A Holy Calling: To Keep Truth Alive

His
real name was George Pease Williams, but to ward off insensitive school-yard
taunts as a young boy he constructed a more elegant middle name for himself,
and this is how he was known for the rest of his life: George Huntston Williams
(1914-2000). When I arrived at Harvard University in 1972, he was already a
legend in that place and widely known elsewhere as one of the leading church
historians of his time. He stood in the front ranks of scholars on the order of
Roland Bainton, Jaroslav Pelikan, Georges Florovsky, and Heiko A. Oberman.

Williams
is best remembered for
The
Radical Reformation, a monumental overview of sixteenth-century
religious dissent, first published in 1962 and still in print today. But he
never considered this his principal work. It was, he said, only a “fresh trench”
or irrigation ditch—he borrowed this image from Thomas Mann, who referred to
such motifs as
coulisses—in the landscape of the wider Christian tradition. His
true
magnum opus, he envisaged,
would be titled
The New Testament People: An Ecumenical History of
Christianity with Attention to Its Relations at All Important Nodal Points with
Judaism and Islam.
Like the unfinished
cathedrals of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth, Williams’s projected covenantal
history of the people of God was never completed. But, as a determined
generalist in church history, he was always alive to the subtle and complex
interconnectedness of the events he studied—events he saw not as isolated, opaque
moments in the history of religion but rather as translucent windows on to a
whole pattern of Christian experience.

Williams was fond
of saying that the special task of the church historian was to make meaningful
at least two articles of the creed: the
una sancta and the communio sanctorum. This is why he pursued not only the grandees of
church history (Athanasius, Anselm, Luther) but also those harried, illusory,
and sometimes downright weird participants in the community of faith. From
Anabaptists running naked through the streets of Amsterdam to Celtic monks
chanting psalms in the icy waters of the Shannon, from polygamous apocalyptics
to ascetic renunciants, Williams treated each seriously and with sympathy. They
all have something to teach us, he said. They are all our “speaking cousins.”

Calvin
Pater, one of Williams’s students, described his mentor’s work in this way: “Only
Williams would decide to specialize in everything; thus clasping to his breast
both and and,
with either and or together—a state of affairs that would have
scandalized a Kierkegaard.” Indeed, in his personal life no less than his
scholarly labors, George Williams was a coincidence of opposites. A Unitarian
who did not deny the Holy Trinity, he dared to write about sectarian
ecumenicity, wilderness and paradise, evangelical rationalism, Catholic
liberalism, and benignant Calvinism, not to mention Radical Reformation.

Unlike others
before and after him who assimilate church history to secular history, Williams
defined his own vocation as that of one standing committedly within the
historic community of faith, charged with telling and interpreting the story of
that community against the background of ultimate meanings. He resisted
historicist reductionism on the one hand and confessional imperialism on the
other.

Williams was one
of the few official Protestant observers present at all four sessions of the
Second Vatican Council. There he met Karol Wojtyla
from Poland, who later befriended him during a sabbatical leave in Krakow. Williams
later published one of the first English-language books on his friend, 
The Mind of John Paul II: Origins of His Thought and Action (1981). At the behest of the Holy Father, Williams
was inducted as a Knight of the Order of St. Gregory I in a special mass for
Christian unity.

As both scholar
and minister, Williams labored under the burden of a holy and risky calling to
keep alive the truth, the truth that sets men and women free. Such truth was
not speculative or abstract but engaged. Thus he refused to play the role of
historicus otiosus,
an idle observer detached from the flow and flux of the events he or she
interprets. He liked to quote the words of Adolf von Harnack: “We study history
in order to intervene in the course of history, and we have a right and duty to
do so; for without historical insight we either permit ourselves to be mere
objects of the historical process or tend to mislead people in an irresponsible
way.”

One could almost
tell the story of American public theology during the latter half of the
twentieth century through the prism of Williams’s scholarship and activism. During
the McCarthy era, he argued for the principle of “conscientious reticence.” In
an influential article, “Reluctance to Inform,” he defended the right of the
sensitized conscience against forced informing. He supported racial equality
and civil rights and marched in Montgomery with Martin Luther King Jr., a
former auditor in his courses in church history. Like Richard John Neuhaus, he
opposed the war in Vietnam. Even before
Roe v. Wade, he wrote and spoke against abortion on demand and
served as president of the National Right to Life Committee. Following a sermon
on this theme at Harvard’s Memorial Church, he once received a blow to the head
from a critic in the congregation who was enraged by his pro-life perspective.

In this, the
centennial anniversary of Williams’s birth, Rodney L. Petersen of the Boston
Theological Institute has edited a manuscript of some two thousand pages left
unpublished at the time of Williams’s death.
Divinings:
Religion at Harvard
From its
Origins in New England Ecclesiastical History to the 175th Anniversary of The
Harvard Divinity School, 1636–1992
tells
the story of religious life at Harvard from its founding in 1636 through almost
all of the twentieth century. It has now been published in three volumes by
Vandenhoeck
and Ruprecht: (1) First Light: The Formation of Harvard College
in 1636 and Evolution of a Republic of Letters in Cambridge;
(2) The “Augustan Age”: Religion in the
University, the Foundations of a Learned Ministry and the Development of the
Divinity School;
and (3) Calm
Rising Through Change and Through Storm: The Contours of Religion and
Commitment in an Age of Upheaval and Globalization. Only Williams could have conceived and written such a tumultuous
history of religion at Harvard, one that begins with “light” and concludes with
“upheaval.” The footnotes alone—in which Williams recounts many personal
anecdotes and reveals strong opinions on many matters—are worth the price of
the set.

George Williams
had an incalculable influence on several generations of students. In his
graduate seminars we were never very far from the sources, the documents, and
the languages he loved and knew so well. His seminar on Tertullian was my
introduction to serious historical research—one came away with a sense of
having been in the room with that fiery Latin teacher and having glimpsed the
whole
oikoumené of classical and
Christian antiquity.

Williams would
come to his church history courses in Harvard Yard directly from Appleton
Chapel, fresh from morning prayer, which he rarely missed. He would divest
himself of his galoshes and topcoat, brush the snow from his disheveled hair,
shuffle through his near-illegible notes for a minute, then begin:

This is called
ancient church history, because it must be truly seen in the
context of the ancient world. . . . The church is like a symphony. Christianity
stands in continuity with Judaism, while uniquely celebrating the mid-logos of
God incarnate alike in the infant of Bethlehem and the figure at Calvary. Salvation
is cosmic, as the whole creation groans in travail awaiting our full
redemption, a new heaven and earth. Our calling is to examine all the various
strands of confessing communities. We are amazed that this world is our home
and now (by satellite) has been glimpsed as a heavenly body and Christ’s saving
significance encompasses
both aspects.
The truth, however, remains in part unseen, even as Jesus was often a mystery
to his own disciples.

It was several
years after I left Harvard before I realized the gift I had received from this
great scholar. He taught me the meaning of what I believed. His insight,
conviction, and passion left none of his students untouched. But his pastoral
and personal qualities also shown through—his affection and tenderness, his
capacity for encouragement, his spiritual wisdom and quest for faith
de
profundis, his compassion and love for all
things human and humane. When George Huntston Williams died in the year 2000,
the theologian, later cardinal, Avery Dulles, S. J., wrote: “With George’s
death, I feel that I have lost a friend and gained, most probably, an
intercessor in heaven.”

Timothy George is dean of Beeson Divinity School of Samford University and general editor of the Reformation Commentary on Scripture. His email address is [email protected].

See
also Timothy George, “George Huntston Williams: A Historian for All Seasons” in
The Contentious Triangle: Church, State, and University, eds. Rodney L. Petersen and Calvin Augustine Pater
(Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1999); “Keeping Truth Alive
as a Holy Calling,”
Harvard Divinity Bulletin 29/4 (2001).

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