Intellect Led Her to Philosophy, Faith to Episcopal Priesthood

Growing up in central Illinois, Marilyn McCord Adams always wanted to be a preacher. Her grandfather was a preacher, her cousins, uncles and maiden aunt were preachers. “It was sort of a family business, and when I was a child, that was my ambition,” she said.

But they were Disciples of Christ, and by the time she emerged from an adolescent phase of atheism, Marilyn Adams was swept up by the liturgical drama of the Episcopal Church.

It was a conversion that led after a delay of more than two decades to the UCLA professor’s ordination as an Episcopal priest late last year.

Together with her husband, a Presbyterian minister, she is one of the few members of the clergy who is also a professional philosopher at a secular university.

Meaning Through Science

Her path began with a search for meaning through science.

“I loved science, but my real question was ‘Does God exist, and what he’s like?’ ” she said.

Changing majors from nuclear engineering to philosophy, she wandered from church to church, asking her questions.

In part it was the Episcopalians’ emphasis on Holy Communion that attracted her, she said, because the Disciples of Christ shared that rite.

And the young intellectual was also attracted by what she described as a non-authoritarian climate, “in which you hold onto the Bible on the one hand or the creeds on the other, but you don’t hold so tightly that you make Gods out of them.”

In the end, “I found myself believing . . . and with a kind of vivid sense of the reality of God which I had had as a child. So there it was, and it was kind of embarrassing because I was a philosopher. I should have arguments to reply to these things, but I didn’t.”

Instead, her faith grew deeper. A philosophy professor at UCLA since 1972 and chairman of the department from 1985 to 1987, Adams was ordained an Episcopal priest last year and named an adjunct chaplain for the Westwood campus.

She has already appeared there in priest’s collar and dangling silver cross over a black blouse, and she plans to celebrate the Eucharist regularly in her office when she returns from a 9-month study leave at Yale University.

The call to the ministry had to wait for many years, however. Adams went to graduate school in philosophy after realizing that there was no room for women priests in the Episcopal Church of the mid-1960s.

‘A Kind of Theologian’

“The Episcopalians would not hear of the ordination of women, but they told me that I could become a kind of theologian,” she said.

During a summer course on the problem of evil, she met Prof. Nelson Pike, who convinced her that “theologians didn’t think as clearly as analytic philosophers, so I decided to go to Cornell and study with him.”

There she won her Ph.D. and also found the Rev. Robert Adams, a fellow graduate student and ordained Presbyterian minister who became her husband and colleague. They taught together at the University of Michigan and are both on the UCLA philosophy faculty.

“Both are extremely well-known philosophers,” said Pike, now at UC Irvine.

Neither of the Adamses was the first priest or minister to teach philosophy on a secular campus. But few colleagues can recall a professor who added priestly habit to academic gown at the height of an academic career.

“It is more common that somebody ordained earlier on in life will . . . later go into the academic world,” said William Alston, a philosophy professor at Syracuse University and founder of the Society of Christian Philosophers, which Marilyn Adams heads as president.

Interviewed before departing for New Haven, Conn., Adams said her desire to be a priest returned as part of a life-threatening crisis.

“(Doctors) said, ‘Well, we don’t know. It could be cancer. You might die,’ ” she recalled. “And I said, ‘Oh my, I knew I would die some time, but what have I really done with my life?’ And I had all these academic opportunities. I took them, but what about the religious opportunities? So that got me thinking. It turned out to be a gallbladder, so no big deal, but I was already thinking, just the same.”

She started studying for the priesthood by taking courses at Bloy House, an Episcopal seminary in Claremont, but soon realized that weekend study would take too long.

Instead, she took summers and autumns off for two years in order to study full time at the Princeton Theological Seminary, managing to avoid the required classes in theology by arguing that she taught theology for a living.

Steps Toward Ordination

Then came a grueling series of psychological tests and personal interviews, followed by service in a church and finally ordination as deacon last summer and as priest on Dec. 21.

Secure in her job as philosophy professor, Adams said she does not plan to seek a paid pulpit. But when she returns to Los Angeles, she hopes to help out at a parish on the Westside, to minister to AIDS patients at the UCLA Medical Center and to counsel students in her office.

The reaction of women parishioners to the sight of her celebrating Mass has been especially moving, she said.

“Basically, I think the message that women priests give is that God loves girls as well as boys,” she said. “They seem to find it very moving that women can take these roles and that they might be called by God too.”

On campus, Adams said, she sees her religious vocation as a signal to students that there is room for believers despite the commonly held idea that philosophy departments are citadels of skepticism.

“It’s important to signal to religious students . . . that one can integrate one’s religious commitment with the reasoned life,” she said. “I think that’s very important, perhaps more important on a secular campus than it would be at a religious school.”

At the same time, however, she has managed to keep her scholarly pursuits distinct from her religious calling, said Montgomery Furth, who succeeded her last year as chair of UCLA’s philosophy department.

“It’s not that she won’t talk about God in her office . . . but her profession on campus is to be professor of philosophy,” he said. “They’re connected, but she’s clear about their relationship, which is not identity.”

As a professor, Adams has focused her research on the Middle Ages, a time when religious questions were very much on the minds of serious thinkers.

Her decades-long study of William of Ockham, a 14th-Century Franciscan monk who rebelled against the authority of Pope John XXII, recently culminated in a two-volume, 1,402-page study.

“I don’t think you’re going to get any historian of philosophy to call anything definitive, but I certainly doubt that another book on Ockham needs to be written in English very soon,” Furth said.

While earlier experts focused on the logic of Ockham and his contemporaries--Ockham’s razor, also known as the law of parsimony, argues that the simplest hypothesis is often the best--Adams has concentrated on their religious debates.

“That was a period in which the problems about how to conceive of God, what was the nature of God, what was the relation of God to the world, the whole raft of things that philosophers of religion are interested in, were discussed in a very rigorous way,” she said.

“But of course medieval philosophy is highly technical and laden with obscure terminology, and so if you’re going to figure it out, it takes some work. So I decided that I would try to crack the code.”

Ockham appealed to her when she was a graduate student 25 years ago because of his rebellious nature, although she said she does not much use Ockham’s razor, preferring to see God as generous, not stingy.

“William of Ockham was very colorful, and I suppose when I started working on him back in 1964, I really identified with it because he was somebody whose honest convictions put him in conflict with established authorities,” she said.

Recently, however, she has begun to grapple with one of the toughest challenges for believers: how to reconcile the goodness of God with the sufferings of the world.

“That’s a hard question. I expect to spend the rest of my life on it,” she said.

The issue became more than academic when she ministered to AIDS patients at Trinity Church in Hollywood, where many of the parishioners are homosexuals and where an AIDS Mass that includes the laying on of hands is held once a month.

“I think the answer is the suffering of Christ and the goodness of God,” she said, expanding on the thought in a typical torrent of words that makes students and interviewers alike grateful for the invention of the tape recorder.

“I think that the suffering of this life is made meaningful within the context of our intimate relationship with God, that God is intimately present to every person, whether he or she recognizes it or not,” she said.

‘As Far as I’ve Got So Far’

“And (I think) that this is especially true with people who suffer deeply, and that in the world to come that we will all see God face to face, and that this experience will be infinitely better than we can imagine, and that when we look back on the experiences of suffering that we have in this life, we will be able to recognize his presence with us . . . and that the relationship will be so important that it will make us not wish to erase that, even those deep moments of suffering from our life history. That’s as far as I’ve got so far.”

All is not pain and suffering in the world of theology, however.

Adams said a friend suggested “The Monk With the Razor” as an alternate title in the unlikely event that Hollywood transmutes her scholarly tomes into a movie.

“That sounds great, don’t you think?” she said, making light of philosophy’s abstruse terminology. “I mean, you can just see the black cover, with the red dripping substances and qualities slinking off as the quantities pop out. . . . Never mind. It’s a joke.”