Jesus at Harvard

Bookstore browsers may do a double-take on seeing the title "When Jesus Came to Harvard." If you imagined Jesus coming to an American university, wouldn't Harvard be the last place you'd think of Him appearing? Wouldn't He be more likely to show up at an institution like Bob Jones University, known for its all-out Christian emphasis, rather than a school regarded as a secular, intellectual stronghold?

The new book by Harvard theologian Harvey Cox is not the report of a full-fledged miracle - Jesus didn't appear in Harvard Yard trailing clouds of glory - but rather in the form of a course called "Jesus and the Moral Life." It almost seemed like a miracle, though, when "Jesus" became the most popular course at Harvard in the `80s and `90s, drawing an overflow crowd of eight hundred students that had to be moved from a classroom to Memorial Hall, a venue usually reserved for rock bands and symphony concerts.

The last professor who had made Jesus the subject of a course at Harvard had retired in 1912, and the professor who brought Him back to the curriculum had originally gained fame for proclaiming "God Is Dead" in the 1960s, along with a group of other young rebellious theologians. Cox wrote a bestseller back then called "The Secular City" that foresaw a "post-religious" age, but came full circle three decades later with his "Fire From Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and The Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century." In that book he wrote that "Today it is secularity, not spirituality, that may be headed for extinction" - an analysis that seemed to be confirmed in the recent presidential election.

Cox explains in "When Jesus Came to Harvard" that the faculty realized in the early `80s that students were being well educated in the humanities and sciences, but "we began to see that we were giving them virtually no preparation for how to apply their educations in a morally responsible manner." The university introduced a "division of moral reasoning" into the undergraduate curriculum, and Cox was asked to give a course using Jesus' teachings as a way of thinking about morality. He did it with a flourish, enlivening classes with a "multi-media" approach, playing Gospel music and Gregorian chants, projecting images of Jesus in art through the ages, and staging debates and dramatic readings.

Informal in manner and casually dressed, Cox has white hair and a white beard, but his lively eyes and spirited talk project a youthful energy. Over coffee at a bookstore in Harvard Square this fall, he spoke with warmth and affection about teaching "Jesus and The Moral Life," explaining that the course was "for anyone dissatisfied with moralistic fundamentalism as well as `do your own thing' relativism. There were Jewish and Muslim students as well as Christians, even agnostics and atheists who were able to see how ethical and moral issues raised in the Gospels could apply to their own lives."

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