We moved to Alma, Michigan, in 1965, where my father was named the chaplain of Alma Presbyterian College and assistant professor of religion. Dad went down to Montgomery, Alabama, at this time and met and marched with Dr. King. They became friends, and in 1967 he called Dad to discuss his evolving views on the Vietnam War.
In 1969 Rev. Berry received the call to SFTS. He finished his doctoral thesis in nine months and was awarded a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia. His thesis was a systematic exercise in proving the existence of the human soul.
When we arrived in Berkeley, Dad stood face to face with the counterrevolution. This caused him a struggle for discernment that any black intellectual born in the 1920s would have. He looked to Tillich’s idea of the “new being” to frame the young people’s quest, in a Christological context.
“Christianity as a religion is not important, for Christianity is more than a religion. It is the New Being that is important. Resurrection is not an event that might happen in some remote future, but it is the power of the New Being to create life out of death, here and now, today and tomorrow. Where there is a New Being, there is a resurrection, namely, the creation into eternity out of every moment of time.” — Paul Tillich
In a surprising move of solidarity with the young people’s movement, he asked if he could have a polished clay peace symbol I had. He had never asked me for anything before in my life. He wore that peace symbol around his neck instead of a cross every day for the rest of his life.
“One of my clearest recollections of my father was when he took us to Jones Beach on Long Island, where everyone from New York and New Jersey vacationed. It was truly amazing to see him swimming against the horizon — he looked like a great white whale. His swimming skills were amazing. The pictures in my mind of him swimming in the ocean are truly epiphanic.” — Author Rev. Cornelius Oliver Berry Jr. (“Neil Jr.”)
Dad’s close friends at the seminary were the Rev. Howard Rice (longtime chaplain of SFTS), the Rev. John Hadsell (longtime administer) and the Rev. Warren Lee (longtime Director of the Advanced Pastoral Department). Rev. Rice and I became great friends during my time as a student at the seminary. One day he called me aside and said, “Neil, your father had a special place in my heart, and he was one of my favorite theologians. He made Tillich understandable to me.”
Upon his death, Dad was working on a book about the black church in America. In 1994 I picked up the baton and took the idea for a course on the history of the black church in America to the African Studies department of the University of Michigan, Flint campus. It was the most popular course in the department, and I taught it there for five years until I took a call to Witherspoon Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis. The course is still taught there to this day.
In conclusion, I would like to quote from the eulogy his good friend and colleague, the Rev. Dr. Benjamin Reist, gave at “The Church by the Side of the Road” in Berkeley in July 1973: “To say ‘poor in spirit’ with reference to my colleague, my friend, and my brother Neil is to utter then a high salute indeed. For Neil’s was that unique kind of poverty of spirit that refused to relinquish the integrity of his own identity in the face of any external definition from left or right, black or white.”
If Dad were alive today, he would be proud to know that the Rev. Dr. Diane Givens Moffett (whose younger brother, Christopher, married his youngest daughter, Alison) was recently named executive director and president of the Presbyterian Mission Agency in Louisville, Kentucky.
