Expressions of gratitude for Randolph Crump Miller

Religious Education, Fall 2002 by Melchert, Charles F

Charles F. Melchert

Lancaster Theological Seminary, Lancaster, Pennsylvania

When Randolph Crump Miller succumbed to cancer this summer, I was asked to compose some reflections to mark his passing. I began by searching my computer files to see what I might have written about Randy and his work. I did my graduate work with Randy (1962-1969) and had been his Teaching Assistant, yet I was surprised to find little explicit mention of my mentor in my files. At first I was puzzled at this, since Randy had been very influential on my whole way of thinking about the educational ministry of the church. Indeed, when I began seeking a graduate program in religious education, I applied to Yale and Yale alone, for I had just read Miller's Christian Nurture and the Church (1961) and was greatly impressed with his "womb to tomb" approach to education in community. So how was I to account for this absence of explicit mention of Miller in my written work?

I pondered my surprise. I thought about Miller's influence on me and how he worked with us students. I began to leaf through the pages of that text which had so drawn me to him, and when I came upon his description of a "Christian teacher," understanding dawned. Miller writes (citing one of his favorite authors, Reuel Howe), a teacher "seeks to incarnate the Holy Spirit rather than teach certain subject matter; he is sensitive to the meanings which the pupil brings and to the relationship between himself and the pupil; ... seeks to recognize the freedom of the learner to be himself and to stand beside him in his search ... is willing to wait and trust. . . " (p. 31). Randy was that kind of teacher.

I remember conversations with other graduate students and professors as I worked on my dissertation, and I kept hearing horror stories about professors who sought to direct or control their students' thoughts, their sources, and their conclusions. My experience with Randy was that of a partner, a thoughtful and gentle guide and fellow-- learner, who was as interested in my subject and my thinking as he was his own. Randy recognized from the beginning that he and I did not agree on some issues, but he spent as much or more time trying to understand and encourage my thinking as he did telling me his own. Miller insists that the Christian's witness is chiefly through what they are rather than what they do or say. "But one's true being is supported by his acts and his words, or else he is a hypocrite" (Christian Nurture and the Church, 28). Randy was neither a hypocrite, nor did he confine his interests to his own students. Young graduate students at professional meetings would find themselves talking to this elderly gentleman who seemed to take a great interest in what they were doing, and then later find out "That was Randolph Crump Miller!"

It is well known that Randy was first and foremost a theologian, and secondarily an educator. Indeed, much of his profound influence on the field of "Christian education" from the 1950s to the 1980s came from his ability to speak a sophisticated theological word that was also educational to religious educators who rejected any theology that was not liberal. He also spoke an educational word to theologians whose emerging neo-orthodox theology sometimes insisted there was "no room in the inn" for any "humanistic" activity such as education.

Miller's theological position was grounded in biblical and theological sources, but also deeply formed by two other realms-personal relationships and contemporary philosophies. The first of these were rooted in his nuclear family-a clergyman father "whose heart was the eternal song and who saw Christianity as intelligent, open and joyous; and a mother struck with multiple sclerosis at a young age, thus early confronting him with a crisis of his notion of God. He found aid in the thought of William James, John Dewey, and Henry Nelson Weiman, and then studied with D.C. Macintosh in "empirical theology," while doing his Yale Ph.D. (1936). Later he studied Whitehead and Hartshorne's process theology. (See his What We Can Believe, 1941; Religion Makes Sense, 1950; The American Spirit in Theology, 1974; and This We Can Believe, 1976. The first chapter of the latter includes a helpful autobiographical sketch, linking his theology with his life experiences). These resources stood him in good stead when his wife and the mother of his four daughters contracted polio and died in 1948. In 1950 he married a young widow, "Lib," a warm and graceful companion. Lib, their blended family of six, and later their many grandchildren, gave him great joy.

Miller was committed to process thinking, for in his view reality is a constant process of becoming and perishing, with which God is always interacting and working. The method he advocated he called 11 empirical" and "pragmatic" because what we know is based upon our critical and appreciative interpretation of common human experiences-and thus it must be pluralistic-as are our experiences (This We Can Believe, p. xii). Yet he never insisted others adopt process theology, because faith is a commitment, a pledge of loyalty based on trust not on the certainty of knowledge. "Our knowledge of God is always tentative ... 11, yet "the little that we do know about God is enough to require our absolute loyalty. We are able to revise our beliefs about God in the light of the evidence, but we do not revise God" (Ibid., 15). His theology enabled him to keep relationships central and open, yet grounded biblically and theologically, and in touch with ecclesiastical realities, and led him to what he called "the Clue" to Christian education.