The First Period of the HTR

The rationale of Peabody's “Call” suggests clearly that the Faculty intended the new Theological Review to serve a crucial theological and pedagogical role, not only for the community of Harvard graduates in Divinity but also for the wider and society. When one looks closely at the first issue of the Review and subsequent numbers, one can see that dual intent manifest, in that the HTR from the outset provided a) a review of advances in knowledge in fields related to the theological enterprise, and b) theological and philosophical reflections that were themselves out to integrate and revise theology and Christianity's self-reflection in light of these advances.

The opening number, HTR 1:1, begins with Peabody's “Call to Theology,” articulating the modern liberal agenda of the Review and its rationale. This is followed by a review of “modern ideas” of God by Arthur McGiffert from Union Theological Seminary, which seeks to instruct the reader in contemporary tendencies concerning philosophy of religion and doctrines of God. Without taking a strong position, this piece maps a contrast between the metaphysical trajectory funding idealism, which it identifies as beginning with Spinoza and leading through Schleiermacher and Hegel, and the moral view found from Kant through Ritschl.Footnote ⁷ Immediately following this analytical essay is a piece titled “Is our Protestantism Still Protestant” by William Brown, also of Union, which seeks to interpret contemporary liberal protestant thought both as true to the reformation but also properly true to modernity and its revisionary task. Most interesting in this piece, I should note, is the surprising observation that the declaration of Papal infallibility at the first Vatican Council in 1870 indicates a “public recognition of the emancipation of the [Roman Catholic] Church from the tyranny of the past.” Brown notes that although this power was then being used against Catholic Modernists in a reactionary way, its real significance lies in its freeing the church to respond to the new situation that attends modernity, hence placing Catholicism and liberal Protestantism in similar steads in the sense that both are now open to revising theology in relation to the new world the modern era has ushered in.Footnote ⁸

Also in that first issue are a review essay in New Testament studies on synoptic criticism and a survey of recent archaeological work in Palestine. These two pieces are followed by an article from Thomas Carver, an economist then lecturing at Harvard, which probes human anthropology and particularly human evil from the perspective of economics' understanding of the human situation. Closing out the number is an essay by a local pastor on “Divine Providence.”

This range and format from the first number of HTR is roughly paralleled through the first years of the Review. Subsequent issues frequently include reviews of the state of particular fields of study such as Psychology of Religion, and review articles on recent books in systematic theology, New and Old Testament studies. Indeed, from 1914 to 1920 the publication even offered stand-alone book reviews, a practice never duplicated since. While academic authors predominated, often in these early years an issue would conclude with an essay by a noted local pastor on a fairly general topic, ordinarily approached from a liberal perspective. Additionally, specialists in non-theological fields appeared not infrequently in the pages.

Also prominent in the early volumes of HTR are transcripts of noteworthy talks or presentations delivered at the Divinity School, the Lowell Institute or elsewhere around Cambridge and Boston, thus making available to a wider public the substance of discourse and instruction that was predominating at Harvard. Notable among these was the occasional appearance of the Ingersoll Lecture on the Immortality of Man, and the Dudleian Lecture, each of which had set topics and occurred annually at the Divinity School. Hence the pedagogical function of HTR literally as a review—of the current state of the discourse in a range of fields, of the proceedings around Harvard, or most generally, of the very intellectual atmosphere and orientation that the Faculty found valuable and salutary—was conspicuous.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of HTR in its first decade was the clear existence of a distinctive theological profile, namely the modernist, liberal orientation announced in the opening essay by Professor Peabody. This is not to say that there was agreement among authors on what the content of that modern liberal theology should be. Indeed, the differences of opinion among the authors writing in the journal are significant, with authors such as Josiah Royce and Ralph Barton Perry, both of Harvard, for example, differing significantly on how much and what in particular of Christianity is to be given credence, and others in the liberal fold arguing from the perspectives of either idealism or pragmatism, defending the distinctiveness of Christianity, or arguing more generally for a more generic philosophy of religion as the eventual endpoint. But what was clear from the beginning was that this review, this venue, was committed to the modern liberal and predominantly Protestant enterprise, and that indeed this Review was understood as a social organ for the advancement of that cause for the greater benefit of theological education, the church and society.

There were a number of noteworthy essays in the first decade of the Review, several of which I wish to highlight. Illustrating the modernist bent of the Review, in the final issue of volume 2 in 1909 the lead article was “The Religion of the Future” from none other than Charles W. Eliot, President of Harvard University, one of his two eventual publications in HTR. The article was the transcript of the concluding lecture of the Summer School in Theology of 1909 given by President Eliot. This brief piece is a classic of theological Modernism, on the order of Shailer Matthew's 1924 The Faith of Modernism. Footnote ⁹ Eliot offers his own sketch of the shape of the religion of the future that stands in front of the twentieth century as its likely telos. He defines its characteristics largely negatively, noting that a) it will not depend on authority, b) it will not personify the primitive forces of nature, c) it will not worship any ancestors, teachers or rulers, nor will it identify anyone with the eternal deity, d) it will not orient towards personal welfare or salvation of the individual, but rather the betterment of the collective future, e) it will not be propitiary, sacrificial or expiatory, f) it will not understand the deity anthropomorphically, and finally g) it will not be gloomy, ascetic, or maledictory. In place of all these, Eliot sees the religion of the future to be dominated by a new thought of God as monotheistic, but in concert with modern science (remember that Eliot is a chemist), it will comprehend God as an eternal energy, taking literally Paul's claim that “in him we live and move and have our being.” As concerns humans, the future religion will be what Eliot calls “an all-saints religion,” paying homage to righteous and loving persons in the past and present who have pursued the good, in place of holding out immortality, other-worldly or supernatural salvation. It will approach evil from the side of prevention, not justification, and focus on the uplifting features of human goodness and interaction, emphasizing love and hope. In short, it is a classically modernist, human oriented conception of theology and religion, and one which Eliot himself appears to hope that Harvard can assist in bringing to fruition.

With the theological bent of the Review so clear, it is not particularly surprising whom and what topics we find populating the journal early on. Royce appears twice in its pages before his death in 1916, James B. Pratt and Ralph Barton Perry, students of both Royce and William James and participants in the discussions around pragmatism, write frequently in the Review. One of the most noteworthy early publications is an article by Ernst Troeltsch in 1912 dedicated overtly “to the memory of William James,” in which Troeltsch compares William James's new empirical approach to the Philosophy of Religion with what he calls the European Platonist approach to such study, which he identifies himself with and advocates. The only appearance of Troeltsch himself in HTR, Troeltsch seems to have wanted to publish this appreciative but critical piece at James's home institution, both to honor him but also to engage the most serious audience conceivable about the issues at stake. A classic statement of Troeltsch's own view, as well as a sympathetic appreciation of James's, this article remains well worth reading today.Footnote ¹⁰

Another remarkable piece from the first year of the Review is “Medievalism and Modernism” by George Tyrrell, published in the third number in 1908.Footnote ¹¹ Along with Alfred Loisy, Tyrrell was one of the two major figures in the emergence of Catholic Modernism, as well as a critic of Adolf von Harnack's widely discussed conception of the essence of Christianity. Tyrrell was expelled from the Society of Jesus in 1906 for his teachings, and suspended from the sacraments in 1907. This piece presents a sober and poignant defense of Catholic Modernism from the perspective of one who has suffered the full sanctions of the church, while still maintaining his core beliefs in Christ and the Catholic church. In response to Pope Pius X's 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis condemning the modernists, Tyrrell carefully appropriates the term, distinguishing it as only aptly applying to one who believes, as he does, in the possibility of a critical synthesis of Catholic Christianity (though notably not Catholic theology) and modern culture, and not all of those targeted by the broad sweep of Pius X's encyclical. In the essay Tyrrell both rebuts the encyclical and other defenders of Pius X's position, and seeks to justify his own position as a Catholic one, as well as to uncover the key distinction between the modernists and those he terms “medievalists,” meaning those then considered orthodox. For Tyrrell this distinction lies chiefly in the modernists' recognition of the reality of historical change, and hence the recognition that the church itself has and must continue to change over time.

I mentioned that the piece reads as poignant. This is partly due to the fact that Tyrrell, who was accused of Protestantism and hence a forsaking of the Holy Roman and Apostolic Church, had to turn to a Protestant American publication of the most liberal order to find both voice and audience. Adding to this is the fact that only a year later, Tyrrell was dead at the age of only forty-eight. Nothing else that I have read in Harvard Theological Review struck me as quite so emblematic of the state of things theological at a particular time.

The last example among the early pieces I want to draw attention to is a trio of articles published between 1912 and 1914 which exhibit the vibrancy, health, and indeed the quickly gained stature of the Harvard Theological Review. The first essay is a classic piece from the pen of Benjamin B. Warfield, the youngest of the Princeton theologians who defended biblical inspiration and the idea of scriptural inerrancy. Warfield, a long-standing critic of liberalism, submitted a fifty-one page attack on the liberal theological tradition entitled “Christless Christianity.”Footnote ¹² The article was, notably, given second billing behind Ernst Troeltsch's piece in memory of William James in volume five, number four. Warfield offers a comprehensive critique, beginning with an analysis of the origins of theological liberalism in Gotthold Lessing's eighteenth century rendition of the problems of history for understanding Christ. Warfield moves forward, ultimately to the Ritschl school, Harnack and Troeltsch on the “essence” question, and D. C. MacIntosh and Matthews on the idea of a Christianity not only without Christ, but even potentially without Jesus. Warfield asserts, to the contrary, that as Christianity is defined by redemption through a substitutionary atonement in the blood of Christ, these thinkers are not, in fact, Christians at all.Footnote ¹³ The essay is vintage Warfield (or “B. B.” as he was known when I was at PTS in the 1980s) both in rhetorical style and in the strategy of bringing the critique right into the lair of the beast. In 1912 that den already was already located at HTR.

Warfield's salvo went unreturned for a year, but in 1914 MacIntosh responded programmatically with his essay “What is the Christian Religion?”Footnote ¹⁴ MacIntosh does not break new theological ground, except in his central critique that Warfield is begging the question that the modern tradition itself is facing. The essay nonetheless stands as a clear and concise summation both of what is distinctive about the modern theological trajectory, and of MacIntosh's own reasons for continuing to call himself a Christian, and on what terms. Warfield lost little time rejoining, appearing for his second and final time in HTR in the fourth number of that volume with a fifty-nine page piece reasserting the centrality of the cross.Footnote ¹⁵ The exchange is historically instructive, offering concise access to the core components of the Princeton Theology and its liberal counterparts, both of which have proved so formative to the subsequent theological scene. It also illustrates the openness to real debate of the Reviewin its early years.

Ebbs and Flows of Theology in the Review

Although the first nine years of the HTR were dynamic and fulsome, from a theological perspective, by 1917 both the tenor and the content of theological discussion in the Review changed dramatically. Volume 10 opened, not unintention-ally I assume, with an historical piece entitled “Quietism,” and the offerings that year theologically were both slim and oriented to historical questions and subject matter.Footnote ¹⁶ The United States entered the “war to end all wars” on 4 April of that year just as the second number was issued. Luther and Augustine were the prominent theological subjects in the 1917 volume, with original sin front and center in the latter, and the only liberal figure who was the subject of an article was Kant; the topic in his case was morality. The following year was equally void of novel theological contributions and liberal dynamism, including only reviews of the work of Loisy, R. B. Perry and Phillips Brooks in what now read, in historical perspective, to be something like eulogies for the vibrancy of the modernist and progressive era at the conclusion of the Great War.

The “house theology” of HTR did not completely fade from view, but it did recede significantly over the next decades. Reliable contributors oriented more to the philosophical or psychological side of matters, such as James B. Pratt, Ralph Barton Perry and Julius Seelye Bixler, continued to publish routinely. But the balance of articles shifted significantly, both from: a) the predomination of theology overall to that of biblical studies; and b) within theology, from contemporary systematic and philosophical theology to an emphasis on and domination of historical theology. Thus the particular function of the HTR as a motive force for the modernization of both theological education and contemporary theology within the church that Peabody had envisioned, and the first decade of the Review had delivered, effectively failed by the early 1920s. I should note as well that this challenge to progressive and liberal theology itself went essentially unremarked in the Review, leaving the reader only to infer its reality from the abrupt shifts in subject matter and offerings.

The Divinity School between the mid-twenties and the early 1950s was not what one would call a thriving institution; certainly it was nothing like the relative heyday out of which emerged the Review. Typically the Review over this time period might include one essay in systematic theology or philosophy of religion per year, as well as several pieces that are better classified as historical theology.Footnote ¹⁷ The quality of these offerings remained high, but the coherence of the pieces published, and hence the notion of the Review being the locus of a vibrant conversation, is hard to intuit. Some volumes, such as volume 28 from 1934, and volume 30 from 1936, had no theological offerings at all for the whole year. Most notable overall was the historical attention offered to American theologians and movements, such as Perry Miller's fine articles on Solomon Stoddard, Jonathan Edwards, and Theodore Parker between 1941 and 1961.Footnote ¹⁸ Emerson too received significant attention, and by the 1950s it was clear that HTR was a significant publication for American historical theology and church history, as well as for more historically oriented pieces on topics in European historical theology. Interestingly, Dante and Milton were recurrent topics.

As the Divinity School Faculty began to grow again in the mid 1950s, with particular focus on contemporary ecumenical movements, in parallel the number of theological and philosophical offerings also began to increase. Volumes 60 to 67 (from 1967–1974) were particularly noteworthy for the dynamism of their theological offerings, and the renewed focus on contemporary matters both theological and cultural. These were, I should note, the last seven years of the editorship of Professor and then Dean Krister Stendahl, concurrent with the beginning of his deanship. Stendahl was supported by Professor Richard R. Niebuhr as an associate editor for theological and historical contributions. The orientation to the Zeitgeist was most evident in volume 62, which opened in January 1969 with the only title over the century of publication to use the word “psychedelic,” Walter Pahnke's Ingersoll Lecture, “The Psychedelic Mystical Experience in the Human Encounter with Death.”Footnote ¹⁹ Pahnke had completed his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1963 in Religion and Society, conducting the famous controlled LSD studies under the direction of Timothy Leary, including Huston Smith as a subject. He had been invited to offer the lecture by Dean Samuel Miller just days before Miller's untimely death.

The Faculty's overall theological concern with contemporary issues was also evident in the dedication of a complete number in 1971 to Black Theology, which included, among other interesting contributions, a particularly pointed piece by Bill Jones.Footnote ²⁰ The following year's fourth number was likewise topically focused, this time on ethics, with Arthur Dyck guest-editing the volume, and Preston Williams, Robin Lovin, Ron Green and David Little all writing in the issue. Topically-focused issues have been few and far between in the history of HTR, although current editor François Bovon has done this at least three times; these two are in any case particularly noteworthy.

By the mid-seventies, the brief revival of this concerted contemporary focus to the Review settled back into a now more consistent appearance of pieces of quality in theology and the philosophy of religion, with a resumed and continued emphasis on historical matters. The social orientation that had gripped the School, the culture, and even the HTR in the late sixties and early seventies slipped loose again, and the high quality but general publication that we are all familiar with came squarely into view. But for the addition of an emphasis on Jewish thought that came in the late eighties and early nineties, presumably along with the inauguration of the List Professorship at the School, the tenor and scope of the Review from the theological perspective has proved remarkably consistent and reliable over the last decades.

Twentieth Century Theology as Seen Via HTR

As I noted above, the shape of modern liberal theology in the decade before WW I is fairly evident in HTR with regard to Catholic Modernism and Protestant liberalism, both the American and European movements within these. Interestingly, however, developments in European theology that become particularly important later in the twentieth century—here I have in mind the work of Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, as well as that of Paul Tillich both before and after his emigration to the United States—are little in evidence. None of these authors, Tillich included, ever published anything directly in HTR. Moreover, little is in fact said of them until well after their prominence had been assured and, excepting Barth, their primary contributions made. There is a single review essay of this new theological position entitled “The ‘Theology of Crisis’: Remarks on a Recent Movement in German Theology” published in 1926 by Gustav Krüger, a professor of church history in Giessen, followed by another quite critical review essay on German theology by Julius Seelye Bixler some four years later.Footnote ²¹ But the Review only has two more articles taking up the significance of German crisis theology (or neo-orthodoxy) before the mid sixties, making it evident that this major movement in twentieth century Protestant theology was effectively not transpiring through or made available to its readership via the pages of the HTR.

One might surmise that this was a feature of the American orientation of the Review, assuming that while movements in European philosophy and Protestant theology were being ignored, American players were well-represented. But this thesis is not well-attested either. I already mentioned the fact that Paul Tillich, who was even a member of the Faculty at Harvard (though not the Divinity School per se), never writes in the Review. Additional to this, neither Reinhold Niebuhr nor H. Richard Niebuhr ever are authors of articles included in the Review, though Reinhold Niebuhr is, I should note, more than occasionally discussed, at points in the same breath as Barth and Brunner as the antipode of liberal theology. Later theological figures at Yale such as Hans Frei and George Lindbeck are also missing from the annals, with the exception of one early article on medieval nominalism by Lindbeck in 1959.Footnote ²² Ronald Thiemann, sometime Dean and Harvard's current expert on the more recent Yale theology, has to date only published one article in HTR, his inaugural convocation address as Dean on theological education.

Chicago fares little better than Yale as a source for or subject of theological discussion. There is one essay by Bernard Meland, and one later by James Gustafson, but nothing from Henry Nelson Wieman, Schubert Ogden, Langdon Gilkey, or David Tracy, all of whom would figure in any account of twentieth century American theology. Chicago, like Yale, did have its own outlet for theological writing, and it seems clear that those and other venues, rather than HTR, seemed the relevant places for their faculty to publish and be discussed.

Turning to more topically-oriented movements, James Cone never has written directly in HTR, although as I noted above there was an issue devoted to the emergence of Black Theology and subsequent attention to it. Feminist theology fared even less well. Mary Daly, Judith Plaskow, and Letty Russell are all missing from the list of contributors until Russell appeared in volume 99, number 4 in 2006, a special issue celebrating fifty years of women at Harvard Divinity School. Professor Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, at Harvard since 1987, only appears twice in HTR, and then only after she joined the Faculty. In contrast to Black Theology, feminist theology was little treated as a subject over the decades since Daly's The Church and the Second Sex appeared in 1968. Though I have by no means been comprehensive, it seems clear that a history of 20^th Century Christian (even Protestant, or liberal Protestant) theology written solely from the evidence of Harvard Theological Review would read quite differently than one would otherwise expect.

There appear in the Review a number of other notable theological figures and contributions, many of which are connected to the happenings and Faculty at Harvard. Richard R. Niebuhr published both an advance excerpt of his 1963 book Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion, which effectively launched the revival in Schleiermacher studies, and a preparatory study for his 1974 Experiential Religion. This was followed a decade later with a typically close study of symbols that related to his later sustained writing.Footnote ²³ Likewise between 1966 and 1972 Gordon Kaufman published three essays in HTR that worked out significant moves and ideas for his emerging reconception of theology as human construction.Footnote ²⁴ But after 1972, none of Kaufman's significant theological work appears in the Review directly. George Rupp, Margaret Miles, and later Francis Schüssler Fiorenza published an equivalent number of offerings as Kaufman and Niebuhr, though none were as central as Niebuhr's or Kaufman's to their research programs.Footnote ²⁵

Of more recent additions to the theology faculty, Sarah Coakley published only one item in HTR during her time on the faculty, and that was in connection with a number dedicated to a recent conference on patristics the proceedings of which appeared in the 100^th volume of HTR.Footnote ²⁶ Amy Hollywood, Nick Constas, the present author (David Lamberth), and Kevin Madigan each appear in the Review, some more than once.Footnote ²⁷ Notably, Harvey Cox, the most recent incumbent of the Hollis Professorship and a faculty member for some four decades, has never appeared directly in the Harvard Theological Review. Relatedly, I should note that liberation theology, which Cox has been greatly interested in and which was a major movement in theology in the second half of the twentieth century, primarily in Roman Catholicism but also influential for Protestant theology, is referenced extraordinarily infrequently, never, as far as I can see, receiving focused treatment in even an article in the Review.Footnote ²⁸

Other major figures in twentieth-century theology and philosophy of religion do appear in the Review, often by virtue of the continued practice of periodically publishing named lectures at the Divinity School. John Smith, Jürgen Moltmann, and Wolfhart Pannenberg all appear with significant essays by virtue of the Ingersoll Lectureship, which, in contrast to other endowed lectures, has publication mandated by its terms.Footnote ²⁹ Paul Ricœur's Dudleian Lecture marks his only contribution, a valuable piece on revelation.Footnote ³⁰ More recently Michael Welker's Lentz Lecture is there.Footnote ³¹ In addition to contributions from others such as George H. Williams, rounding out the majority of the other theological contributions published are a significant number of fine articles in a range of fields written by graduates of the doctoral programs at Harvard, at times while still in residence, but more often after leaving Harvard. Notable among these are contributions by Albert Blackwell, Mark C. Taylor, David Little, Wayne Proudfoot, Paula Cooey, and Sam Preuss.

Prospects of Theology in a Second Century of HTR

Having surveyed the waxing and waning activity over the century of HTR just completed, as well as considered some observations on the topography of inclusion and omission relative to the history of theology of the twentieth century, it seems warranted now to close by offering some assessment of the success of HTR relative to theology over the last century, and to inquire into the prospects of theology in HTR for the next decades.

As to the question of how successful a review HTR has proven, I read the results to be somewhat mixed. If one begins from Professor Peabody's “Call to Theology,” with its dual interest in renovating both theological education and the church, I am at something of a loss to estimate the Review a success on its own terms. The aim Peabody identifies is large, even lofty, and certainly more than one might reasonably expect a simple quarterly serial to realize; indeed Peabody himself understood this, as well as the enormity of the task. But if we break down the components of Peabody's understanding, and indeed the practical application of them in the first decade of the Review, we can see that the attempt to forge a specific theological outlook and carry on a particular kind of contemporary conversation about Christianity engaged with the world, soon fell short of the mark. What is most distinctive about the early volumes of HTR is that they clearly kept in view the broader intended audience that lay beyond the walls of what we might call academia's first tier. By this I mean that the Review, with its apparently commissioned, somewhat didactic, topical “review” essays and its collection of public lectures from around the greater Harvard milieu, sought to export to a wider and not merely academic world a discussion that was being carefully framed and intentionally shaped as a new thing at Harvard. The spirit of carefully crafting the intellectual conditions for a new type of “learned minister” and a new and engaged form of theological education was much in evidence then, and HTR was in large part its organ of communication.

But by the mid 1920s, the scope and purpose of the Review had clearly and definitively shifted, and the audience appears much more exclusively to be framed by the editors as a solely academic one, and one mostly—to the presumed chagrin of Peabody—with predominantly historical concerns. I have not investigated the readership of the Harvard Theological Review over its history, but reading back from the volumes themselves, I would surmise that the intended reader, to the extent that he (or she) was imagined, shifts from being a church-engaged minister or theological educator, with some academics presumed to be reading as well, to the latter group of dedicated scholars alone being the intended audience, with the ministerial readership looking on. The aptly chosen title of “Review” thus to my eye became an historical anomaly within the first two decades.

Since this shift occurred, the Review appears to have functioned as do so many other successful and highly respectable academic journals, primarily evaluating received submissions and publishing only those of the highest caliber, but not going out of its way to shape the submissions. (Perhaps Arthur Darby Nock did differently in New Testament Studies.) From the theological perspective, what is particularly remarkable is the fact that after the first period, it does not appear that HTR has been the locus for any particular and sustained theological discussions or controversies. Indeed, the choices of both Troeltsch and Benjamin B. Warfield to publish their particular pieces in HTR, and initiate certain discussions, which were taken up in both cases, does not seem to have been frequently replicated. Theological controversies, then, seem to have always been drawn elsewhere, and are only treated secondarily, if at all, in HTR.

Turning back to the question of the educational value of the Review for a moment, I think it is fair to say that while HTR had by no means been particularly representative of the state of theological discussion at a given time over most of its history, it has proved to be largely informative and interesting in regards to its offerings for anyone who happened to be reading. Somewhat analogous to President Eliot's idea of an elective educational system, HTR has offered a wide if still eclectic range of offerings to any given reader over its numbers and volumes, and allowed readers to choose for themselves, and presumably, should they be interested, follow up on such matters more deeply in other theological publications. This is, therefore, a publication with significant intellectual and pedagogical value for one interested in theology; however, it is not necessarily a must-read either in the way Peabody envisioned, or the way many academic publications function vis à vis particular fields. This is, I suspect, probably a markedly different estimation than one would give of the “must-read” aspect from the perspective of New Testament Studies over this same century.

Whither and where-to for the next decade and century? From the perspective of theology, broadly construed, and the philosophy of religion, I would note two desiderata. (Both of these derive from my observations concerning the two most vibrant theological periods in the Review's first century.) First, assuming one wants to retain the broad scope, I would suggest that more be actively done to animate sustained conversations around particular topics. It strikes me as unlikely that HTR would become the “must-publish” location for some subset of issues in contemporary theology per se, in the way that, for example, Modern Theology has cornered a particular set of discussions. And, it strikes me that with the shape of theology at HDS at present intentionally plural rather than “school-oriented,” it would be unlikely that we would soon again develop a “house theology” and thus be the locus for particular controversies. But it should be possible for HTR nonetheless to host ongoing, focused discussions over several numbers or issues in a way that deepens the tenor and value of the discussion beyond the stand-alone effect of the single articles currently appearing. This could be done either by more actively and topically commissioning or soliciting articles and contributions, or dedicating volumes to topical issues. This latter has been successfully pursued in the past by either dedicating an issue to a topic and amassing the material in advance, or more recently by publishing major contributions from conferences held at Harvard. Both of these in my estimation generated vibrant intellectual and theological discussion within the pages that was valuable and desirable on its own terms. Were it done more concertedly, and more often, I think the theological value of the Review would increase.

Secondly, I am inclined to think that attending more overtly to the “review” aspect of the publication, but again in a somewhat more active than receptive way, is apt to be of value, at least from the theological perspective. Part of the dynamism of the early volumes of HTR was, to be sure, based on its focused agenda. But much of its contemporary quality was generated simply by placing one in the room at the Lowell Institute, or the closing days of the Summer School on Theology, or at the annual Dudleian or Ingersoll Lecture. Thus the wide and varied scope of the Review could be capitalized on by more closely mirroring the broad range of events at Harvard and around Cambridge. Particularly since the recent revisioning of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin there is competition at HDS for where to publish the record of the many things that transpire in these halls, and there are questions about what best should reach which audience. But from the perspective of the health and prospects of HTR, I would say that publishing more selected pieces from our activities, including more routinely the named lectures, would increase the vibrancy and timeliness of the theological offerings of the Review.

Despite the variations in focus, and the changing predominance, or lack thereof at points, of theology, I should note in closing that reading across the century of HTR, once cannot help but be struck by how consistent the quality has been of the many and varied pieces that were published. I can only attribute this to the extraordinary efforts of the exceptional scholars who have served as editors of the Review over its first century. Having read still only a fraction of the final product which emerged from their work, and that of the supporting editorial staff and advisors, I am impressed anew with the dedication, expertise, and sheer labor and love that it has taken to bring us what we have in one hundred years of HTR. I want to close, then, by thanking the editors we all have known in the last fifty years of the review, Dean and Professor Krister Stendahl (who fell ill and was unable to be at this celebration), Professor Helmut Koester, whom I had the pleasure to serve under as an editorial assistant, and Professor François Bovon. The work of these Faculty, and their predecessors, has been magnificent, and we shall only hope to continue in our good fortune for the decades ahead.