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Robert Terwilliger In this lecture I want to describe in concise form the key factors which shaped Robert Terwilliger's mind and which gave him the distinctive perspectives which acquired national and international prominence in the late 1960s and the 1970s during his tenure as founding Director of Trinity Institute in New York City. It was in that period that many first came into contact with him; it was during that same period that, in the view of some, he exercised upon our church his greatest influence. It was owing to the prominence which that New York platform gave him that he came to live and minister here in Texas. I think that in gaining a somewhat clearer sense of his background and intellectual odyssey we might understand somewhat more accurately the kind of witness he made and the influence he had. By any accounting Texas was an odd place for Terwilliger to end up. Born into a Methodist family in Cortland, New York, Terwilliger's roots went deep into the Dutch history of the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson River area. It's no surprise that perhaps the happiest period of his life and ministry was the eleven years he spent as rector of Christ Church, Poughkeepsie, the charming city center of Dutchess County, from 1949 to 1960. Despite his family's long Dutch lineage and its inevitable associations with the Dutch Reformed tradition, by the latter nineteenth century the Terwilligers had become Methodist. His father, Melville Terwilliger, was a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church of the classic, Wesleyan sort. As the only child of a second marriage, with two siblings rather older than himself, Terwilliger was the object of intense parental affection. And despite the material constraints of the family's simple ministerial life-style, the home was rich in many ways. It was rich, for instance, in an earnest, simple Methodist devotional life. Family prayers were said daily, kneeling by the kitchen table between eating and clearing up, and Bible reading was always part of it. The young son remembered well his father's highly predictable extemporaneous prayers! Melville Terwilliger enjoyed preaching and preachers, so the family spent time by the radio listening to the great American preachers in weekly programs like 'The Chicago Sunday Evening Club' when the Wesleyan Bishop Freeman held forth. They took excursions to New York City to hear the great Dr. Fosdick in the pulpit of the Riverside Church, the scene of some of Robert's most memorable sermons during the Trinity Institute years. The Reverend Melville Terwilliger was a thoroughly Wesleyan Methodist. That meant a considerable openness to the Wesley's Anglicanism, not least in liturgical style which the elder Terwilliger knew to be characteristic of current Episcopalianism (Terwilliger's chapels typically had two candles on the table). It meant too that Terwilliger's father, despite his lack of a college education, was keenly interested in theology and possessed a considerable and varied personal library. To this his son was given free rein. When he could read well he could be seen scouring the sermons of John Wesley on the library floor day after day. Wesley's early morning prayer vigils, his dawn preaching to the Welsh miners on their way to the pits, those early romantic images of a fervent Christianity remained vivid in Terwilliger's mind throughout his life. Two other books planted even more potent seeds. One was the 1889 Book of Common Prayer. Once he found it on his father's shelves, Terwilliger later commented, he "simply possessed it". He mastered its contents and 'badgered' his father about the 39 Articles ("Why did the Methodist prayer book have only 27"). Of course, Terwilliger knew parts of it from the Methodist Communion service, so this Prayer Book simply fanned an already flickering flame. The intrigue of the BCP and its seeping influence was complemented by Sir James Knowles' beautifully illustrated edition of King Arthur and His Knights. It was thoroughly neo-gothic and captured Terwilliger's imagination. In fact, he kept it throughout his life. The Arthurian legends put Terwilliger in contact with the European and British cultural tradition (here is the source of his life-long Anglophilia); they communicated a sense of mystery, and pictured life in terms of a goal to be strenuously sought; they conveyed the thrill of dangerous exploits. Perhaps most important of all they gave to the boy a kind of disdain for conformity. This richness struck a child who was commonly viewed as intellectually precocious. Owing to huge financial inducements Terwilliger entered Syracuse University in 1935 which had a distinguished faculty in both arts and sciences. Even at this stage Terwilliger felt "fore-ordained" for the Methodist ministry but he aspired to an academic clerical life-style. So he studied philosophy chiefly, with minors in history and English literature. The department of philosophy was largely in the hands of men propagating the legacy of German, Hegelian idealism. In reaction to this Terwilliger became, as he put it, "naughtily interested" in a wider philosophical tradition and with it a "whole new world". Bradley's essay on the sublime, and Etienne Gilson's recent book The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy were, by his own admission, Terwilliger's most influential discoveries. Yet despite his early philosophical prowess, Terwilliger had already concluded that the great philosophical question, namely, what is the nature of reality? Couldn't be solved by philosophy. The answer, he determined, wasn't even attainable this side of eternity. But in so far as it could be, he concluded, it had to be approached through theology. As many of you know, the influence of that seismic theological shift called 'Neo-Orthodoxy' was greatest in the English-speaking world in the 1930s. Simply put, it was a 'revolt against immanence'(S. J. Grenz and R. E. Olsen, 20th-Century Theology. God & the World in a Transitional Age [Carlisle: The Paternoster Press, 1992] pp. 63-4). It was a reaction to the Liberal Protestant habit of mind of the preceding century with its 'theology of optimism'(Ibid.,p. 63) and its fusion of the divine with forms of material, social and ethical progress. In reaction, the Neo-Orthodox theologians sought to reaffirm the transcendence of God, his radical difference from us, the neediness of the sinful human scene, and the necessity of faith in response to God speaking from beyond (Ibid., p. 64). For that reason it was also called 'crisis' theology since it called for a decisive human decision [Greek: krisis] of acceptance or rejection of the Gospel. So, amidst his formal philosophical study Terwilliger devoured the diverse and exciting theology of this new movement. He enjoyed its sense of excitement; he valued the fact that it was a theology in response to a clear social and cultural need. It was theology at work in the face of the actual human predicament. For a time Karl Barth's 'The Word of God and the Word of Man' was his vademecum through each day; he read and studied it between classes. In Barth Terwilliger found, first and foremost, a theology which estimated preaching as a key experience in God's revelatory act. Barth's essay 'The Power and Potential of Preaching' gave Terwilliger a sense of the preaching moment which he never forgot. He even quoted it twenty-five years later in his first book entitled (not surpisingly) Receiving the Word of God:
Barth's influence, however, was by no means the strongest. Terwilliger went without lunch for a week so that he could buy the Swedish Lutheran Gustav Aulen's ground-breaking study of the atonement Christus Victor. "When I read it", he said later, "it was like an ecstasy because he gave me a perception of the excitement of theology". In that respect, at least, Aulen's influence was the greatest. But, again, it was not exclusive. More Barth, Karl Heim, the Russian Nicholas Berdyaev, and Emil Brunner were key influences in Terwilliger's maturing appreciation of Neo-Orthodoxy. While Terwilliger's mind was very much on the move during these university years of the later 1930s so was his identity as a churchman. The seeds of romantic, medieval catholicism that he had found in the Arthurian legends was bearing fruit in an articulated commitment to catholicity. It was unclear as yet how that commitment might find expression. Should he attempt to catholicize his own Wesleyan Methodist tradition? Should he become a Roman Catholic? (That had obvious social and romantic implications that made it doubtful!) Then, what about Anglicanism? In a sense the answer was made for him. During his university years Terwilliger ministered as a lay preacher for some small rural chapels in the Mohawk Valley east of Syracuse. The strenuous journey each Sunday began at about 4 a.m. and involved a change and layover in Utica. To occupy the time Terwilliger attended a very early morning mass at a Roman Catholic Church and then went on to the 8 o'clock Communion at Grace Church. Grace was a splendid example of English neo-Gothic designed by the famous architect Richard Upjohn. It had a men and boys choir and altogether embodied a full Anglican style. It made a forceful impression and drew him firmly toward Anglicanism. So, when in his final year the Methodist Conference voted to allow lay preachers like himself to celebrate communion Terwilliger, who couldn't accept such an unapostolic extension of the ministerial franchise, resolved to become an Episcopalian in due course. His ecclesiastical change coincided with his first semester at Yale Divinity School in the autumn of 1940. Two months into the semester, in mid-November 1940, he was confirmed by the colorful Bishop Budlong of Connecticut. The Divinity School was a thriving, diverse environment with striking professorial exemplars for the students. Church history was ably represented by professors Latourette and Bainton; Albert Outler in theology; ethics and theology by Terwilliger's 'great teacher' H. Richard Niebuhr who had joined the faculty as Sterling Professor two years before. Terwilliger's confirmation and attendent intention to seek ordination led him to transfer after the first year to the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, then under the able liberal leadership of Dean Angus Dunn. For two further years Terwilliger studied for the ministry in this more distinctively Anglican atmosphere. Chapel was not required, but he attended daily as a matter of personal discipline. He explored churches and museums, read the novels of Somerset Maugham, and altogether relished the distinctively 'Anglo' flavor of real New England. There was one especially important fact about ETS with regard to Terwilliger's theological development. For years there had been keen interest among the faculty in the legacy of the great Christian Socialist theologian-philosopher of the previous century, F. D. Maurice. A notable stained glass window of Maurice even decorated the chapel. When Terwilliger left Cambridge in 1942 with thoughts of further study Maurice was very much on his mind. The return to Yale did not come until the autumn of 1944 when Terwilliger was both ordained and married (to Viola Mae Carroll on December 27th 1942). From 1944 to 1949 Terwilliger's theological perspective took permanent shape. Doubtless H. Richard Niebuhr was the single most important influence both directly and in the course of study which he directed. Niebuhr was a central figure in the American 'Neo-Orthodox' theological scene. His interest in the theology of history and culture put him in greater sympathy with Emil Brunner rather than Karl Barth. Beyond that, Niebuhr sought to root Neo-Orthodox concerns in a credible engagement with the unavoidably 'historical approach' of modernity. Niebuhr understood revelation as the action of God in history focused in Jesus Christ. That 'revelatory moment' gave sense and purpose to all other moments, and it was accessible to the believer only as a believer and only as one who participates in 'the living memory of the community'(The Meaning of Revelation [New York: Macmillan, 1941] p. 96). Niebuhr likened the Christian revelation of God in Jesus Christ to a 'luminous sentence' from which we can go forward and backward and so attain to some understanding of an otherwise impenetrable text (p. 93). As a result, he described Jesus Christ as 'the one who ties all our world together by meeting us in every event and requiring us to think his thoughts after him in every moment'(p. 184). To be sure, Terwilliger gained far more from Niebuhr. I want, however, to underline a phrase in the sentence just quoted: Jesus Christ is 'the one who ties all our world together by meeting us in every event'. Such is the perspective of the Christian apologist and analyst of culture and society. Terwilliger understood theology's task in a way deeply informed by this concern: to discern how God was speaking or could speak through any and every human situation. The cultivation of that habit of mind was, I suspect, Niebuhr's great bequest to his student. It bore especially rich fruit in later years when Terwilliger conceived the Trinity Institute. Its location in New York City was precisely because New York in a unique way offered a concentrated exposure to those manifold human situations, political, cultural, social, religious, where the Word of God impacts the words and deeds of man. It was a sort of laboratory for Niebuhrian analysis. When Terwilliger sought a topic for his doctoral dissertation he settled on 'The Doctrine of the Church in the Works of F. D. Maurice'. Niebuhr supervised it. Theses can tell a reader as much about the researcher as about the topic researched. In Terwilliger's case this is so. There is no doubt that Maurice's thought was intrinsically worthy of study; in fact, Terwilliger's sense of Maurice's importance was shared at the time by Alec Vidler whose own published study was roughly contemporary with Terwilliger's research. But Terwilliger had two other motives. First, Terwilliger recognized that in the years immediately following the war, with the spirited initiatives for Christian unity, the issue of ecclesiology loomed large. Terwilliger believed that the Anglican Communion had a special role to play in the Church Unity Movement and that, within Anglicanism itself, Maurice 'offered a precedent for a right approach to the problem'(pp. 258-9). Beyond that, however, Maurice articulated a significant contribution to what Terwilliger called 'the present struggle for catholicity' (p. 7). In short, Maurice offered a vision of catholicity which could be described simply as 'unity with comprehensiveness' (p. 8). Beyond that, Maurice painted a picture of catholicity that included structural elements such as creeds, sacraments, ministry and Scripture. At the same time, it was a characteristic of the church not wholly or authentically instantiated in a single ecclesial community. Thus catholicity could become the object of a common, shared (we might say ecumenical) quest. Anglicanism, Terwilliger believed, was called to make just such a witness to the universal church. But more was happening in Terwilliger's engagement with Maurice. Terwilliger was being steeped in an open, liberal, critical catholicism and was coming to understand this as paradigmatic for his own approach. It involved a thoroughly biblical theology; it prized affirmation rather than negation as the response to unorthodoxy; it held the church and the Gospel together in an inextricable unity; it was profoundly trinitarian; it was suspicious of intellectual systems; it preferred the tension of attempted synthesis to the resolution of firm differentiation. All of those Maurician features seem to me to have characterized Terwilliger's Anglicanism as well. One suspect's, though, that however much Terwilliger valued Maurice's contribution, he was somewhat uneasy with Maurice's fierce independence and disdain for church parties. It was difficult to see how positive influences upon a church and a communion, even the sort Maurice himself sought to have, could ever occur apart from organized, united effort. When Terwilliger completed his dissertation in 1948 he and his wife Viola had already moved to the General Theological Seminary in New York City. During his two years as a fellow and tutor Terwilliger wrote an S.T. M. thesis on the theology of the late Victorian churchman Richard Church. He had encountered Richard Church, best known for his history of the early years of the Oxford Movement, already in his work on Maurice. At that time, however, there was no secondary literature on Church himself. Now Terwilliger had a chance to broaden and deepen his appreciation of Anglicanism through one of the English Church's greatest late nineteenth-century figures. Whereas Maurice wedded theology to a strong philosophical streak, Church's theology was that of a strongly historical and scientific mind. He took the best of Maurice's intellectual liberality and critical acumen, and joined to it a more coherent, catholic churchmanship and humanism. If Maurice provided the foundation for Terwilliger's theological style, Church embodied the character, tone and sensibility which for Terwilliger was the Anglican spirit. It was deeply committed, catholic, humanist, urbane, and profoundly imbued with historical perspective. The thesis comprehends and takes forward Terwilliger's characteristic interests: 'The Theology of History', 'Christian Humanism' and 'The Nature of Anglicanism'. Church's more historically informed, less idiosyncratic views gave to the Anglicanism of Maurice the counter-weights it needed. If it was less creative, it was more dogmatically reliable. More broadly still, Terwilliger saw in Church a kind of Victorian Anglican precursor to some of the key themes of Neo-Orthodoxy. It gave him a purchase which his own deeply Neo-Orthodox sensibilities could grasp in his new Anglican situation. Further, Church's keen sense of Providence informed Terwilliger's interest in history as a story of judgment as well as of grace, and emphasized the eschatological consummation of God's work in history. Church's theology of history would give to Terwilliger a critical stance toward purely secular movements of social change. This aspect of his thought became more and more relevant as the social, intellectual and theological turbulance of the 1960s and 70s unfolded. With the submission of his S.T.M. thesis in the summer of 1949 Terwilliger was free to move into other spheres. Contacts at G.T.S. over the previous two years proved fruitful. His friend James Pike was leaving Christ Church, Poughkeepsie, New York, to become the Episcopal Chaplain at Columbia University. Pike was keen that Terwilliger succeed him. The persuasive Pike got his way. In the late summer of 1949 Terwilliger and his family moved some sixty miles north of Manhattan into the grand rectory of Poughkeepsie's 'English' church. A new phase of ministry where theory would meet practice began. The subsequent thirty-five years of ministry with their rich intellectual and theological dimensions were a super-structure built upon the foundations which have been described. Doubtless Trinity Institute during the Terwilliger years provided the most overt occasion to articulate and develop the themes, interests and perspectives of these early years. To be sure, there were innumerable other thinkers, movements and perspectives which through the years Terwilliger co-opted into his distinctive theological universe. I would contend, though, that his assessment of them, his adoption or adaptation of them, were always informed by these influences. Thus, while our appreciation of Terwilliger cannot end with them, it must begin with them. In his thesis on Dean Church Terwilliger quoted Church's own obituary of Maurice. They provide, I think, fitting words for me, at least, to close this lecture:
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