Given:
“ . . . the magnetic figure of Barth—two men who spoke of God in all his glory with a far greater power than the fundamentalists (whose God tended to be as narrow as the range of their own imaginations); who spoke of God’s Word in language so dynamic that it shattered my previous concept of the Bible as a code-book of doctrines and morals plus a few stories and passages of dramatic power; who lifted up Christ in his incarnation, death, and resurrection as the unique Savior and Lord of a fallen world; and who obviously were able to accept the critical view of the Scriptures not grudgingly but joyfully, as a sign of the true humanity through which God speaks.” (p. 56)
This did not mean that David Read now became a slavish Barthian. On the contrary, as he tells us in his memoirs, he gratefully appropriated insights over the years from Catholic theologians such as Karl Rahner and Hans Kung, from philosophically-oriented theologians such as John Baillie and Reinhold Niebuhr, and even from Paul Tillich, “not to mention Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” Still, as far as the young man from Edinburgh was concerned, Karl Barth remained “the theologian of the twentieth century.”
Barth’s name calls to mind an amusing incident that I witnessed during one of Read’s post-Christmas preaching seminars at Princeton Theological Seminary. A number of us in the class had joined him for supper one evening at the college cafeteria. In turn we were joined by a talkative young seminarian who, upon discovering that we were all ministers, volunteered for our edification Paul Tillich’s comment according to which preachers should stand in the pulpit with the Bible in one hand and the daily newspaper in the other. There was a brief pause, and then Read gently corrected the student: “I think it was Barth who gave us that choice bon mot.” “Oh no,” said the student full of confidence, “it was Tillich all right.” At which point Read smiled mischievously and said, “No, no . . . Tillich was the theologian who encouraged preachers to stand in the pulpit with the Bible in one hand . . . and a copy of Playboy in the other.”
But to return to our story: Before David Read completed his formal theological education in Scotland, he went on to study in Paris and Strasburg. He also enjoyed a semester along the way in Marburg, Germany, studying with Rudolf Bultmann. Read had actually wanted to study under Barth in Bonn, but the Principal of New College, “a strong liberal,” ordered him to go to Marburg so that he could imbibe the wisdom of the New Testament scholar and subsequent advocate of demythologization. The young Scot’s theological horizons were consequentially widened under Bultmann’s challenging interpretations, but not at the expense of diluting the Christological heart of the gospel.
In the spring of 1936, David Read was ordained. That same year he married Pat Gilbert and began his ministry with the Presbyterian Church in a small, quiet town on the Scottish border. All of this might well have been idyllic except for the storm clouds that were gathering in Germany. Many in Britain ignored these clouds if only because they couldn’t bear the thought of another war with the memories of the last one still so painfully fresh. But Read took the signals to heart, remembering perhaps the rising militant fanaticism that he had witnessed during his semester in Marburg. He had actually been arrested that year and hauled off to the commandant’s office by an S. A. guard for taking pictures of Nazi officials. In his defence he claimed that he thought that the Stormtroopers were a perfectly harmless group like the Boy Scouts. However, it was probably only on account of his British passport, and the fact that the Nazis had been instructed to be polite to British and American visitors, that Read escaped imprisonment. Returning to his residence he couldn’t help reflecting, he tells us in his memoirs, on how different things might have been had he been a German, let alone a Jew.
When Britain declared war with Germany on September 3, 1939, David Read volunteered as a military chaplain and was soon working at a hospital in Le Havre where he experienced the period of the so-called “Phony War.” Western France in fact was so quiet that fall and winter that Read finally requested a transfer to another division on the Belgian border. Again, things were very quiet for several more weeks. But then, in the spring of 1940, Germany struck and suddenly all hell broke loose.
The fledgling British troops quickly found themselves pushed back to the sea. Some of their units attempted to escape back to England, but Read’s division was trapped in a town near the sea. General Rommel now decided to concentrate on killing the British soldiers who were making for the boats and trying to escape by water. This decision probably saved the lives of the soldiers in Read’s battalion. Instead of being shot, they were taken prisoner and marched 250 miles to Germany where they spent the next five years behind barbed-wire fences.
This was the war, then, for David Read: one hair-raising, life-threatening moment after another spent almost entirely behind barbed wire. Even so, the young chaplain survived, and when the guns finally fell silent in the spring of 1945, Read was able to return to Scotland and take up his ministry afresh in a suburban church in Edinburgh. This was Greenbank Presbyterian Church which he served for the next four years (the ex-chaplain requiring the first six months, he wryly notes in his memoirs, to re-learn the accepted language of respectable society). Five years as a chaplain at the University of Edinburgh followed the suburban pastorate. Then, in 1955, Read was offered the opportunity of a lifetime—a teaching chair at St. Andrew’s University, following in the ranks of Donald Baillie and other world-famous Scottish scholars. But while he was mulling over this golden opportunity, an invitation came to leave Scotland altogether and move to America where a whole new adventure awaited him.
Here’s how it happened.
During the summer of 1955, free from his chaplaincy duties, David Read had accepted an invitation to spell off two ministers in North America on their holidays. The month of July was spent preaching at Deer Park United Church in Toronto, and catching up with a number of Canadian cousins. Then in August, Read went to New York to occupy the pulpit at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church where, even on sweltering summer Sundays, over a thousand worshippers normally formed the congregation.
That first weekend in the Big Apple proved especially dramatic. It began with Read and his wife Pat arriving in Manhattan on the first Saturday of August and settling into a small apartment that a friend had loaned them for the month. Their first night in New York was spent enjoying a Broadway play. Alas, when the young couple got back to their residence they discovered that they had left their only key inside the apartment. Every trick in the book now failed to gain them entrance into the flat, and they ended up going to a hotel for the evening.
But no sooner had they settled down to sleep than Read realized that the flat held not only his luggage and church robes, but a copy of the sermon that he planned to preach the next morning. The distraught preacher simply had to get back to the flat even if it was well past midnight. He accordingly called the police who came around and tried to find an extra key by waking up the neighbours in the apartment building. When this strategy proved fruitless (not to say, in some cases, offensive), Pat Read came up with the bright idea of calling the chauffeur of the woman who had lent them the apartment. Success! The key at last was retrieved and the Reads were finally able to get into their flat.
Only now it was almost morning. There was barely time for a couple hours of sleep before the exhausted couple had to get up and dash off to the service at Fifth Avenue. So it was that, with croaky voice and bleary eyes, David Read preached what was surely the most consequential sermon in his lifetime. For though he didn’t know it at the time, a number of key people from Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church were sitting in the pews at Fifth Avenue that day. In the wake of George Buttrick’s recently announced retirement they were looking for a new minister, and this was the unsuspecting preacher’s opportunity to win their hearts. Their hearts, needless to say, were captured. And before the month was out Read had accepted their invitation to leave his homeland and the promise of academia, and embark upon a whole new adventure in his life and work.
Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church proved a marvellous fit for this gifted but unassuming Scot. The sanctuary itself was modest in size, at least by Manhattan standards, and designed, as Read gratefully
