Miller Warns Theological Students Against 'Hollow' Religious Practice

Ministers are in grave danger of pleasing the world but failing to fit its real needs, Samuel H. Miller, Dean of the Divinity School, said yesterday.

In an opening address to divinity students at Memorial Church, Miller claimed that "the church may long deceive itself by its spectacular success in members and prestige without knowing how hollow it has become."

It is tragic to see our ministers both "overworked and underemployed," he added. They spend most of their time on petty things which have little to do with religion, and are therefore unable to study the real problems of sustaining the spiritual lives of men and women.

The compulsive frenzy which is so often part of a clergyman's manner is probably due to his own guilty realization that he has spent too much time on making his church well-liked and not enough on dealing with the real intellectual problems of his profession.

Yet a thorough education and a consuming interest in theological problems are not sufficient to make an ideal clergyman either, Miller maintained. "To say the least, our situation is bewildering," for ministers must be neither scholars to such an extent that they lose contact with the present, nor agents of the present to such an extent that they forget the larger order of reality, he asserted.

To avoid the "twin terrors of the pulpit" the minister must learn to combine what seems to be an obsolete past with the criteria of the present, Miller explained. Only then can he expect to find the point of his work again and be worthy of its challenge.