Once we had arrived England, we stayed some days with friends in London. Visiting the city’s well-known tourist sites (usually with Stephen in tow) was exciting, despite the rain. We then toured the Oxfordshire countryside in a small Morris Minor station wagon, cooking our meals on a gas cooker perched on the lowered back door of the car, again in the rain. We visited Cornwall and Isobel’s relations whom she had last seen when she was twelve. This was her ancestral home and remains close to her heart.
We crossed the Atlantic on the old Queen Mary, deep in the bowels of steerage class. En route we experienced an Atlantic storm, and generally had a dismal time in a tiny cabin whose single light went off the moment we closed the door. But apart from seeing the iconic Table Mountain in the distance as you arrive in Cape Town, few things can compare to arriving in New York for the first time by sea. After disembarking, we sat on the quayside with our luggage for several hours, having no idea as to how we would get from there to Chicago. Leaving our trunks in the care of officials who promised to rail them to us (the trunks arrived three weeks later), we took a cab to a dodgy downtown hotel where we spent the night. The next day, a South African student friend who was studying at Union Theological Seminary, Bob Hammerton-Kelly, introduced us to Union and helped us catch an overnight train to Chicago.
We were met at Chicago Central Station by Jo Davis, a warm and generous staff member at CTS, and were soon settled into our apartment in Hyde Park on Kimbark Avenue. The house, which we shared with three other families, had once been the residence of the philosopher-educationalist John Dewey, whose famous experimental school was across the road. The University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel towered close by. It was all invigorating and exciting.
I registered for a one-year Master of Theology (MTh), which required a dissertation and six semester courses, at least two of which had to be taken at the university. I did courses in Constructive Theology, Cultural Anthropology, Social Psychology, and one on the Ministry of the Laity. I also did a course on Ministry to the Mentally Ill, and an experimental course in Leadership Sensitivity Training. I learnt much from this eclectic assortment of courses, but ached to do some “serious” theological study. Therefore, I attended as many additional lectures a possible. These included a series by the French philosopher Paul Ricœur on Hermeneutics, and a weekly seminar by Paul Tillich on his major works. I also learnt much from Franklin Littell, a noted Methodist historian, about the German church struggle. In January 1964, I was a delegate at the Ecumenical Student Conference held in Athens, Ohio, where I heard daily lectures by the Yale church historian Roland Bainton, and the Russian Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann. Most importantly, it was in Chicago that my interest in Bonhoeffer began in earnest.
Two things accounted for this interest: Firstly, on the boat from Durban to Southampton, I read Honest to God (a media sensation at the time) by John Robinson, the Anglican bishop of Woolwich. Robinson, who years later visited us in Cape Town, drew somewhat randomly on Bonhoeffer’s theological ideas in his letters from prison. I had read these before as part of a ministers’ study group in Durban, but only now did I begin to glimpse their possible implications. Robinson visited Chicago while we were there, and I heard him lecture, as well as give a seminar on Honest to God. At the latter, Tillich made the comment that, while Robinson might not have fully understood Barth, Bultmann and Bonhoeffer, he had certainly understood him and his books were now selling better than ever before.
The second and most important reason for my interest in Bonhoeffer, was the fact that Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer’s close friend and biographer, had given the Alden-Tuthill lectures on “The Challenge of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life and Theology” at the seminary in 1961. I soon devoured these, and discovered what I really wanted to do. There were no courses on Bonhoeffer, but I made a special study of his doctoral dissertation, Sanctorum Communio, which became a major source for writing my own dissertation under the supervision of Ross Snyder. Ross (as he insisted on us calling him) and I were not on the same page theologically, but he was a gifted teacher who encouraged me to do independent study. I soon learnt that he had no time for any theological humbug.
Although our ability to explore the rich cultural offerings available in Chicago was limited by lack of money and looking after Steve, Isobel and I met many interesting people, and on occasion I preached in churches in other parts of the Midwest. We attended various churches in Hyde Park on Sundays and always felt welcome, but while usually impressed by their social concern and Christian education programmes, we were not particularly taken by the standard of preaching.
A weekend we spent at Reba Place Fellowship in Evanston stands out in our memory, because it was our first experience of Mennonites and their pacifist commitment. During our short visit, I had a heated exchange with a militant pacifist about Bonhoeffer’s role in the plot to assassinate Hitler. This challenged me to think more deeply about the Christian peace witness and non-violent resistance. That was a timely development, because in the same year President John Kennedy was assassinated, and the Civil Rights Movement reached its climax. Protest marches and the murders of social activists down south were daily news, and the campus community was abuzz with heated debate. For light relief, we watched The Danny Kaye show on TV each week, saw news clips of the Beatles arriving for their first American tour, and ate hamburgers at the very first McDonald’s, not far from where we lived.
Most of my time and energy, however, went into writing my dissertation on The Local Church and the Race Problem in South Africa. In writing it, I was undoubtedly influenced by what was happening in the US, but I also drew on my course work and wider reading, and was greatly stimulated by weekly sessions with Ross Snyder. Using insights from my course in Cultural Anthropology, I began the dissertation with a case study of my congregation in Sea View. I then examined the relationship between theological and racial/cultural identity, followed by a study of the problem of white racial prejudice, using Gordon Allport’s masterly The Nature of Prejudice as a guide. Then followed a chapter on racial anxiety, based on Paul Tillich’s book The Courage to Be, in which I examined how change in patterns of behaviour and attitude are inhibited by a deep-seated, irrational anxiety. Using Bonhoeffer’s Sanctorum Communio, I concluded by developing an ecclesiology of personal and social transformation. The manuscript was longer than required, and I had to work late into the night on my manual typewriter to meet the deadline and provide additional carbon copies. I was awarded a summa cum laude for my efforts.
Towards the end of our stay in Chicago, Isobel and I discussed whether or not we should return to the United States in a year or two so that I could do a PhD. Ross offered to arrange for an assistantship and to help in whatever way he could to make this possible. The prospect was tantalising, but we could not postpone our return to Sea View. In any case, three months of summer lay ahead of us in which to explore America and widen our experience. I also had the great fortune of being invited to be the summer supply pastor of the First Congregational Church (UCC) in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
After a long overnight ride on Greyhound buses, we arrived in Albany, New York, where we were met by the minister of the church and taken through the beautiful countryside to one of the loveliest places we had ever seen. Stockbridge is the quintessential New England rural town, located in the Berkshires, an area renowned for its fall colours in the autumn, and for being transformed into a fairyland when the snow covers the landscape in midwinter. We had no idea what to expect, but our eyes opened wide as we were driven up the long road, then still lined by elm trees, which led to the red-bricked church with its white steeple and stone bell tower nearby, and to the large manse adjacent to the church where we would live for the summer.
In his reflections on his first visit to America, Bonhoeffer observed that “American Christianity remains concealed from those who do not know from the beginning of the Congregationalists in New England, the Baptists in Rhode Island, or the revival movement led by Jonathan Edwards.”10 Edwards, so we discovered, was the second of a series of distinguished ministers in Stockbridge when the church was founded in the eighteenth century. Without knowing it, we had arrived in the heartland of historic American Protestant Christianity and Congregationalism. And being a Congregational minister in New England, where the