By Jack Wyman

It is the oldest institution of higher education in the United States.

Few are more prestigious anywhere in the world.

It is sweeping in its academic presence, comprising ten scholastic facilities.

It boasts the largest academic library system in the world - 79 individual libraries, containing over 20 million items.

It has an endowment of $42 billion, the largest of any academic institution on earth.

Harvard University.

Nothing quite like it.

Harvard holds the world’s record for Nobel Prizes - 161 among its alumni, faculty and researchers - and the US record for members of Congress and Rhodes Scholars.

Harvard has given our nation eight presidents and 188 living billionaires. Students and alumni have won 10 Academy Awards, 48 Pulitzer Prizes and 108 Olympic medals (46 of them gold).

In view of its breathtaking achievements and stellar contributions to American and global life across a wide array of academic fields, it’s worth noting that Harvard may be first in one other category.

Chaplains at the university recently gathered and elected Greg Epstein as their new president.

Epstein, 44, is an atheist.

The vote was unanimous among the 40 chaplains from 20 different faith traditions and beliefs. Not a single chaplain had even a slight cause for concern. One remarked that while other “more conservative” universities might have hesitated, this is Harvard, after all, and we’re proud of our vote.

The chaplain added:

“Greg is known for wanting to keep lines of communication open between different faiths.”

That sounds reasonable, almost quaint.

When a Wendell Willkie backer was trying to persuade a hard-shell Republican to back Willkie for president in 1940, the old guardian pointed out that Willkie had recently been a Democrat.

“Don’t you believe in forgiveness of sins?” asked the Willkie backer.

“Yes, I certainly do,” the old man replied. “If a woman of the street came to our church truly repentant, I’d welcome her and even seat her in the front row. But I sure wouldn’t ask her to direct the choir.”

In unanimously electing an atheist to lead them, Harvard’s chaplains have fired yet another shot across the sinking bow of America’s once strong and united Judeo-Christian heritage.

Their choice says something about Harvard. Something we’ve long known about the Ivy Leagues’ flagrant secularism and rejection of all things conservative or traditional. This has been decades, perhaps a couple centuries, in the making.

Their choice also says something about their own faith and their confidence in it. Are they unable - or more likely, unwilling - to draw a distinction between faith in God and atheism? It is any longer important to do so?

Does faith in God matter anymore? Or is it a rustic relic of a superstitious and ignorant past, best to be disregarded and, where possible, jettisoned in the interest of an enlightened and sophisticated modernity?

God is so yesterday.

"Professing themselves wise, they became as fools" (Romans 1:22).

For "the fool has said in his heart, 'there is no God'" (Psalm 14:1).

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At Harvard it may be more important to be woke than to believe in God. Even if you’re a spiritual counselor.

More young people enter college uncertain and confused about spiritual beliefs than ever before in our history. They are the products of our unstable, doubting and cynical times. Popular culture and social media have undermined their confidence - in themselves, the future, the meaning of life - and in God. If he does exist.

They need not look to Chaplain Greg Epstein for hope or clarity.

“We don’t look to a god for answers,” Epstein says. “We are each other’s answers.”

Really? God help us!

His fellow chaplains offered no objection to the rallying cry of the humanist: “No deity will save us - we must save ourselves!”

Nothing is more delectable in the strategic economy of Satan than the blind leading the blind. Jesus warned of it. If one blind person guides another, they will both fall into a ditch (Matthew 15:14).

It is a bitter and sad irony that Harvard’s chaplains seem willing and proud to tear up the precious spiritual roots of their own heritage. John Harvard, who lived only to be 31, was a Puritan clergyman who had a passion for training young men for Christian ministry.

Harvard left his library and his property in 1636 to begin a college for the expressed purpose “to train a literate clergy.”

He wrote:

“After God had carried us safe to New England … one of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and to perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers lie in the dust.”

This inscription may be read on the wall of the old iron gate near the main entrance to the campus.

Veritas. It’s Harvard’s motto, engraved in its seal. It means divine truth. The first ten presidents of Harvard were ministers.

Our intellectual and spiritual leaders should be reluctant to abandon faith in God at this present time in our history. We see the evidence of our poorly-constructed self-reliance wherever we look. Our cultural, economic, political, social, moral and global life are in confused and dangerous shambles.

We’ve thrown away our compass and we’ve lost our way.

As the light dims and the sun sets on western civilization, when and how shall we “save ourselves”? There is a dire warning of judgement for “all the nations that forget God” (Psalm 9:17).

Instead of forgetting, declaring our independence from God, and smugly knowing all that isn’t so, we should humble ourselves, confess our national and personal sins; turn from our wicked ways, seek the face of God, and ask him for forgiveness and help.

He may yet hear from heaven, forgive our sins and heal our great land.

America needs a spiritual revival. It may be our last, best hope. We must pray for it.

God warns man not to boast of his riches, his wisdom or his power.

Instead, let people boast “in this - that they have understanding to know me, that I am the Lord” (Jeremiah 9:24).

Veritas.

Truth.

God’s Truth.

Harvard once stood for it.

You and I still can.

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