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| follow him linguistically,
he threw all kinds of German theological books from his own library in
my direction, most prominently those of Albert Schweitzer, whose theological
works had not yet been translated into French. The Alsatian giant,
who I was to meet later, after the war, for an hour of conversation, became
my inspiration and my idol, long before he was discovered by the public
at large for his "reverence for life," while I followed up on his idea
that Jesus, during his whole ministry on earth, had expected the coming
of the Kingdom of God until the last moment on the Cross. He called
this, in his own theological jargon, the "thoroughgoing eschatological
method." Both my Masters and my Doctoral theses were based on ideas
gleaned from this master theologian.
Another Alsatian refugee who came to teach for a few years at Montpellier was Professor Edmond Jacob, whom we dubbed immediately "Yahweh." He insisted on calling the God whom our Bibles insisted on calling "Jehovah" by this name, which seemed to us strange and unwarranted. It took us many years to see how utterly right our "Yahweh" had been in bringing to us the results of modern Biblical research. The most remarkable feature of the seminary, however, was its student community. The cohesion, the kindness, and the devotion of the students one for another made us all feel secure even at this time of crisis. The spiritual bond was strong; and so was the knowledge that God's love had to be visible among us in order to give our lives the meaning that we wanted to bring to others. There was truly no narrowness in our teachers or in the student body. All were welcome, including an elderly Jesuit who had discovered the Reformed faith by reading Calvin. He was a fanatical Thomist and Aristotelian, which clashed with my deep Platonic and Augustinian convictions and led to some fundamental discussions about reason and its place in theology. We admired him for his devotion to the poor and to his own ascetic life, though the parishes he administered later were not always as kind as our community. Of indomitable courage, he was wounded during a strafing attack on his village when he herded his congregation, just emerging from church services, back into the sanctuary. After the war many among
us longed to travel and spend a year or two in the United States, where
seminaries opened their doors to us. Jean Abel, a close friend during
the war years, went to the Southern Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond,
Virginia, where he told many stories about our valiant deeds in the Resistance,
and about the hardships of unheated rooms and inadequate food. I
thus received, one day, when I was already Pastor at Montpellier, a letter
from Jean, asking me to describe the conditions at the seminary in those
still difficult years after the war. I thus described how we often
had to study in bed during the Winter because of the cold and that some
of our number had been sent back from mission fields in Africa because
their undernourished bodies could not resist the tropical climate.
Upon receipt of my letter, a Dr. Brim, the Librarian at the Richmond Seminary,
put out a circular in which he informed the students and the whole Southern
Presbyterian Church, that the students at Montpellier were so weak that
they had to study in bed, and that in the mission fields they were dying
like flies because they could not resist |
