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Georgia Harkness: Chastened Liberal
By Marianne H. Micks

Georgia Harkness (1891-1974), first woman to teach theology in an American seminary, had her head and her heart knit together. She fused sense and sensibility. At her insistence, her title, both at Garrett Theological Seminary and later at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, was Professor of Applied Theology. For Harkness, theological reflection issued in action.

Among the many labels her interpreters have used to locate her in the history of twentieth-century theology, the most appropriate is "chastened liberal." She herself used that phrase in a 1939 article for The Christian Century on "How My Mind Has Changed in this Decade." Ten years earlier, in one of the first of her more than thirty books, Harkness had firmly declared her belief in human moral progress. "In spite of temporary eddies in human progress, such as the World War and its after effects," she wrote, "a long look over the past reveals a tremendous advance from the ideals and standards of former days."¹ She rejoiced at the fact that the doctrine of original sin was fast disappearing. "The sooner it disappears, the better for theology," she commented.²

Now, on the; eve of the Second World War, Harkness declared that liberalism needed to be recalled to the meaning of the cross and the power of the resurrection. Although she still believed in liberalism, it was "a chastened and deepened liberalism." As she recognized, this change came about partly from her wrestling with continental theology. She had also encountered the work of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich in this country.

Marianne H. Micks is Professor Emerita of Biblical and Historical Theology at the Virginia Theological Seminary. Her most recent books are Loving the Questions: An Exploration of the Nicene Creed (1994) and Deep Waters: An Introduction to Baptism (1995).

¹ Georgia Harkness, Conflicts in Religious Thought (New York: H. Holt & Co., 1929), p. 131.

² Ibid., p. 221.

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Reading a selection of Harkness' many publications today is virtually to find a survey of theological currents in the first three quarters of this century. It is also to meet a Christian thinker with extraordinarily broad interests, one, who might well be called a Renaissance woman in that respect. I will explore just four of the diverse and ongoing concerns of this many-dimensioned theologian-her love of poetry, her ecumenical participation, her apparent fascination with eschatology, and finally, above all, her deep commitment to helping people understand the Christian faith. Although she did not speak of herself in this idiom, she was a powerful modern apologist, one who made theology accessible to the laity. All four of these themes are so interwoven in her writing that we will not be able to speak of zany of them in isolation.

LOVE OF POETRY

In the autumn of 1951, for example, Harkness presented a paper to the
West Coast theological discussion group of which she was a member while
teaching at the Pacific School of Religion. She chose as her topic "Eschatology in the Great Poets." The paper was later published in the journal Religion in Life. In characteristic fashion, she first set forth a clear typology of six predominant forms of eschatological thought alive among Christians at that time and then proceeded to illustrate each type from the work of one or more poets.

The range of poets she discussed is also indicative of her breadth of interests. She began with Lucretius and Omar Khayyam. She proceeded to Homer and Virgil, who in turn led her to Dante and thence to Milton. A short section on the great hymnodists, such as Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley, followed, and finally she treated three mid-Victorian poets--Whittier, Tennyson, and Browning-with appropriate illustration of the optimistic outlook of each.

Harkness could not resist a jab at neoorthodoxy in the article. She notes that she cannot think of a poet of this theological stripe: "Eschatology it has," shoe comments, "but not poetry." She wonders if the mood of neoorthodoxy is congenial to the production of poetry at all. On the other hand, her liberalism, however chastened it might be, shines forth in her discussion of the Victorians. Acknowledging some truth in charges of undue optimism among them, she applauds their emphasis on the love of God and the intrinsic worth of every human being as the ground of ultimate trust. Death is no final barrier. It is to be accepted in confident faith.

Harkness herself wrote and published poetry, much of it in The Christian Century. Her poems, such as one titled "The Agony of God," reveal her combination of spirituality and social responsibility. Three of her poems are in the United Methodist Hymnal published in 1989, and one of those is a prize-winning hymn she wrote for the 1954 meeting of the World Council of Churches in Evanston, Illinois. Not surprisingly, it echoes the theme of that meeting, Christ as "Hope of the World." Each of the five stanzas opens with that refrain.

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ECUMENICAL PARTICIPATION

The brief obituary in The Christian Century on September 4, 1974 notes that Harkness was a delegate to many ecumenical gatherings, "particularly the World Council of Churches meetings in Amsterdam, Lund and Evanston." In the last of her books, published posthumously in 1974, Harkness speaks of her earlier participation in the 1938 Conference of the International Missionary Council in Madras, India and serving on two of its drafting committees as "one of the great experiences of my life." That conference adopted a statement on the kingdom of God, one drafted by E. Stanley Jones, according to her recollection, a statement that Harkness quotes almost forty years later as the best she has ever seen. In fact, it is almost a précis of her last book, Understanding the Kingdom of God (1974), the book for which she read page proofs the day before she died.

One incident in her ecumenical adventures is especially amusing to any feminist. At the 1948 meeting of the World Council, she encountered no less a theologian than Karl Barth, with whom she is said to have had a spirited exchange on the place of women in the church. She recalled that Barth, along with a few other men, chose to be part of a section on that topic. The chairman of the group surprised Harkness by asking her without any warning to state her theological position on women. Her reply was biblically based. She cited the Genesis 1 text that both women and men are made in the image of God, and Jesus' treatment of women as equal.

Barth then took the floor to say that on the contrary, according to Genesis, woman was created out of Adam's rib, and that in the New Testament, Ephesians 5 says emphatically that as Christ is head of the church, so mar: is head of woman. In the ensuing buzz of discussion, all Harkness added to her original reply was the well-known Pauline statement of Galatians 3:28, that in Christ there is neither male nor female. As Harkness tells it, if Barth had meant his statement as a joke, it was one that backfired. A year later, when asked if he remembered meeting an American woman theologian at Oxford, he retorted, "Remember me not of that woman!”³

FASCINATION WITH ESCHATOLOGY

Eschatology is not ordinarily a special interest of liberal theologians. Indeed, not many years ago when the President of the American Academy of Religion called upon the entire scholarly community to rethink eschatology in the light of current crises on planet earth, he awakened fresh interest in last or final things. Yet, for the Methodist Professor of Applied Theology, they were a matter of life-long interest.

In one of her earliest books, published in 1929, Harkness devoted the final chapter of more than thirty pages to the question of immortality. The

³ Georgia Harkness, "Days of My Years," extracted in Spirituality and Social Responsibility: Vocational Vision of Women in the United Methodist Tradition, edited by Rosemary Skinner Keller (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993), p. 218.

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book is titled Conflicts in Religious Thought. In her typical fashion, she first provides the reader with several clear definitions of immortality and then sums up arguments for and against it. The former are outlined in the table of sums up as eight in number: the reasonableness of the universe, moral optimism, the intrinsic worth of personality, the conservation of values, the problem of pain, man's moral task, the religious experience of humanity, and the character of God. Such a list reflects the full-flavored liberalism of the early Harkness. Indeed, the whole book is intended as a textbook in the college study of the philosophy of religion; it was written while shoe was on leave from a teaching post at Elmira College. Only later in her career did Harkness become more theologically oriented and more christocentric in her thinking.

Forty-five years later, Harkness devoted her last book, Understanding the Kingdom of God, to the subject of eschatology also. Her tidy mind is still very much in evidence. She sets forth clearly the spectrum of opinion currently alive and well in the churches-apocalyptic, prophetic, realized, existential. She digs for the roots of the idea of God's kingdom and reviews Jesus' parables about it. Finally, in the penultimate chapter, on the question "What difference does it make?" she cites her own earlier works, including Conflicts in Religious Thought (1929). In a note, she refers to chapters on the same subject in five of her other books, ample evidence that eschatology was fascinating to her-largely, I suspect, because no one can say anything about it with any great certainty. Harkness knew that theology proceeds' by asking questions rather than by providing any definitive answers

COMMITMENT To APOLOGETICS

I have called Georgia Harkness an apologist for the faith. The word apologia occurs only once in the New Testament, in 1 Peter 3:15, traditionally translated, "Always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in you." The NRSV now renders it verbosely: "Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you." Either way, Harkness fully meets the challenge of the next verse, "yet do it with gentleness and reverence." I think her gentleness and reverence shine through in four of her works chosen at random, works with titles suggestive of a continuing thrust in the ministry of this gifted teacher. In chronological order, they are Religious Living (1937), The Faith by Which the Church Lives (1940), Understanding the Christian Faith (1947), and Beliefs That Count (1961). But along with the gentleness and reverence in this sampling of her apologetic writing, Harkness exhibits her razor-sharp clarity of expression and her power to simplify without becoming simplistic. These qualities are not always highly valued in a graduate seminar, but they undoubtedly are in pulpit and pew.

The Hazen Foundation sponsored a whole series of brief books, books that sold for fifty cents a copy back in the thirties and forties. That fact is not irrelevant if one is trying to appeal to college students, the presumed target of the series. A distinguished list of mid-century authors produced

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the short books-among them John C. Bennett, Douglas Steere, Walter Horton, Mary Ely Lyman, Robert Calhoun, and Henry P Van Dusen. Harkness was a member of the committee responsible for planning and overseeing the series. Religious Living, designed to help a bewildered generation come to a "living experience" of religion, was her 1937 contribution to the Hazen series.

Clarity of organization was another of Harkness' hallmarks. In the four chapters of Religious Living, she treats the question "What is Religious Living?" followed by "Obstacles to Religious Living," "Beginnings in Religious Living," and "Growth in Power." She answers her first question by describing in cheerful and highly readable terms how religion relates to the whole of life-work, knowledge, beauty, friendship, play, home, money, health. And in the course of the fourteen pages of this opening chapter, she quotes Ibsen, Clement of Alexandria, Wordsworth, Aristotle, and Carl Jung, as well as the Bible.

As might be expected, the secular environment, with its growing rationalism, growing time pressures, and growing disbelief, is the chief obstacle to religion, but personal attitudes, especially arrogance, are also obstacles. Four beliefs seemed to her to be essential to religious living:

"She was deeply committed to pacifism, a stand that was undoubtedly one source of the loneliness she had earlier referred to, a loneliness that comes from taking an unpopular stand. "

belief in what she calls "spiritual personality," belief in human inadequacy, belief in a God who elicits devotion, and belief that personal religion is both possible and desirable. Throughout this discussion, Harkness demonstrates enormous empathy with students and their problems. There is nothing in the least stuffy about her presentation. She knows what moral problems they f ace. She is refreshingly straightforward in her discussion of prayer; for example, "Stop praying infantile prayers addressed to an elderly gentleman in the sky if you have been doing so, and pray with emotional and intellectual maturity.”⁴

The final section of this short apologetic work is directed at service to others. Here again, it is the Professor of Applied Theology speaking. Nothing less than struggle against poverty, class cleavage, racism, and war is called for. And once again, she pulls no punches. I think she speaks from personal experience when she writes, "The social struggle to create a more Christian world, if taken seriously, will lead you into ways of unpopularity

⁴ Georgia Harkness, Religious Giving (New York: Association, 1937), p. 50.

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and loneliness when only the person whose life is grounded in God finds power to stand."⁵

Three years later, in 1940, Georgia Harkness published another apologetic work-one called The Faith by Which the Church Lives. It consists of the five Mendenhall lectures she delivered at De Pauw University that year, as "the first woman," of course. Once again, she states her purpose succinctly and unequivocally. It is "to try to state in outline the basic and perennial and therefore the living, convictions of the Christian Church."⁶ To this end, she draws explicitly on her ecumenical experiences in Oxford, Madras, Amsterdam, and Geneva. She talks about a world church in a world crisis. Already in 1937, Harkness showed awareness of Hitler and German concentration camps. Now she writes as Europe is torn by full-scale war in which the United States will soon join.

In her opening lecture, Harkness shares some of her impressions of the church universal garnered from the four ecumenical conferences she had attended! What she remembers most about the 1937 conference on Life and Work at Oxford includes the worship in old St. Mary's Church, the leadership of John R. Mott, who presided, and the thrill of the vote to merge with the Faith and Order movement to create the World Council of Churches. This was the meeting at which Harkness encountered the sharp clash between liberal and continental theology.

The 1938 Madras conference of the International Missionary Council was a far richer ecumenical experience because it had far more participation by Christians from Asia, Africa, and South America; but the account Harkness gives of her travels in India after the conference is marred by invidious remarks about Hinduism that would be quite unacceptable in today's climate of interfaith dialogue. Such phrases as "the prevailing poverty, dirt, disease, and superstition of the Hindu masses" and "a sacrifice at the loathsome Kalighat" are signs, I think, of acute culture shock.

The Amsterdam meeting that Harkness attended was not that of 1948, the first heal WCC meeting, but rather that of the World Conference of Christian Youth in 1939, a conference with the motto Christus Victor. The Geneva ,Conference she attended that same month was a far smaller affair, some thirty-four people from eleven countries. This group was directly concerned with the crisis of the war. It produced what Harkness called a Magna Charta of a new international order. The only specific aspect of that order on which Harkness reports concerns Christian pacifism. She was deeply committed to pacifism, a stand that was undoubtedly one source of the loneliness she had earlier referred to, a loneliness that comes from taking a ii unpopular stand.

The remaining four lectures are devoted to an exposition of the Christian faith by dealing in turn with the authority of Jesus, the Lordship of Jesus, the democracy of the church, and God the Father. The lecture on authority

⁵Ibid., p. 61.,

⁶Georgia Harkness, The Faith by Which the Church Lives (New York: Abingdon, 1940), p. 9.

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explores ",the tangled hedgerows and byways of present-day theology." With her usual optimism, she looks for increased theological vitality through the exchange among different modes of thought. The lecture on the Lordship of Jesus has a more historical flavor, emphasizing Jesus' Jewishness and his rootedness in first-century culture but also his transcendence of that culture--his uniqueness as a teacher, his treatment of people, and his role as Savior. When she reaches discussion of the resurrection, this poet-theologian turns to one of her own poems published in 1935 in her book Holy Flame. The concluding lines are:

To read the mystery I have no hint:

But I have seen the Lord on Easter day,

My heart has burned within me in the way.

The Second World War gave great impetus to the writing of Christian apologetics. Dorothy L. Sayers, for example, abandoned Lord Peter Wimsey to write such powerful pieces as "The Dogma Is the Drama" and "Creed or Chaos." C. S. Lewis gave his series of three BBC radio talks, later published collectively under the title Mere Christianity. And Georgia Harkness wrote Understanding the Christian Faith, intended expressly to help the laity think theologically. When she gave the lectures at De Pauw, she still hoped that America could and would stay out of the war. Now at the end of that long conflict, she claims that there are two dates of outstanding importance in human history-the turning point made by the birth of Jesus ,and the turning point of August 6, 1945, the day the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

" `In the Kingdom of God, God rules as Lord but loves us as Father and works with us as Companion.' "

In her introduction to this new apologetic work, Harkness announces her intention of writing in such a way that people who can read the Readers' Digest can understand it if they want to. She does not intend to avoid such words as incarnation, atonement, and redemption but rather to recover them and reinterpret them for the present day. Surely that is the task of the apologist in any generation. Accordingly, she proceeds from the meaning of faith to the critical problems of understanding the Bible and then to the reality and nature of God, the person and work of Christ, and the other standard loci in theology. As befits this applied theologian, she has a penultimate chapter on the Christian in society. She ends with a call to Christian action, to new direction for our time. It seems to me that Harkness succeeds in her goal of making basic theology accessible to the intelligent layperson. There is nothing "watered down" about the theology she presents, but anyone should be able to understand the basic doctrines she explains.

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The fourth and final apologetic work I want to introduce was published some fourteen years later under the title Beliefs That Count. It was part of a series called' Basic Christian Books intended for adult education in the Methodist Church. Once again. we meet the applied theologian at work, reinterpreting fundamental theology for a new day. As the author says in the introduction, "It is contrary to the spirit of John Wesley to put theological beliefs into straitjackets when human need cries out for a more relevant application to Christian experience." This is vintage Harkness.

All of the reflections in Beliefs That Count are based on a statement made by Methodist bishops at their 1952 General Conference. Harkness claims to have adopted a method of correlation akin to but far simpler than that of Paul Tillich, attempting to meet existential questions with the answers of Christian faith. Although the book bears a decidedly Methodist stamp, since it was intended for use in adult education classes in that denomination, it presents basic Christian doctrine in a lucid and engaging manner. Four of the book's brief chapters reflect the "chastened liberalism" with which Harkness speaks toward the end of her career. Each begins "We believe . . ." The chapters I've chosen are ". . . in Man," " in Christian experience," ". . . in Christian perfection," and ". . . in the Kingdom of God."

In the first of these, the author addresses directly the fact that the difference between liberalism and neoorthodoxy centers on anthropology. Citing Reinhold Niebuhr's Gifford lectures, .The Nature and Destiny of Man, as well as Barth, Brunner, and the renewed interest in the thought of Kierkegaard as the source of a recovered emphasis on sin, she draws (I would say overdraws) a sharp contrast. Liberalism stresses human dignity and greatness as made in the divine image; the new orthodoxy stresses "man's perpetual sinfulness and weakness." The bishops' statement she proceeds to exegete is "We hold as central the dignity and sacredness of every human personality. Man is made in the spiritual image of God and partakes 'of His character and fellowship." The emphasis of her chapter is on freedom of choice and on human creativity. To be sure, humanity's sinful nature is affirmed on scriptural grounds, but through God's grace, we can rise above our sin and surrounding circumstances. Sin is basically disobedience, but despite our sinfulness, we are infinitely precious to God.

Through the witness of the Holy Spirit, we are assured of our salvation. Reason has a role to play, but it is feeling that generates the motive power of life. One hears echoes both of Wesley's strangely warmed heart and of Schleiermacher throughout this short chapter on experience, an experience fed and strengthened in the fellowship of the church.

The next chapter, of course, is on Christian perfection. Harkness is canny enough to realize that many people will not agree with her on this score, but she believes in perfection, or rather in holiness, as she says the doctrine is properly, called. She cites Ephesians 4:15, about growing up in every way into Christ, as the basis for believing that God's purpose for us is Christlikeness. The stress here is on becoming, not arriving.

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Finally, we turn to the chapter on the kingdom of God. Understanding the kingdom was the topic of Harkness' last book, written some thirteen years after this one. It is tempting to think that writing this short chapter whetted her appetite for more extensive reflection on the topic. She claims here that the nature of the kingdom is "the most disputed element in Christian theology." The kingdom, she thinks, means the reign of God in a redeemed society. She reaffirms our obligation to work for the coming of the kingdom, summarizing her views in these words: "In the Kingdom of God, God rules as Lord but loves us as Father and works with us as Companion."

Georgia Harkness was generous in recounting incidents in her own life that influenced her faith. She tells us of falling from a cliff into a stream far below while she was an undergraduate at Cornell. It was dark, and she could not swim. She tells of writing her book on the Dark Night of the Soul, while she was having serious physical problems and depression, writing it "as an alternative to having a nervous breakdown." But perhaps most significant of all, she tells us of an interchange with her father about an hour before his death in 1937. He asked her how many books she had written. She told him seven. She remembers his answer clearly. "I think they must be good books. Wise men say they are. But I wish you would write more about Jesus Christ."⁷ Henceforth, this philosopher of religion turned Christian theologian did precisely that.

The third stanza of one of her hymns in the current Methodist hymnal, a hymn called "'This Is My Song" (437), to the tune of Finlandia, written about 1939, reads:

This is my prayer, O Lord of all earth's kingdoms:

Thy kingdom come; on earth thy will be done.

Let Christ be lifted up till all shall serve him,

and hearts united learn to live as one.

O hear my prayer, thou God of all the nations.

⁷Quoted by Keller, Spirituality and Social Responsibility, p. 211.