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Neville melds intellect and religion as Marsh Chapel dean, University Chaplain
By David J. Craig
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Rev. Robert Cummings Neville preaching at Marsh Chapel. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
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On a Sunday morning last semester, parishioners at Marsh Chapel heard an unusual interpretation of St. Mark's Gospel story of the rich man who asked Jesus what he must do to enter heaven. Rev. Robert Cummings Neville suggested in his sermon that Jesus told the young man to give away his fortune not because Jesus disapproved of wealth — he didn't, Neville noted, and in fact had many rich friends — but because the man's identity was tied to his social position as well as to his virtue and chastity.
“We all know people who use virtue for the sake of gaining importance in the eyes of others and in their own eyes, not for its own sake,” Neville said. He told the members of his congregation that like that rich man, who wept with grief when Jesus told him to give up his wealth, they will know what they must do to grow spiritually when they hesitate to make the necessary sacrifice. “It might mean becoming morally serious for the first time,” he said, “or truly committing yourself to your relationships, or abandoning a false patriotism, or finding more socially useful work, or giving up feeling sorry for yourself.” The truth, he said, cuts especially sharply into “good people . . . the people who would run up to Jesus, kneel at his feet, and ask how to obtain eternal life.”
The sermon was characteristic Neville: intellectually challenging and compassionate toward those who struggle with religion's complexities. “My sermons actually have been criticized as being too complex for undergraduates,” says Neville, who became dean of Marsh Chapel and University Chaplain last June, after 15 years as dean of the School of Theology. He also is an STH professor of philosophy, religion, and theology. “But I believe that in serving an academic community, my focus should be speaking directly to complexities, not speaking down to anyone. . . . Undergraduates usually have their religious ideas challenged as soon as they get to college, and they need to find deep ways to either reaffirm their faith or legitimate their questioning. I believe that one's religious faith needs to mature during the undergraduate years, just like one's knowledge of chemistry or history.”
Aiming high
The author of 18 books and more than 200 academic articles, Neville certainly has the stuff to engage the minds of his parishioners. And on Sunday mornings at Marsh Chapel he consistently demonstrates the importance of intellect in religion, penetrating sophisticated spiritual matters and divisive social issues by appealing to scripture, while also fleshing out the moral ambiguities inherent in the topics he addresses. Neville hopes thus to show, he says, why “good people, church people, fall on both sides” of issues such as homosexuality, abortion, and the war in Iraq.
His convictions frequently are informed by contemporary ideas he draws from fields as diverse as physics and biology, the social sciences, and Eastern religion and philosophy. Discussing homosexuality during a recent service, for instance, he pointed out historical changes in cultural assumptions about the acceptability of various forms of nonreproductive sex since ancient times. “Christians who believe homosexuality is contrary to biological nature,” observed the 64-year-old Methodist minister, “need to come to terms with the modern definition of nature in population biology.”
And in a sermon last September, he showed a sensitive grasp of political trends while warning Americans against allowing their government to reject the core Christian virtue of humility by acting aggressively. “The ethics of democratic government is complicated because, as [it is] democratic, governmental policies and actions express the needs and wishes of so many constituencies,” he said. “Nevertheless, Christians are among the interest groups in the American democracy and often have prevailed to put the needs of poor, disenfranchised, and angrily frustrated people, as well as enemies, onto the national agenda. . . . Now, however, the ‘me first' motif seems to govern important American policies . . . ironically at a time when Christianity is supposed to be influential in government.”
Two-way street
Like BU's Methodist founders, Neville believes that religious values should form the foundation of academic inquiry in a fundamental yet subtle way, in a manner that falls short of exercising ideological influence. The pursuit of truth is, after all, he says, “a form of ultimate concern, and that makes it religious.
“Deep questions exist regarding why one should engage in intellectual activity,” continues Neville, who lives in Milton with his painter wife, Beth. “Is it just about getting grants and promoting your career? When people aren't religious, the importance of pursuing the truth can very easily become lost.”
To encourage all members of the BU community, including undergraduates, to attend to their religious and spiritual needs, last semester Neville launched a weekly adult Sunday school class, focusing on personal spiritual development, which he teaches from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. at Marsh. He hopes to start a Sunday school class for children within the next year, as well as to form a spiritual development group specifically for undergraduates. That group, he says, would discuss what “personal commitments Christians should make of themselves.
“There's a very strong conservative movement now among students going back to evangelical forms of Christianity, in part, I think, because they appreciate the demands it requires of them, as well as because they're searching for identity, and they like being instructed on how to act,” he continues. “The great fault of liberal religious rhetoric is that it has a lot to say about large social issues, but it doesn't demand that individuals discipline themselves. Helping people consider the personal demands of religion is a more difficult task for a liberal church, of course, because it can get so complicated — what should we do?”
9
January 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations