Great American Events/Universalists

George Huntston Williams – Renewing Religion at Harvard

Divinings-

RELIGION AT HARVARD 1636-1992

By George Huntston Williams, Hollis Professor of Divinity, Emeritus

ABBREVIATED DESCRIPTION OF CONTENTS

1. Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century Religio et Veritas 1636

2. Harvard Before Incorporation
3. The Oldest Corporation in America 1650
4. Harvard College from 1650 to the Founding of Yale in 1701
5. Harvard in the Eighteenth Century 1701-1780
6. The Founding and Unfolding of the Divinity School 1805-1869
7. Presidents Eliot, Lowell, and Conant 1869-1963
8. Renewal of Religion at Harvard 1941-1963
9. Dean Samuel Miller and Preacher Charles Price 1958-1968
10. President Nathan Pusey and the Harvard Upheaval 1969
11. Religion Under Presidents Derek Bok and Neil Rudenstein 1971-1992
12. Higher Education in a Post-Christian Era
 Memorial Minute for George H. Williams
At a meeting of the Faculty of Divinity on February 24, 2003, the following Minute was placed
upon the records.

George Huntston Williams, a church historian of extraordinary range and productivity, and an
important contributor to the revival of Harvard Divinity School after the second World War, died
on October 6, 2000, at the age of 86.

Williams, the son of a socially radical Unitarian minister who held pastorates in Ohio and in
Rochester, N.Y., was born in Huntsburg, Ohio, on April 7, 1914. He graduated from St.
Lawrence University in 1936, and from Meadville Theological School three years later. He then,
having spent one of his undergraduate years in Munich, again studied abroad, this time in Paris
and Strasbourg, before taking up an associate pastorate at the Church of the Christian Union
(Unitarian) in Rockford, Ill. In Rockford he met Marjorie Derr, an alumna of Oberlin. They were
married in July 1941. Marjorie Williams and three of their four children survive him.

In the Fall of 1941, George Williams assumed teaching duties in church history at the Starr King
School for the Ministry (Unitarian) in Berkeley, and at the adjacent Pacific School of Religion
(Congregational). While holding this dual post he pursued doctoral studies first at the University
of California and then at New York's Union Theological Seminary, where he received a Th.D. in
1946. His dissertation in medieval church history was published five years later as "The Norman
Anonymous of AD 1100."

In the Fall of 1947 Williams began his career as a teacher at the then small and struggling
Harvard Divinity School. In later years he would take understandable pleasure in recalling his
first encounter with the Harvard Dean, Willard Sperry. After perfunctory but pleasant greetings,
Sperry's remarks took a sharp downward course: "I'm afraid, Mr. Williams, that there is not
much of a future here for you." During his subsequent active service of thirty-four years at
Harvard, not only did Williams erase such apprehensions about his own future; he was also
instrumental in securing the school's future.

After Dean Sperry's retirement in 1953, the as yet untenured George Williams served for two
years as Acting Dean. Among his first decanal acts was an invitation to the newly elected
President, Nathan Marsh Pusey, to address the Divinity School at its opening convocation. This
was Pusey's first public address at Harvard as President, and the first time a sitting President had
spoken in Andover Hall in nearly half a century. It was no small coup for the young Acting
Dean. In a larger sense it underlined the fact that Pusey, himself a churchman, intended to give
special attention to the somewhat daunting project of rehabilitating the school.

Williams also sought to secure the place of the Divinity School, within and beyond the
University, by lending his special academic talents to the recovery of its history. With the
assistance of several colleagues, Williams in 1954 produced the first comprehensive history of
the school. The origins of both the University and its Divinity School, as the editor and joint
author explained, extended back to Moses, Joshua, and the Hebrew School of the Prophets. A
typological strategy of this sort, in its similarity to those of Augustine in "The City Of God," and
Cotton Mather in "Magnalia Christi Americana," may have seemed to some readers strained and
perhaps pretentious. For Williams, however, given his sense of Harvard's significance, such
comparisons were not even faintly hyperbolic.

In 1955, with Douglas Horton safely installed as Dean, Williams turned his full attention to
teaching and writing. He was appointed Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History a year later,
and in 1981 became Hollis Professor of Divinity. The fact that the Hollis is the oldest endowed
chair in the oldest of American universities was never far from his consciousness. Despite
rumors to the contrary, he never asserted a statutory right to tether his cow in Harvard Yard. As
an historian of the University he knew very well that such rights, doubtless because of some
clerical error, had become attached not to his chair but to other, relatively upstart, professorships.
Besides, he knew that the Hollis Professor could claim something more important, namely a right
of precedence permitting him or her to march at the head of all the faculties in each year's
Commencement procession.

Williams's classroom performance and demeanor demonstrated the same high seriousness, and
conveyed similar convictions about history's relevance to the affairs and ceremonies of today.
Throughout his Harvard career, he taught church history in the grand style that fewer and fewer
of his fellow historians were inclined or trained to attempt, offering the entire institutional and
doctrinal history of Christianity in a four course sequence.

His students, whether in broad, magisterial courses of that sort or in highly demanding seminar
settings, regarded Williams with admiration, awe, and sometimes terror. Erudite, abstracted (he
never learned to drive a car), and remarkably focused (in his later years he taught himself
medieval Polish), he was clearly a man of singular accomplishments yet, at the same time, was
just what most students expected a Harvard Professor of Divinity to be.

In the days when candidates for a Bachelor of Divinity degree were subject to seven written and
one oral examination, most seniors prayed that George Williams would not be on their
examining committee. It was not that he was in any way unfair or unfeeling; it was rather that, as
an academic unaware of any limits to his own scholarship, he seemingly could not comprehend
that others, including his colleagues, might not know as much as he did.

His participation in doctoral orals could be especially intimidating for everyone. According to
one story, perhaps apocryphal, Williams asked a hapless candidate to speculate on an obscure
biographical detail relating to one of the Cappadocian Fathers. An annoyed colleague interrupted
in behalf of the student and said. "George, nobody knows that." Williams is alleged to have
replied sweetly, "I know I don't know, and I'm sure you don't know, but I wondered if perhaps
this young man fresh from his labors knows." The anecdote captures something of that essence
of George Huntston Williams that was at one and the same time exasperating and endearing.

In his spiritual life, his teaching, and his scholarship, Williams was guided by a theologically
grounded vision of the oneness but also inclusiveness of Christianity. His ambition, never
realized, was to write a book to be called "The New Testament People," with a characteristically
Williams-esque sub-title: "An Ecumenical History of Christianity with Attention to Its Relation
at All Important Nodal Points with Judaism and Islam." One reason why this was a daunting
project, even for Williams, was the fact that he considered the heretics, the dissenters, and
various wayward sectarians to be as legitimately a part of the story as the established churches of
the powerful. Thus he devoted a major part of his attention to the neglected and despised
Anabaptists, spiritualists, and rationalists of the "left wing" of the Reformation. The principal
result was the nearly thousand-page volume entitled "The Radical Reformation" (1962). But this
was preceded in 1957 by his celebrated edition of "Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers," and was
followed by massive documentary volumes representing "The Polish Brethren" (1978) and
"Stanislaw Lubieniecki" (1994).

Such works exhibited Williams the specialist at his best. Williams the generalist explored
virtually all the Christian centuries, and ranged over subject matter as diverse as American
Unitarianism and Universalism, Pentecostalism, the military chaplaincy, ecology, abortion,
church-state issues, Hinduism, and Marxism. His Polish historical pursuits, together with his
experience as an observer at Vatican II, led him to publish a number of pieces on Roman
Catholicism and, in 1981, a substantial study of "The Mind of John Paul II."

Not too surprisingly, the man who managed this enormous output of books and lectures was
most often to be found, on working days and weekends, not at the Divinity School nor at his
home in Belmont, but in his Widener Library study. More accurately, perhaps, he was believed
to be there even though a visitor to his study might despair of actually "finding" him. If
Williams's inhabiting of Widener was legendary, so was the difficulty of locating him among the
thousands of books and documents that rose, all over his workroom, most of the way to a twelve-
foot ceiling.

Williams was never content, however, to be typed simply as an academic, nor even as an
academic cum ecclesiastic. He also thought of himself as an activist who honored and drew upon
the liberal political traditions of his Unitarian inheritance. It was in this capacity that he became
something of an unlikely hero to the troubled generation of divinity students at the time of the
Vietnam War. On one famous occasion in Boston's Arlington Street Church, he was moved by
the passion of his own rhetoric and the emotional heat of the moment to perform what was
widely perceived, in the Vietnam era, as the ultimate symbolic act of protest. That is, he began to
burn draft cards - in this case in the pulpit. So unanticipated was this action on the part of the
venerable professor that it apparently left the principal speaker, William Sloan Coffin, at an
uncharacteristic loss for words.

That of course did not last. But George Williams's taste for political theater had nearly provoked
a riot. Clad in his flowing academic gown, his florid face crowned with a most impressive mane
of white hair, his voice an open diapason in full cry, he had for a memorable moment become
one of those radical reformers of sixteenth century Europe to whom in quieter times he had
devoted so much of his scholarly attention.

Respectfully submitted,
William R. Hutchison, Chair
Peter J. Gomes
C. Conrad Wright

Copyright 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

Williams, right, with Harvard President Nathan Pusey

in 1953, when Williams was HDS’s Acting Dean.
GEORGE H WILLIAMS RENEWING RELIGION AT HARVARD

In the 1950s when George H. Williams was the Acting Dean of the Harvard Sperry, the retiring
Dean Willard Sperry welcomed him but apologized for the anticipated close of the school.
Harvard’s retiring scientist President James Bryant Conant considered the weak Harvard
Divinity School with its part-time dean to be an anactropism. Williams immediately therefore
invited the new Harvard President, Nathan Pusey, to address the incoming Divinity School class.
The result was an alliance which not only perpetuated the school – which represented the
primary purpose for the establishment of Harvard College – but which led to the prompt
invaluable Rockefeller support for the Divinity School.

Soon Harvard Divinity School experienced reawakening. In addition to other factors, Dean
George Williams attributed the school’s new admission policy partly to an ever widening
demand for women in the church. Now it must noted that Harvard now has the strongest group of
scholars working in the field of women and religion.
 THE CELEBRATION OF WOMEN

The celebration of women at Harvard Divinity School began with their formal admission in
1950, shortly after George H. Williams became Acting Dean of the school. Today women
constitute a majority of living graduates, as well as a majority of currents students.

In 1955 eight women degree candidates included Letty Russell, who then served at the Yale
Divinity School for 26 years; Constance Parvey, who long served as a MIT chaplain for many
years; and Judith Hoehler, the Unitarian Universalist pastor who also served as a Divinity
School denominational counselor.

The School remained almost exclusively a male domain, with no women on the faculty, yet in
1971 56 women entered the Master of Divinity program. A Womens Caucus began meeting
weekly. There was a some tie in when Mary Daly led a walkout from Memorial Church. Women
students increased by the early 1980s. Rosemary Reuther offered a first course on feminist
theology. Jane Smith and Diana Eck grew support from women. As of 2005 the student body
was 52 percent female and the faculty 40 per cent. As of 2005-06 Harvard Divinity School was
celebrating 50 years of Women.
 CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF WORLD RELIGIONS

A host of changes in the faculty and the student body of Divinity supplemented the addition of
the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard founded in 1960. It was established as a
uniquely residual community of academic fellows, graduate students, and visiting professors of
major world religious traditions. The Centers sponsors educative programs centered around an
annual theme such as “Conflict and Authority in World Religions.” There are seminars on
historical and contemporary issues in Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
The building that houses the center was designed by Jose Lluis Sert.
 THE ANDOVER-HARVARD LIBRARY

The latest major symbol of the resurgence of Harvard Divinity School since its restoration begun
during the period of George H. Williams is the bold renovation of the Andover-Harvard Library
completed at a cost of $12 million dollars. The library adds 4,000 or more new volumes each
year. It also participates in the Boston Theological Institute program founded in 1967, which
fosters cooperation of libraries and courses between diverse nearby theological schools:
Andover-Newton, Boston College, Boston University, Episcopal Theological School, Gordon-
Conwell Evangelical, Holy Cross Greek Orthodox, and St. John’s Roman Catholic.

In brief, Harvard Divinity is now the foremost center of theological education anywhere.
Currently it contains the following:

• Books and bound periodicals: 485,046

• Over 30,000 rare books (including 22 published before 1525)
• Current serial (periodical) subscriptions: 2,981
• Original papers of Paul Tillich
• Audiovisual material: 633 titles
• Historical archives of the Unitarian Universalist Association
• Library adds 4,000 to 6,000 new volumes to its collection each year.
• Total circulation in 2006: 46,703
Click here to read American Universalism
by George Huntston Williams
on Google Books.