Word: dusen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Pitney Van Dusen has been a friend of mine for many years, and I want to commend you heartily upon an excellent cover" story [April 19] ... It combined the ecumenical and theological movements of our time with the human interest, biographical data of a single individual. . . (THE REV.) CLAYTON T. GRISWOLD New York City...
Glory & Despair. Van Dusen's biggest job at nondenominational Union has been reorganizing the seminary to meet the doubled postwar enrollment, plus the influx of students' wives. He rearranged housing facilities, started a program by which churches would finance Union students from their own budgets, increased the number of foreign fellows from about 20 to 64 this year, and upped the budget from roughly $500,000 to $1,100,000. Union has come a long way from that December day in 1836 when the seminary first opened its doors to 13 students who wanted, as the preamble...
...Dusen himself has been something of an upstream swimmer against the intellectual current prevailing at the seminary during the past two decades. These have been the "neo-orthodox" years of theological through-the-looking-glass, when the wildest radicals were the most Biblically conservative, and the mark of old fuddy-duddyism was a relaxed attitude toward dogma. Students jampack the classes of Reinhold Niebuhr to hear that man is not good and never will be, and that humans must be content to strive for conditional and imperfect ends...
...these he added a third proposition, and its fuller development indicated that it was Van Dusen's own. This view "does not deny the possibility of Christ's return to end history. But it does not believe this expectation to be an essential element in Christian hope for the world, and for at least two reasons. It points to the indubitable fact that the early church anticipated the imminent return of Christ and that that expectation was not fulfilled...
...Dusen's concluding advice to Christians in a Lenten era: "American Christians [at Evanston] must come to grips with [a] term almost as unfamiliar to their ears as was the term 'ecumenical' 20 or even 10 years ago-the term 'eschatological.' Not only must they accustom their ears to the sound of the word; they must give their minds and hearts to the attempt to comprehend it and why it holds so decisive, so pivotal a place in the hope of fellow Christians in many lands and of many traditions...