Finding God At
HARVARD
1st night of the 1st Veritas Forum, Ames Courtroom, Harvard Law School, November 11, 1992. Kelly reading some of the student questions (some couldn't get to the microphone) to Ravi Zacharias and a panel of students from various cultures and disciplines. (Veritas now in 100+ universities in various countries).
Dr. Poh Lian Lim (Yap) speaking at the 1994 Harvard Veritas Forum, Sanders Theater, Memorial Hall. Jennifer Wiseman, Pablo Polischuk, Poh Lian Lim, Patricia Lyons, Todd Lake, Ian Hutchinson, Tom Howard, Bruce Herman, Brian Hall, Casely Essamuah, William Edgar, Susan Drake Emerich, not shown include Vera Shaw, Kelly Monroe, and keynote speaker David Aikman.
1996 Harvard Veritas Forum, with authors of Finding God at Harvard, Sanders Theater, Memorial Hall. Jeff Barneson, William Edgar, Todd Lake, Poh Lian Lim, Habib Malik, Kelly Monroe, Eve Perera, Rodney Peterson, not shown include: Vera Shaw, Kathy Weigand, Betsy Dawn Inskeep Smylie, and John Rankin.
Harold J. Berman was the Ames Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School. In 1985 he became the Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory University and a Fellow in Russian Legal Studies at the Carter Center. A prodigious scholar in the field of Soviet law, Professor Berman’s work also includes international trade, legal history, jurisprudence, and law and religion. He has authored twenty-five books and some three hundred articles. Known for his energetic and friendly personality, Dr. Berman was greatly respected in, and beyond, his field; and, was recently celebrated on his 60th anniversary as a law professor.
Harold Berman graduated from Dartmouth in 1938 and the London School of Economics in 1939. “At that time I was a lukewarm believer in Judaism,” he said. “I was, and still am, very conscious and proud of my Jewish heritage.” After serving in the U.S. Army as a cryptographer in Europe from 1942 to 1945, he went to Yale Law School. As a young law professor from Stanford, Berman arrived at Harvard Law School in 1948 on a visiting professorship — and stayed for the next thirty-seven years. In 2007, Dr. Berman left us to be with the Lord.
A note of memory, from Kelly Monroe Kullberg ~
In the mid-90s I, quite nervously, approached the office of Harold Berman at Harvard Law School — for the third time — about his contribution to Finding God at Harvard. (By then, friends and I had decided that FG@H might be useful as a book, not merely a photocopied collection to circulate among a hundred or so students.)
Sheepishly, wanting it to be over, I asked Professor Berman if he would consider adding some of his own life story, and faith journey, to his interesting essay on "Judeo-Christian versus Pagan Scholarship." As with many of the writers (and one of the reasons the volume took seven years to create) I found myself cajoling a scholar of enormous academic stature to write personally, in 1st person voice, from the heart as well as the mind. This kind of writing takes some relearning. And courage. And vulnerable love for the world.
"I've not written of my own story, before. I'll think about it," he said, with a kindness that allowed me to breathe again. I thanked him and left a floppy disk on his desk. Two weeks later, that floppy disk appeared in my mailbox, once again. Harold Berman added the following four paragraphs:
Excerpt from Dr. Berman's entry in Finding God at Harvard: Spiritual Journeys of Thinking Christians.
.... The truth that “set me free” first appeared to me at the outbreak of World War II, when I was twenty-one years old. I was in Europe, where I had been studying European history for a year. While I visited Germany, Hitler announced on the radio that Germany had invaded Poland. It was literally the outbreak of the world war, and many of us fled for France. The stations were crowded with peasants carrying potatoes and animals and personal effects. The earliest train I could catch left at midnight.
I thought that Hitler’s invasion of Poland would lead to the total destruction of human civilization. I felt as one would feel today if all the major powers were to become involved in a full-scale nuclear war. I was shattered—in total despair. There, alone on that train, Jesus Christ appeared to me in a vision. His face reminded me of one of the Russian icons that I would later see—heavily scarred and tragic—not suffering but bearing the marks of having suffered. I suddenly realized that I was not entitled to such despair, that it was not I but another, God himself, who bore the burden of human destiny, and that it was rather for me to believe in him even though human history was at an end.
When the train arrived in Paris early that morning, I walked straight to the Notre Dame cathedral, and I prayed a personal prayer to God for the first time in my life. My wife, who is Protestant, asks me how I could become a believer in Christ without having read the Gospels. My answer is that that is how the first disciples became believers.
And so this experience of “amazing grace” not only made me a Christian believer—against my will and against my heritage—but also freed me from that pride and illusion of intellect which is the besetting sin of academic scholarship.
Unabridged essay: Judeo-Christian Versus Pagan Scholarship, by Harold J. Berman, Finding God at Harvard
The founders of Harvard University were convinced that the pursuit of scholarly knowledge would lead to discovery of truth, not merely in the secular sense but also in the Christian sense—that is, truth which discloses the glory of God. They believed that God is revealed both in nature and in us and that therefore the study of natural and human phenomena will disclose God’s purposes.
In the past century, we have moved very far from that vision of the purpose of scholarship. Today the lectures offered by the faculty, the class discussion, and the books assigned in the various sciences and humanities give little if any recognition that God even exists—much less glorify him. Our intellectual life, our thinking, has been largely divorced from our religious faith.
Faculty, students, and administrators now think of themselves as members not of a religious community but of an “academic” community—named after the Greek hero Academus. It was in a grove dedicated to Academus—I think we may call him the unknown god of our universities—that Plato in about 390 b.c. founded his famous school, an “academy” dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom. The modern academic community has come to stand in sharp contrast with the Christian community, which is dedicated to the worship of the known God—the God who, we are told by Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians, had confounded the wisdom of the secular and made it foolish.
“The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain” (Psalm 94:11). The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the eminent historian Professor So and So, that they are vain. God hath made foolish the writings of the distinguished economist Professor This and That. Where is the scribe, Professor ABC of the Divinity School? Where is the disputer of the world, Professor XYZ of the Law School? “Hath not God made foolish their wisdom?” (1 Corinthians 1:20). If the wisdom that we are pursuing is vanity, surely we should cease to pursue it. But is there not another wisdom, a wisdom of God, for us to pursue?
What is the difference between the wisdom of God and the wisdom of the world?
The wisdom of the world assumes that God’s existence is irrelevant to knowledge and that truth is discoverable by the human mind unaided by the Holy Spirit. Christian wisdom, on the other hand, seeks God’s guidance, the guidance of the Holy Spirit, in order to discover the relationship between what we know and what God intends for us. God is the Lord of our minds as much as he is the Lord of our “hearts.” Nothing is discovered without his help. I believe that if we open our minds to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and pray for his guidance in intellectual matters, we shall discover new truth which will astound those who believe that God’s existence is irrelevant to scholarship.
The pagan scholar says, “Facts are facts.” He treats nature and society as objects, as things to be dissected and analyzed by his brain. The Judaic or Christian scholar sees not merely nature and not merely society but nature and society as creations of God separated from, and yet still bearing witness to, their Creator. Heaven and earth are still his handiwork and still declare his glory. They reflect his purposes for humankind. The Judaic or Christian scholar attempts not only to see this reflection but to participate in it, to commit himself to exemplifying it.
But isn’t a fact a fact? Are not the facts we seek to discover, as natural and social scientists—facts about the moon or about history or about life—the same facts to a Jew or a Christian as to a pagan? In one sense, of course, they are. That the sun rose this morning is a fact recognized by atheist, polytheist, Hindu, Muslim, Jew, or Christian. But in another sense, that is not so. For a fact is never seen in isolation from other facts. The phenomena of space and time may be seen from many different perspectives. As a matter of fact, the sun, of course, did not rise; the earth turned.
A Judaic or Christian perspective reveals certain facts that otherwise cannot be known. It reveals that human history is part of God’s plan for the universe and that every fact of the universe is an event in the life of God. The Judaic or Christian scholar strives to find God’s purposes, God himself, in the subject of his scholarship. He or she must therefore be a prophet, and more than that, an apostle.
It is customary to treat the historical controversy between science and religion as a dead issue—and it is, in the old sense of science as the hard physical sciences. We are no longer troubled by the claim that the natural sciences disprove religious truth. But there is a far more serious conflict between religion and the modern, broader conception of “science” which should trouble us: that is the conflict between the secularism of so-called modern “scientific” thought, especially in the social sciences, and the Christian insight that humans are more than a natural phenomenon, more even than observers of natural phenomena, that humans are rather creatures of God who partake also of God’s creative powers.
The modes of analysis which dominate our intellectual life today are essentially pagan modes of analysis. They are inherently skeptical modes of analysis rather than faithful modes of analysis. In the social sciences, they seek explanations in materialistic terms of aggrandizement, whether economic or political or psychological. In philosophy and literature, they increasingly emphasize the arbitrariness and subjectivity of standards of goodness, truth, and beauty. Underlying these modes of analysis is the tendency of the analyst—the social scientist in particular—to arrogate to himself a power to treat humans as objects, a tendency to “play God” with his intellectual systems. He stresses causation instead of creation, facts instead of acts. He looks only at the temporal things which are seen and not at the eternal things which are unseen. He denies the reality of God’s self-revelation in the intellectual process itself. Pride of intellect is the besetting sin of the modern university, whether it takes the form of the professor’s skepticism or the student’s idle curiosity.
There is a need for Jews and Christians to cultivate Judaic and Christian methods of thinking about life—Christian modes of analysis of society, of history, of economic life, of the human psyche. This means, at the very least, bringing back into the classroom the simple truth that our entire cultural and intellectual heritage derives historically from our religious tradition.
From a Judaic or Christian standpoint, intellectual understanding is intimately connected with faith, with hope, and with love. There is a faithful, a hopeful, and a loving mode of scholarship which it is the task of the scholar to cultivate. Though the unbeliever will classify such a mode of scholarship as “unscientific,” it will come much nearer than dispassionate objectivity to the truth about human nature and social life. For the truth is that God does not call us to be merely observers of life; rather he calls all of us—even the scholars—in all that we do, to participate with him in the process of spiritual death and resurrection which is the fundamental religious experience.
The non-Jewish or non-Christian reader may be puzzled by this conclusion and may wonder whether it does not exclude him from the intellectual community of his Jewish and Christian fellow-scholars—or, more precisely, whether it does not excuse those relatively few persons who seek to practice a Jewish or Christian mode of scholarship from the intellectual community of the great majority who prefer to dwell in the academic grove where facts are simply facts. Fortunately, however, the modern university, despite its more dogmatic beginnings, is (at least when it is at its best) hospitable to fundamentally diverse concepts of the nature of truth. Indeed, it thrives on such diversity, leaving it to each scholar to relate his intellectual convictions to his personal convictions in his or her own way.
Yet this very pluralism makes it appropriate, and even necessary, for participants in the scholarly community to share with one another, from time to time, their personal experiences. This is a difficult and humbling thing to do, especially in a university where people hardly ever discuss truth and first principles which ought to be fundamental to our dialogue. Yet to be a scholar is to search for truth. And to search for truth is to be open to the possibility that some discovered truth will lay claim to one’s allegiance.
In my own case, the truth that “set me free” first appeared to me at the outbreak of World War II, when I was twenty-one years old. I was in Europe, where I had been studying European history for a year. While I visited Germany, Hitler announced on the radio that Germany had invaded Poland. It was literally the outbreak of the world war, and many of us fled for France. The stations were crowded with peasants carrying potatoes and animals and personal effects. The earliest train I could catch left at midnight.
I thought that Hitler’s invasion of Poland would lead to the total destruction of human civilization. I felt as one would feel today if all the major powers were to become involved in a full-scale nuclear war. I was shattered—in total despair. There, alone on that train, Jesus Christ appeared to me in a vision. His face reminded me of one of the Russian icons that I would later see—heavily scarred and tragic—not suffering but bearing the marks of having suffered. I suddenly realized that I was not entitled to such despair, that it was not I but another, God himself, who bore the burden of human destiny, and that it was rather for me to believe in him even though human history was at an end.
When the train arrived in Paris early that morning, I walked straight to the Notre Dame cathedral, and I prayed a personal prayer to God for the first time in my life. My wife, who is Protestant, asks me how I could become a believer in Christ without having read the Gospels. My answer is that that is how the first disciples became believers.
And so this experience of “amazing grace” not only made me a Christian believer—against my will and against my heritage—but also freed me from that pride and illusion of intellect which is the besetting sin of academic scholarship.
