Theology: Faith & Learning at Stanford

Brown, Novak & Napier sounds like a plausible name for a law firm; actually it is a winning combination at Stanford. Inspired by Presbyterian The ologian Robert McAfee Brown and Roman Catholic Philosopher Michael Novak, religion has become one of Stanford’s most adventurous intellectual disciplines, and Dean of the Chapel B. Davie Napier has turned the once staid services at the pseudo-Roman esque Memorial Church into a continuing experiment in worship. The result is an enlightening case study of how Christianity on a secular campus can be imaginatively brought to life.

Going Beyond a Charter. Academically, the renaissance of religion at Stanford began in 1962, when Theologian Brown was hired away from Manhattan’s Union Theological Seminary as professor of religion. Guided by a 19th century charter that forbade any sectarian instruction in doctrine, the university did not even have a lecturer in religion until 1951. Now the religion teaching staff, operating within the humanities division, consists of four men:

Brown; Biblical Scholar Edwin Good; Novak, a onetime seminarian in Rome who studied for his doctorate at Harvard; and Church Historian William Clebsch, formerly of Texas’ Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest.

Students cannot major in religion and must take the subject as an elective—but the courses are highly popular nonetheless. The Stanford emphasis is strongly contemporary. Brown teaches one course on modern theology on the work of Barth, Tillich, Bultmann and Reinhold Niebuhr, another on Christian ethics that ranges from sexual problems-to political responsibility. Novak traces the development of 20th century Catholic theology and literature, has gained his greatest student following with a course that explores the practical consequences of commitments to faith and atheism.

Liturgy from Africa. This fall, the revival of religion as a discipline has been supplemented by the spiritual experiments at Memorial Church fostered by Dean Napier, a Congregational minister who formerly taught Old Testament at Yale. He has inaugurated an ecumenical Sunday Communion based on an Anglican liturgy developed for use in Africa that provides for considerable congregational participation. Utilizing student creativity, Napier presents jazz and folk-song services with banjo and guitar accompaniment, for Christmas will put on a medieval Christian drama performed by freshmen students in the English department.

Although Napier’s chapel and academic religion at Stanford are independent, the revitalization of both has begun to have a synergistic effect: students of religion have felt compelled to express their new concern about faith in worship, while students inspired by worship plan to enroll in religion courses. Concludes Brown: “Faith and learning can exist in partnership with each other: they need not be antithetical.”