On March 17, 1955, Harry Austryn Wolfson walked into the Appleton Chapel of Harvard's Memorial Church to preach a little sermon (or "sermonette," as he called it) on Psalms 14:1, "The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God."
The fool, who in the Scripture lesson this morning is quoted as saying to himself "There is no God" was not a fool in the ordinary sense of the term . . . He was a fool in the sense of being perverse and contrary. He denied what others affirmed . . . People, he knew, believed in God; and by God, he knew, they meant a Being above and beyond the world, the Creator and Governor of the world, a God who revealed Himself to men and told them what to do and what not to do . . . This, he knew, is what people believed in and this is what he did not believe in. And so honestly and bluntly he said to himself and to others, ‘There is no God' . . . He did not start to quibble about the meaning of God. He did not offer a substitute God.
This is an unusual way to begin preaching, even at Harvard. The fact that Wolfson had, by that time, been Harvard's most visible and distinguished Jewish scholar for decades, and still spoke with a strong Yiddish accent, must have made it even more surprising.
Wolfson proceeded to dismiss the work of medieval Jewish, Christian, and Muslim "scriptural philosophers" to whose "quibbles" he had devoted a lifetime of scholarship. He then turned to the prejudices of the theologians of his own time, whom he called "verbal theists." "I wonder," concluded Wolfson, "how many of the things offered as God by the lovers of wisdom of today are not again only polite but empty phrases for the downright denial of God by him who is called fool in the Scripture lesson this morning!"
What—aside from late-career second thoughts and innate chutzpah—inspired Wolfson to preach this sermon? Some of his targets were probably local: current and past Harvard colleagues. Among the empty phrases he mentions as being offered by contemporary theologians in place of God are "the principle of concretion," a slogan of Alfred North Whitehead's, and the "Ground of Being," which, at the time, was particularly associated with Paul Tillich, who had just been brought to Harvard to occupy a distinguished University Professorship. Another one of Wolfson's targets was probably the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who had been teaching at Harvard since the late 1940s.
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