend to destroy human faith in Jesus as a historical being. "If the skeptical conclusions of these scholars should finally prevail," he says, "intellectual honesty would compel me to surrender adherence to Christian Faith."

"Parochial Captivity." Theologian Van Dusen believes that during his presidency, Union lived up to its responsibilities to the nation, and even more to the world: it has graduates in 80 countries, and no U.S. institution of higher learning has a higher proportion (16%) of foreign students. Now, he argues, Union, along with all other divinity schools, faces a new challenge: helping U.S. churches escape from what he calls their "parochial captivity." Van Dusen believes that "the traditional parish structure is inappropriate to metropolitan life" and that theological seminaries must assist the ministry in discovering new ways to reach the urban masses.

A man with virtually no hobbies and a true Calvinist's concern for duty, Pit Van Dusen in retirement is not likely to let Union or U.S. churches forget that the status quo is no substitute for the Kingdom of God. "I want a chance to sit down and think, and then possibly I'll write some articles," he says: "Some of them may be a trifle astringent."

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