The Seminarian
Page 6
“That’s how we met, in the kitchen.”
From a young age, Betty Moitz had a family connection to Crozer Theological Seminary. It started with her grandmother Elizabeth, who became Crozer’s dietician in 1933. When she retired, Betty’s mother, Hannah Moitz, took over the position, and she kept it throughout ML’s time there. The family lived in a five-bedroom, three-bathroom home on the Crozer campus, and Betty graduated with honors from Eddystone High School, located only two miles away. Betty spent many days in her youth walking over to the kitchen to check on her mother, lend an extra hand, or just hang around and chat. Her elegant presence would provoke a shift in the male-dominated conversations among seminarians and faculty who stopped by.*1 “I was a part of Crozer in my small way from age five until twenty-three,” Betty says. “I knew most all of the students.”10
Despite the constant exposure to their world, Betty had no intention of becoming a divinity student. “I graduated from high school in 1946 and went directly to Moore College of Art. . . . I planned on becoming an interior designer, so this is how I was spending my days.”11
Betty was still a student at Moore (right across the river from the University of Pennsylvania) when she paid one of her regular visits to her mother in the basement of Old Main and met a well-dressed, ambitious young man out of Atlanta, Georgia. He had a smooth voice and a sly smile. At first, she and ML were just making small talk in Miss Hannah’s kitchen, nothing that would cause nearby students to turn their heads. As they spoke on and off over the next few months, Betty learned about ML’s background and his tremendous hopes for the future. “Crozer was known as a very radical religious institution,” she says, “so I was surprised to hear from ML himself [that he] had more conservative beliefs.” It was the enthusiasm with which he spoke on a wide range of topics that first attracted Betty.12
ML’s own feelings for Betty were something he tried to keep secret. Though he’d even written to his mother about his other recent dating prospects, he would not have been at all eager to inform Mama King that he was interested in a young white woman. Mac knew, of course, but he saw no harm in helping his best friend separate himself even further from racial norms they both believed were outdated. And though a few other students took note of ML and Betty’s friendly dialogue—it was, after all, a small world inside Old Main—no one seemed too bothered. Marcus Wood in particular understood some of what spurred ML’s attraction: “I supposed he thought that, here I am out of the South now, and not back home . . . out in the open, nothing illegal, a free place, sure I can go over and talk to this white girl.”13
ML’s Class Schedule
Year I, Term 2, November 30, 1948–February 16, 1949
Time
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
8:00 AM
History and Literature of the New Testament
History and Literature of the New Testament
History and Literature of the New Testament
History and Literature of the New Testament
9:00 AM
10:00 AM
10:30 AM
Chapel service
Optional service
Devotional pd.
Preparation of the Sermon
Preparation of the Sermon
11:00 AM
11:30 AM
Public Speaking
12:00 PM
12:30 PM
1:00 PM
2:00 PM
Great Theologians
3:00 PM
4:00 PM
Vespers service (4:15 PM)
5:00 PM
No classes on Monday | Christmas vacation: Dec. 23–Jan. 2 |
Spring vacation: Feb. 17–21
ML’s GPA for the term: 3.25
History and Literature of the New Testament
Morton Scott Enslin, BD (Andover Newton), ThD (Harvard), DD (Colby)
Course Description: “Introduction to the study of the New Testament. The environment and sources of early Christianity; its rise and development from 200 B.C. to A.D. 150; origin, canonization, and transmission of its literature. A competent knowledge of the contents of the English New Testament is required and will be tested early in the course.” (Credit hours: 8; ML’s grade: B)
Preparation of the Sermon
Robert Elwood Keighton, BD, ThM (Crozer)
Course Description: “The sermon as a form of literature; elements of its composition; sources and selection of material. Prerequisite course 360. Required.” (Credit hours: 2; ML’s grade: A)
Public Speaking
Robert Elwood Keighton, BD, ThM (Crozer)
Course Description: “Fundamental physical and psychological elements of public speaking.” (Credit hours: ⅓; ML’s grade: C+)
Great Theologians
George Washington Davis, BD, ThM (Colgate-Rochester), PhD (Yale)
Course Description: “Seminar, second term, every alternate year. . . . Augustine, John of Damascus, Thomas of Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Luther, Calvin, Schleiermacher, and Karl Barth.” (Credit hours: 2; ML’s grade: A-)
On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, a half-hour period was set aside at 10:00 AM for services in the chapel. On Tuesdays was a mandatory service led by Crozer president E. E. Aubrey. Wednesday services were optional, generally led by a member of the faculty or an invited pastor from an evangelical institution. The Friday devotional period was run by the students themselves and presided over by the chairman of the Devotions Committee. On Thursday, the 10:00 AM slot was a free period, and a vespers service was held at 4:15 PM. This tightly planned service featured a speaker from a prescheduled list, usually a Crozer professor or a guest speaker from another institution.14
Classes and Professors: In with the New
History and Literature of the New Testament
“When I first met and observed Martin both in my classroom and in my home (he dined in my house several times), I saw that he was always a perfect gentleman and knew that he was marked for the sword belt [he was destined to succeed]; he was going to be someone, not a private but an officer in the rank. He was a smooth boy and knew the world was round.”
—Morton S. Enslin15
Crozer seminarians knew when Professor Morton Scott Enslin was coming to class. Since Enslin lived near Old Main, his students would look out their classroom window and see Enslin leave his home with a lit pipe in his mouth. “He was puffing away,” recalls a former student, “marching toward the building as if he was in the army.” After Enslin’s human locomotive act, he’d “come into the room very fast.”16
Having endured Dr. James Pritchard’s downsizing of Moses and the Old Testament in term 1, ML and his classmates were prepared for Enslin’s New Testament course to continue Crozer’s program of stripping away biblical myths. They knew that Enslin would try his best to force his students to rethink how they viewed the life of Jesus Christ, to consider him as an actual human being. Enslin was a good friend of Pritchard’s; the two had planned their multiterm reality check together as a way of weeding out any students who still clung to a fundamentalist view of the Bible.
Like Pritchard, Enslin was more biblical scholar than preacher. When Enslin gave a sermon, he never worried about memorization or eye contact; he just read each sermon word for word. When asked why he did so, he shrugged. That’s just the way I am.17
By the time ML entered Crozer, Professor Enslin had been at the seminary for over twenty years. A proud graduate of Harvard Divinity School, he was serious about his role as editor of the Crozer Quarterly, a widely read academic journal. A family man, Enslin had a wife and children and stayed in close touch with his parents. But there was an eccentric side to Enslin that after two decades was well known among students and faculty. According to Pritchard, Enslin had no qualms about swearing or drinking and almost always had his pipe within reach. Enslin’s handwriting was microscopic in size, and he often allowed his children to run around campus naked as the day they ente
red the world.*2 “He was peculiar,” said a longtime Crozer trustee.18
Through others, ML soon learned that Enslin often retreated alone to Philadelphia to attend church services and prayer meetings. Loyal to routine, Enslin sat in the same exact seat during services and meetings. Enslin believed in this routine so strongly that he would turn down any dinner invitation that interfered with his solo church excursions.19
Among the seminarians, the eccentric professor was both a figure of fun and an object of admiration. “[Some of the] Crozer students would talk about him in the cafeteria in jest as ‘Saint Morton,’” international student James Beshai recalls, adding that Enslin was “somewhat of a rebel thinker.”20 But Beshai was impressed with Enslin’s memory for details: “Dr. Enslin was a typical Harvard man. He was a very disciplined historian, and would not talk off the top of his head. He was always citing references and citing evidence to support every claim he made.”21
ML himself must have been very aware of Enslin’s background as a scholar and an editor, and when he turned in papers, he seemed to work harder to paraphrase than he had in Pritchard’s course, perhaps respecting Enslin’s ability to sniff out improper citations. One A- paper for Enslin includes the following example of borrowed language—still bad, but less egregiously so:
“In the New Testament from the first page to the last it is either explicitly stated or implicitly understood that a man can only receive the divine forgiveness on condition that he forgives his neighbor.”
—R. H. Charles, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (1908)
“In the New Testament, it is understood throughout that one can only receive the divine forgiveness on the condition that he forgives his neighbor.”
—King, “The Ethics of Late Judaism as Evidenced in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs” (Winter 1948–1949)22
Only King knows whether this was an intentional modulation. In any event, Enslin’s most lasting impact on ML would be through the ideas to which the professor exposed him. ML would later say of Enslin, “He was one of those precise scholars and superb linguists, who had a rather iconoclastic manner of criticism.” Paraphrasing Immanuel Kant’s famous description of how David Hume influenced his thinking, King wrote that “[Enslin] knocked me out of my dogmatic slumber.”23
Professor Enslin would cause ML and the rest of the class to reassess their entire biblical foundation. As they began to doubt their deep-seated beliefs, they found that it affected their ability to preach. Enslin’s intent was not to torture his students; his end goal was to build them back up so that they could better serve Christian society.
Seminarians had a habit of checking in on other seminarians as they preached, so once when Marcus Wood was asked to give a sermon in Philadelphia, ML and Mac decided to see if he was practicing what Enslin had been putting down. They snuck into the service and lay down in the balcony so Wood couldn’t see them. As their friend spoke, they listened to see how closely he followed Enslin’s version of the New Testament. Did Wood fall into any of the traps Enslin cautioned against? Did he summon a Virgin Mary or otherwise mythologize the story of Jesus?
After the service, Wood discovered the two young men. They had critical looks in their eyes, and he knew what they were about to say: “They tore me apart.”24
Public Speaking; Preparation of the Sermon
“The greatest need of civilization is not political security; the greatest need of civilization is not a multiplicity of wealth; the greatest need of civilization is not the superb genius of science, as important as it is; the greatest need of civilization is moral progress.”
—Martin Luther King Jr.25
ML also continued to study the practical aspects of preaching under Robert Keighton, pulling in low grades for the second term of Keighton’s Public Speaking class. One can only speculate as to why this relatively inconsequential course gave ML such trouble. After all, he had no lack of experience speaking in public; he’d spoken in front of his father’s congregation at Ebenezer and to audiences at Morehouse. Perhaps Keighton’s aforementioned distaste for the black style of preaching affected his grade. It may have also been a sign that the professor had already lost ML to Rev. J. Pius Barbour’s influence.
King did better in Keighton’s Preparation of the Sermon course, earning an A and getting exposure to a number of different sermon formats and organizational techniques—some more useful than others. Keighton taught forms such as the gimmicky “jewel” sermon, in which the preacher introduces a single fact (the jewel) and shows it off by exploring it from different perspectives (One out of every seven people in this city are homeless. Let’s think about that for a moment . . .), and the so-classic-it-became-cliché “three points and a poem” sermon, which is exactly what it sounds like. These fundamental formats had been around long before ML or even Daddy King had started preaching, and ML was resistant to such rigid formulas. He would use them the same way creative writers use writing prompts: simply as random inspiration to kick-start his own imagination.26
More directly useful were Keighton’s tips on how to organize a sermon via a written outline. ML developed several of his future sermons using the six-part template Keighton taught, including “Facing Life’s Inescapables,” which he would deliver in March 1949 at Rev. Barbour’s Calvary Baptist Church. At various points in his notes, ML arranged his thoughts according to the elements in Keighton’s template, which are collected below:
Title:
Facing Life’s Inescapables
Theme:
There are certain great inevitables in life which cannot be escaped.
Purpose:
To show the listeners how to face these inevitables.
Introduction:
One of the tragic tendencies that has characterized man ever since the dawn of recorded history has been his attempt to escape his moral responsibilities. Man is forever trying to escape the realities of life. He is forever trying to make the false seem true; the evil seem good; the ugly seem beautiful; and the unjust seem just.
Body:
—First, you cannot escape yourself. You are the one person from whom you can never get a divorce.
—Second, we cannot escape sacrifice. No one ever accomplishes anything in this life without sacrificing themselves for one thing or another.
—Finally we cannot escape Jesus. For 19 centuries we have tried to escape him. But only to find that every time we attempt to escape him he stands right before us.
Conclusion:
This is the conclusion of the whole matter. We can’t escape ourselves; we can’t escape sacrifice; we can’t escape Jesus. We had better accept these as the great inevitables of life.27
Like the sermon formats Keighton taught, the template above was a common way for preachers to organize their material. But it would not take long for ML to break free from such conventions and distinguish himself from all the other aspiring ministers at Crozer.
Meanwhile, ML continued his education at “Barbour University.” Rev. Barbour had a grading system that was very different from Keighton’s. He would watch ML and other beginning preachers closely as they practiced their sermons in his home, assessing their performance in three categories: content, delivery, and audience reaction. Even decades later, one of Rev. Barbour’s “students” remembered the intimidating assessment: “You could get an A in content, but a D in audience response . . . the lesson was that every sermon had to have relevance to the people listening.”28
At this stage of ML’s Crozer journey, earning all As from Rev. Barbour would have been next to impossible. But Barbour’s stern guidance would help him find his way, not only at “Barbour University” but back at Crozer as well.
Once more, the reverend served as a middleman, bridging the gap between the culture at Crozer and the world of young black seminarians such as ML. To do so, he drew on his own life experiences. J. Pius Barbour grew up a Texan, near Galveston, where his father preached for nearly four decades. Having watched his father an
d brother commit their entire beings to the pulpit, Barbour was resistant to following the same path. (His brother would later collapse and die in the middle of a sermon.) Instead, he chose to pursue a law-related track at Morehouse College, got married.*3 and then landed a job as an English professor at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute. It was while at Tuskegee that he felt a call to the ministry, “mystical” in nature. He chose to study at Crozer, and it was there that he realized how much doubt he actually had about his own faith in Christianity. But his professors encouraged him to strengthen that faith by learning as much as he could about theology. With his background in law and the humanities, Barbour welcomed this intense scrutiny. He went on to earn not just a bachelor’s but also a master’s in theology from Crozer.
J. Pius Barbour knew Crozer’s curriculum, and he knew that anyone coming from a background similar to his would have a tough time finding an authentic experience there. “A course in ministry at Crozer had no relationship to the black church,” explained his daughter, Almanina Barbour. “It had no emotion or tension. . . . Furthermore, it did not speak to the conditions of black people, because how you see Christianity depends upon what your reality is.” That’s why, she added, “there had to be somebody to translate all this, and that is what my father did for all of them.”29