Theology Today - Vol 49, No.2 - July 1992 - EDITORIAL - In Memoriam Hugh Thomson Kerr, 1909-1992

In Memoriam
Hugh Thomson Kerr, 1909-1992
By The Editors

On March 27, 1992, those who are passionately concerned about the vitality of contemporary theology lost a good friend I and a formidable ally. On that day, Hugh Thomson Kerr, the senior editor of THEOLOGY TODAY, died in Princeton after a brief illness. "Tim" (as he was known to those closest to him) had been deeply involved in the life of THEOLOGY TODAY since its very first issue in 1944, serving initially as associate editor under the journal's

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founder, the late John A. Mackay. In 1951, Tim Kerr assumed the editorial helm of this journal, a position he sometimes shared with others but never fully relinquished for the remaining forty-one years of his life.

Tim loved THEOLOGY TODAY, or perhaps more accurately, he loved theology, and he saw THEOLOGY TODAY as an instrument for the lively expression and urgent renewal of theological conversation. Under his leadership, THEOLOGY TODAY became a well-regarded voice in the theological world - a valuable resource for pastors, academic theologians, and intellectually inquisitive laypersons-gradually building readership until it acquired the largest circulation of any religious quarterly in the world.

Born in Chicago July 1, 1909, Tim spent most of his youth in Pittsburgh, where his father was pastor of the Shadyside Presbyterian Church. Tim was a 1931 graduate of Princeton University, and he received his theological training at Western (now Pittsburgh) Theological Seminary and the University of Edinburgh, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1936. After a brief period teaching at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, he joined the faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary in 1940 and was named the Benjamin B. Warfield Professor of Theology in 1950. He officially retired from the Princeton faculty in 1974, but the widespread and enduring student interest in his courses on theology and the arts kept him coming back into the classroom every year.

As a teacher, Tim was known as a warm and encouraging guide who was never afraid to try out a creative and innovative teaching approach. Like other professors, he required his students to read books and to write papers, but he also called upon them to create poems, to script plays, to paint, and to design media productions. His courses in theology often made use of short films and slides of religious art and architecture, and he experimented with classroom methods that encouraged students to take charge of their own learning.

His model for much of this classroom creativity was, ironically, not a theologian but a chemistry professor, Hubert N. Alyea of Princeton University. One of Alyea's lectures, "Lucky Accidents, Great Discoveries, and the Prepared Mind," was so popular that it was repeated year after year on alumni day to increasing crowds of adults and children. The lecture, observed Tim, was a "fantastic light and sound circus":

Alyea mixed chemicals with foaming and brilliant effect, dashing from one end of the long lab counter to the other, writing a formula on the blackboard, instructing everyone in elementary science, and now and then disappearing to a projection booth to flash a slide or a portion of a film on an overhead screen. Children screamed with delight, and older alumni, like me, wondered why in heaven we hadn't majored in chemistry with this genial genius.

For Tim, Alyea's lecture was more than a dazzling show; it was a challenge to rethink his approach to teaching theology. "If [Alyea]

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could make chemistry fascinating for a public audience," Tim observed, "I should be able to stir the ashes of theological debate and generate some sparks of life in the old doctrines. After all Alyea was restricted to his chemical formulas, whereas I could draw on everything in heaven and on earth."

And Stir the ashes he did. One of Tim's former students, John Mulder, who is now the president of Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and who also served for several years as an editorial colleague of Tim's at THEOLOGY TODAY, remembers first of all a refreshing teacher in a course called "Classic Systems of Theology."

"His wit and humor," Mulder recalls, "enlivened what we all found difficult and made the inaccessible reaches of the tradition somewhat closer at hand. The inevitable abstractions of theology were never allowed to be treated as intellectual toys, unrelated to life or the church. For Tim Kerr as editor and journalist, the life of the mind has always been the life of faith, and the life of faith has been the activity of the Spirit in human relationship and community."

Looking back upon Tim's contributions in many areas, Mulder comments on the unifying thread that ran through them all. He was, Mulder states, one whose career as teacher, editor, and theologian was "an evangelistic calling in the best sense - a literate, coherent presentation and distribution of the gospel of Jesus Christ to a broken world."

As an editor, Tim had clear and distinct tastes in religious writing. His blue pencil was a scalpel, slicing away jargon and puffery, healing ailing theological prose. He was convinced that theologians had become too timid, too cautious, too ready to tether their own insights with the cords of qualifications, and he encouraged them to say what they meant and to say it boldly. "What we need today," he once wrote in a THEOLOGY TODAY editorial, " are hard-hitting articles, growing out of deep conviction, by authors who have something to say and are not afraid of taking a stand, unfurling a banner, going out on a limb, engaging in critical controversy." He was particularly negative toward the passive "compare this to that" style of writing so prized in the seminar and so dreaded by journal readers.

One of Tim's many enduring friendships was with theologian F.W. Dillistone, who was an original member of the THEOLOGY TODAY editorial council and who watched Tim's editorial style develop over the years. "There emerged," Dillistone said, "one of the most distinguished editorships that any theological journal has enjoyed. Tim was amazing. When retirement seemed a possibility, he entered the fray again, writing editorials that sparkled with variations, combining the needs of the minister with those of the academic theologian."

Craig Dykstra, a former editor of THEOLOGY TODAY and currently the vice-president for religion of the Lilly Endowment, remembers that Tim Kerr read with appreciation the work of Gabriel Marcel. Marcel, Dykstra notes, made much of the characteristic he calls disponibilité, the capacity to be profoundly receptive to another. "To

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my mind," Dykstra observes, "Tim Kerr's disponibilité, his capacity to be appreciating and welcomingly available to someone or something else, is key to what made him a fine editor, theologian, and teacher. It's also what I felt from him when he befriended me as a young colleague and invited me into the day-by-day, week-by-week enjoyment of continually creating anew this journal that he loved. Doing that with him changed me in a quiet but important way. It is striking how the most important influences come not through force, but by such grace as his sheer, open presence made available to me."

Tim was not only an editor but also a prolific author. He wrote or edited a dozen books, including A Compend of Calvin's Institutes (which was first published in 1939, underwent three revisions, and was translated into Japanese and Korean), A Compend of Luther's Theology (1943, 1966), and What Divides Protestants Today (1958). In contrast to those theologians whose writings grow increasingly technical and obscurantist, Tim titled his last book The Simple Gospel (1991).

Tim had a deep faith in the trustworthiness of God, and this enabled him to face the future with openness, confidence, and eagerness. When he died, he left on his desk the rough draft of yet another book and preliminary plans for the fiftieth anniversary issue of THEOLOGY TODAY in 1994 (which would have coincided, of course, with fifty years of Tim's editorial leadership). At his memorial service, held in Miller Chapel at Princeton Seminary, the congregation gently laughed when they were told that Tim, before he died, had carefully selected each element of the service: the words of every prayer, the text and tune of every hymn, the form of every congregational response-always the editor, even to the end!

Tim Kerr was an imaginative teacher, a faithful theologian, a diligent scholar, and a discriminating editor; he was also, noted his friend Thomas Gillespie, "a grand human being." Speaking at the memorial service, Gillespie, president of Princeton Seminary, illustrated Tim's humanity and humility by telling the story of a Princeton Seminary junior in the early 1950s attending a heavy theological lecture on religious epistemology given by a noted theologian of the day. "Suddenly," Gillespie records, "this student realized that he did not understand a word of what was being said. Looking around the room at all the others who were listening intently and apparently knowingly, he concluded that he must be the dumbest seminarian ever to come down the pike. Filled with self-doubt, he began to wonder how he could ever be a minister if he could not grasp the argument being offered by this prominent theologian. Just then, he looked down his row of seats, and his eyes met those of Dr. Kerr, who was sitting alone at the other end. In that moment, Tim Kerr, the Warfield Professor of Systematic Theology, raised his hands, palms up, as if to say, 'I don't get it either.' That one humane effort saved a seminary student for the ministry."

Those who attended the memorial service that Tim himself had

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designed recognized that this worship, with its words of cheerful confidence in God's providence and its moments of deep joy, was yet another good gift from Tim. At the close of the service, the congregation sang the great hymn "God of Our Life," the text of which was written by Hugh T. Kerr, Sr., Tim's father. The final stanza of this hymn proclaims:

God of the coming years, through paths unknown we follow thee; when we are strong, Lord leave us not alone; our refuge be.
Be Thou for us in life our daily bread,
our hearts' true home when all our years have sped.

No one lived those lines more fully or more faithfully than did Tim Kerr. Because of Tim's life and work, the word "God" is, to borrow a phrase from Barth, "a more cheerful word."