Van A. Harvey

Van A. Harvey (born April 23, 1923, in Hankow, China; died July 11, 2021, in Palo Alto, California) was an American Christian theologian and academic. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1943 to 1946. Harvey earned a BA in Philosophy from Occidental College in 1948 and a B.D. from Yale Divinity School in 1951. He completed his PhD in post-Enlightenment religious thought at Yale University in 1957, with his thesis titled "Myth, Faith, and History" and H. Richard Niebuhr as his doctoral advisor. He influenced by Rudolf Bultmann and Ludwig Feuerbach. Harvey taught at Princeton University (1954–58), Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University (1958–68), the University of Pennsylvania (1968–78), and Stanford University (1978–1996), where he became the George Edwin Burnell Professor of Religious Studies (Emeritus). He served as Chair of the graduate program in religion at SMU and his departments at Penn and Stanford. His early work, such as "A Handbook of Theological Terms" (1964) and "The Historian and the Believer" (1966), explored theological terminology and the relationship between historical inquiry and Christian faith, critically examining the theologies of Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. Later in his career, he shifted towards being a skeptical student of religion, as reflected in "Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion" (1995), which won the 1996 American Academy of Religion’s award for excellence in constructive-reflective studies. This book argued for the superiority of Feuerbach's later theories on the origins and persistence of religion. Harvey received honorary degrees, two John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and visiting fellowships, along with distinguished teaching awards from the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University. He also contributed to encyclopedias like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.