Samuel H. Miller Dead At Age 68

Samuel H. Miller, dean of the Divinity School, died in his sleep Tuesday night. He was 68 and planned to retire in June.

Krister Stendahl, Frothingham Professor of Biblical Studies, was to succeed Miller on July 1. President Pusey will announce an interim dean this morning.

Miller took over from Dean Douglas Horton in 1959, soon after a successful endowment drive saved the Divinity School from possible elimination. To an increasingly scholarly school centered on preparing doctoral candidates for teaching, Miller brought a new emphasis on study for the parish ministry.

Miller was primarily a churchman. He had just come from 25 years as pastor of the Old Cambridge Baptist Church--with a congregation made up primarily of laborers, social workers, and students. "I love this Church more than anything else in the world," he once told a friend.

His lifelong concern -- particularly while he was at the Divinity School--was a ministry alert to society and to social problems. His aversion to what he once called "ecclesiastical incest" led him to establish a number of new programs at the School.

Forming a new Department of the Church was Miller's most notable accomplishment. The Department offers courses in the relationship of the church to society and sponsors a field work program--in mental hospitals and prisons--for prospective ministers.

Under Miller, the Divinity School sponsored the first major conference of Roman Catholic and Protestant scholars--in the spirit of the second Vatican Council--in 1963. A similar conference of Jewish and Christian scholars was held last year.

The administrative details of a practical ministry never interested him. His photographs of the Maine coast seemed to one colleague a symbol of Miller's uncluttered life. "He was a free man."

While at the Old Cambridge Baptist Church, a friend remembered, he was not interested in committees or attendance. When the church's spire was in danger of being condemned, however, Miller rallied the congregation into raising $45,000 for its renewal and spurred a drive for a new prayer chapel as well.

Miller felt life deeply and was a strongly spiritual man. "The mystery of life--a word he often used--to him was not mystification but ... a way of openness and sensitivity," Stendahl recalled.

Miller expressed his love of life through an appreciation of art and literature. He brought artists to lectures at the Divinity School and sponsored monthly showings. "Always," G. Ernest Wright, Parkman Professor of Divinity said yesterday, "he asked--what is he saying about society?"

A 1923 graduate of Colgate University with a B.Th., Miller and received honorary doctorates from seven colleges and universities.

Religion in a Technical Age, the last of Miller's seven books--a collection of essays in his paramount field of concern--has just been published by the Harvard University Press.