Religion Letter

To the Editors of the Crimson:

. . . The three major points which Mr. Bartley's article raises have been persuasively discussed by other writers. Mr. Morison and Pres. Pusey have ably shown the bases for disagreement concerning the use of Memorial Church. The place of the Church is surely a question about which men may honestly differ. Mr. Bartley has done all a service by laying bare the problem.

Prof. Wild's letter has clarified his own position and, hence, freed it from the misunderstanding which easily results from too quick a reading of Mr. Bartley's skillful but too subtly constructed article. Prof. Wilder has with consummate skill defended the idea of commitment, an idea which comes only with the experience of constrasting the quality of education received from committed and non-committed men. I suspect that, from a religious standpoint, Harvard students will have gained a far deeper insight into the significance of Protestant thought from Dr. Buttrick's courses than from all the objective lectures of the University's philosophers and social scientists. This is in no way to deny the the great value, within their own area of competency, of these non-religious approaches.

To defend Prof. Tillich from the misinterpretations which have appeared in a number of CRIMSON articles, Mr. Bartley's included, is unnecessary. Those who have heard him or read his works know that he shares with the other members of the faculty of the Divinity School and of the University at large an abiding loyalty to critical scholarship. The CRIMSON might do well in the future to set aside its objections to him on religious or philosophical grounds when it purports to take the measure of the man.

It is clear that there are two major objections to Mr. Bartley's article. First, what he has to say is slanted in such a way that his words frequently give false impressions. He is too intelligent a man not to know that this is the case, and so we must assume that this slanting of material was intentional. Secondly, what he objects to in the current resurgence of interest in religion is what most of those concerned with that resurgence would object to if they happened to see the situation as he see it. They do not, however, perceive any significant movement toward restricting the courage to think or the expression of one's thoughts. To many it must appear that Mr. Bartley has set up a straw man which he can easily knock down with the full approbation of the Harvard community, but that his ecclesiastical, pietistic ogre is really nothing more than a scare-crow. Robert W. Haney '56 2Dv.