Eric Hall Sigward, a Professor of theology at New York Divinity School, passed away from complications of abnormal blood pressure at Mount Sinai Hospital on Morningside Heights on February 28, 2021, at 3 pm. Eric was one of the first to join a rising wave of evangelicals in Manhattan starting in the 1970s that has produced several hundred churches.
Born on June 22, 1946, in Sloan Hospital of Manhattan, Eric grew up as a kid in kinder times on the streets of the city, playing around in a magic shop on 42nd Street and swimming in the Hudson River while commuting from Manhattan to the elite Horace Mann School for Boys. His father Roderick (called “Hans”) was born on December 16, 1905, in Germany and died on June 30, 1966. His mother Angela was of Sicilian ancestry (née Cosumano), a first-generation American, who resided on the Upper West Side before passing away on January 7, 2002.
Eric also had an older sister named Ellen Sigward Prescott, who was born in 1943 and passed away on July 19, 1985. He is also survived by his cousins Jeanne Casey Seigle, Roger Casey, and Christopher Skelly. Seigle remembers Eric’s larger-than-life personality, intellectual curiosity, fun with the cousins, and numerous romantic relationships, which unfortunately never worked out.
Eric’s burial will be in New Jersey later this week, details to come. The burial will be 10 am Thursday in NJ. Limited to 20-25 attending. If interested, email pastormurphy@mac dot com Messiah’s Reformed Fellowship will hold a memorial service at a later date to be announced. Since some have asked – If one desires to make a contribution to defray burial expenses you may mail a check made out to the church and mail to: Messiah’s Reformed Fellowship, 2152 Ralph Ave. # 554, Brooklyn, NY 11234.
After leaving Manhattan for college, Eric made a peripatetic religious path from romanticism to drugs and witchcraft until finally returning to hang his hat in an evangelical church as a resident of New York City in the 1970s.
After becoming a Christian on the West Coast, Eric attended Peninsula Bible Church. He eventually attended Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia to study for the Master of Divinity and Master of Theology in 1975-1979. His master’s thesis was on the three groans of creation, the human heart, and the Spirit of God mentioned in Romans 8.
At the seminary, he was one of the students who took the last class that theologian Cornelius Van Til offered before his retirement, “The Theology of Karl Barth.” Eric often said that Van Til made him Reformed in his faith. Eric later edited The Works of Cornelius Van Til, 1895-1987. His theological turn toward Calvinism filled a hunger for order after a life of chaotic sensuality and a desire for what he called “meat and potatoes” for the mind.
Eric started his evangelical quest here in Manhattan in the 1970s by holding a Bible study on The Book of Romans in my apartment at Student Christian House located on 114th Street near Columbia University, while he was going to seminary. That is where I first heard his thoughts on the groans of the human condition, which he later published in a booklet.
New York was much changed from the 1950s. In 1975, Kenneth Briggs of The New York Times reviewed the state of religion in the city. It found religion was in retreat and the clergy were desperate. Yet, in the late 1970s, things spiritual started to make a slow comeback, first in the outer boroughs, then Manhattan. Eric arrived back in a Manhattan when the small changes were hardly noticeable. Mostly, people saw violence, chaos, deterioration, and extreme secularism.
Eric started or helped to start various evangelical ventures in Manhattan: Bible studies, a fellowship for students at Columbia University, and the founding of a predecessor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church. He interned at Queens Christian Reformed Church in Briarwood, Queens, pastored by Paul Szto. At the time of his death, Eric was a member of Messiah’s Reformed Fellowship, pastored by Paul Murphy.
To look at Eric back when he was a licensed Orthodox Presbyterian preacher, you would not have guessed that he once rolled down that velvet Harvard slope into the cauldron of witches. Though you might have started to wonder as he quickly went through sleight of hand tricks at the dinner table in the Harvard Club in New York.
“Houdini is my hero,” Eric declared to me one time during my interviews with him. “He debunked the occult as hocus pocus, though it took me a while to get out of it.” Rather for years, Eric followed Houdini’s nemesis, Aleister Crowley, Cambridge University witch and infamous connoisseur of blood sacrifices.
We should note that as part of their drive to be a normal part of American society, witches often prefer to be called pagans, neopagans or wiccans, and their religion is fashioned as neopaganism or Wiccan Religion. They strenuously object to being linked to Satan or Satanism, which they claim are Christian-related inventions. Instead, Wiccans say that they are reviving a nature-based, “ecology-conscious” spirituality that was widespread before Christianity.
But most witches didn’t climb into witchcraft through rational science or for the desire for normality. Most often their normality had been disrupted in some way, not so unusual of course for young people growing up. They tumbled to witchcraft through the doors of lust, greed, drugs, egoism, and loneliness—the usual trip-doors that send students rolling into the gutter of young angst.
Childhood
Growing up, Eric hovered at the edges of high society. As the proprietor of one of Manhattan’s most fashionable gyms on the East Side, Eric’s father was a coat-holder for the elite. The elder Sigward was also famous for teaching Hollywood and Broadway stars how to do fight scenes with judo and other martial arts. (His father’s gym was called Sigward Health Studios on Lexington Avenue near 62nd Street.) Eric was coached into all types of sports, swam across the Hudson River a couple of times, and learned judo.
Eric scoured the city for fun. He hung around the famous old Tannen’s Magic Shoppe on 42nd Street in Manhattan to catch a glimpse of the great magicians playing with their tricks. “It was a funhouse sort of place. People would be practicing magic all day, particularly on Saturday,” he recalled. However, Eric wasn’t looking for any religious experience. He didn’t think that this type of natural magic later led him into his eventual involvement with witchcraft. For him, the skills of natural magic were worldly assets, not supernatural ones. Natural magic gave Eric an edge in the super-competitive world of elite Manhattan childhood.
Sleight of hand, illusions, and the like require practiced skill in manipulating the muscles and the creative use of gravity and sight to “drop, clip and grab” coins, cards birds, and bodies. This type of magic requires intimate knowledge and reliance on nature’s limitations and capacities. Young Eric also had the advantages of athleticism and wit. So, he wove into his personal presentation the fascinating alchemy of hidden powers to transform his Fruit of the Loom gym clothes into Brooks Brothers regalia.
At his school, the extremely selective, high-toned Horace Mann School for Boys, in Riverdale, students were required to show up with a comb, file, and handkerchief–which became perfect implements for Eric’s magical manipulation and social advancement while developing greater physical discipline and mental subtlety. Wowing his fellow students with magic shows, Eric eventually jumped on stage in the early 1960s as student body leader.
When Andy Tobias, today a famous money guru, showed up in his junior high class with a Harvard binder, Eric laced an ambitious spirit with exalted dreams of glory. “I was as guilty as the next man for loving glory or honors rather than knowledge,” he recalled. So, he incipiently started “to strive towards heroism for its own sake,” a process that eventually lost his love for actual life and the people that should lie behind the fame.
Eric relished those things heroic and intense. “I delighted in ancient mythology and romantic poetry.” Eric recognized that the magician’s spiritual ancestry and his reliance on “hidden powers” to fascinate and control his audience roughly resembled a sort of a fascinating peep show into the occult, though without the pornography. In a spirit of love girded with ambition, Eric developed a crush on a girl with the fascinating birthday card from her “Uncle Albert” Einstein. Eric started to feel he was one of the chosen in contact with the hidden powers.
Harvard — rowing through the follies
He set off to Harvard University. It along with Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) boast that they are the greatest concentration of the intellect in the world. U.S. News and World Report rates Harvard or MIT as one of the top two schools in most specialties. Harvard is also the most selective university in the country with secretive, prestigious clubs. It became fairly easy for students to fall into the conceit that a Harvard man or woman knows the hidden powers of the world. Perhaps, for those reasons, unbeknownst to Eric, Harvard-MIT also boasted an unusually high number of witches, according to Helen Berger, co-author of Voices from The Pagan Census (2003).
Entering Harvard with the slogan, “some are chosen, some are not,” Eric bought a red Norton Dominator racing motorcycle to ride as his Roman chariot. Serene, at the center of attention, “my mind was fixed on the true grit of a sensual life.”
Encountering the “perplexing Christian author, C. S. Lewis” in his first class, Eric felt an extreme distaste. He was “utterly opaque to me. Besides, I was a pushy kid from New York intent on success at Harvard.” He spit Lewis out with the remark, “What did the supernatural have to do with me?”
However, soon the 60’s sex-drugs-occult explosion rolled over Harvard. Smoking pipes and motoring down dark Boston, Eric bounced from go-go dancer to Radcliffe girls (“Cliffies”), treating them as mere “learning experiments to be tried and abandoned.” The life-style ended up emphasizing a psychological emptiness that the young student was feeling.
For a while, Eric’s equilibrium was precariously preserved by the rhythmic materialism of “thunk, zing, thunk, zing, thunk, zing” at rowing practice and racing. Although his life was fragmenting, Eric hung on with the chant, “I row.” The Harvard racing crew during his years became legendary as one of the greatest crews in history and for going undefeated, leading to an Olympic appearance (which Eric missed). He also joined the super-elite Porcellian Club (thanks to his friend and rowing-compatriot Ian Gardener and his father sponsoring him for membership). Materialism and high prestige, however, are only skin deep.
With “moderate glee,” Eric studied Freud as an emotional help to his inner distress, and then caught a glimpse of the Aryan occultism of Jung. He thought, ‘That is interesting.’ In his senior year, he also stoked up, suspending time with a marijuana euphoria. Soon, Eric moved through the “doors of perception” using Harvard-invented LSD. Some classmates were also getting otherworldly with witchcraft. He graduated from Harvard in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and literature.
It was not until after he arrived in England at Cambridge University (in the same class as Prince Charles) that Eric stepped from the chemical magic of the laboratory into the supernatural sphere.
Love, Sex and the Occult at Cambridge University
Although Trinity College, Cambridge boasted Isaac Newton as a legendary 17th Century physics professor, Eric became more interested in one of the college’s notorious alumni, the occultist and Satanist Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). Violently hostile to the Christian God, Crowley flaunted his witchcraft with messianic pretensions. Subsequently, he became a tabloid scandal generating lurid headlines such as “Crowley’s Orgies in Sicily,” “The Beast 666,” “Preying on the Debased,” and “The Wickedest Man in the World.”
For this reason, modern Wiccans are loath to be reminded about their heritage from Crowley. Yet, Crowley is one of their seminal thinkers. Indeed, his aphorism “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” has been adopted with the addition of “and do no harm to anyone” as the golden rule of today’s Wiccan Religion.
However, before Eric tried witchcraft, he tried the alchemy of sex and love. Yet, romanticism and the occult are emotionally close in rejecting “normal” reality in the search for something more intense that might take one out of the humdrum life. Eric was both ambitious and eventually desperate.
At first, intense emotional fire with a young Danish girl convinced him that a golden hue to life’s cauldron was emerging. “‘Gold,” he thought, but the hoped-for transformation did not occur. “We were in love but something bright, shining, and hard was missing. There was no commitment of our persons, our lives. The magical conversion was impossible.”
Eric then fled commitment to Marrakech, Moroccan center of hash-heads, to meet his buddy Joe Kanon. While Kanon indulged 60’s euphoria with Eric, he returned to the concrete world of dollars and sense in the publishing industry. Later, he became a spy novelist exploring how to live life in an inevitably corrupt world. Eric, however, was looking for some way to alchemically change his earthbound life into heavenly magic. “I was sexually satiated but angry, confused.” Coming back from Morocco, I read Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and thought, “This is it. This is the way out.”
Indeed, “at first it was hilarious and great, but later, I had more and more bad trips. My lifestyle was degrading me and then unhappiness followed. Our sex was degrading. We weren’t faithful and had many partners.”
Eric and his Danish girlfriend, indeed, leaned toward each other, intertwined in every way, but still couldn’t quite trust enough to fall into marriage. They took from each other.
“I thought I was smarter than her, that my life could be greater than hers,” Eric admits. After all, at Harvard, he proclaimed to people that he was “Eric Sacker of Cities.” A youthful conceit no doubt, but Harvard and Cambridge put their students onto pedestals normally reserved for heroes. Later, Eric realized how little he was willing to give of himself, “I was just cheap.”
As the ‘60s wound down into the ‘70s, exuberance settled down into mean con games. Charles Manson bewitched acolytes and forked his victims; Jim Jones made sure that if he didn’t survive no one would. Although the hallelujah choruses of Aquarius continued, darker deadly tones were sounding.
With his life reeling out of control, Eric hoped again to discover an alchemical moment that would relieve his guilt over using his Danish girlfriend without commitment. He felt some great reserve about committing to her. And the sex wasn’t as exciting anymore. He wondered if he was gay, or permanently damaged. Perhaps, Eric’s thought was that his only hope of escaping guilt and disgust with himself was to obliterate himself in some ecstasy.
The evolution of darkness
During this time, Eric immersed himself into Alistair Crowley, “The Beast 666” of Trinity College, as Crowley had called himself. Crowley appealed to all sides of Eric. Crowley was a world-class mountaineer; Eric a world-class oarsman. Crowley was a romantic mystical poet; Eric loved the romantic poets Luceferian reaching for the stars. Cowley was a self-styled “drug fiend;” and Eric had become a heavy drug user.
Like many of the witches and warlocks Journey has interviewed, Eric started with Tarot cards to gain personal insight and predictions of his future. The power of these cards is hard to explain. In an interview, psychiatrist Leah Davidson suggested that their power results from a combination of their alleged ancient magical associations (“the magic factor”), how they provoke the believer to see correlations between his life and the spirit world (“the correlation factor”) and their resolution of life’s dilemmas (“the tension release factor”). Tarot encyclopedist Stuart R. Kaplan wrote that Tarot has special meaning for witches who use it for prophesying.
Eric’s friends would often see him go in and out of the bookstore lugging stacks of witchcraft books. They seemed very rational, talking about energy forces, connections and methods. And “they seemed more consistent with drug use than any other literature,” said Eric.
As he read the thousands of pages of Crowley’s autobiography, Eric immersed himself in the man. He became so identified with Crowley that life itself seemed to be an oppressive darkness. Eric matured from a somber life like that of the Godfather Vito Corleone–dark and deliberate, to the wasteland for his son Don Michael. “A great darkness came over me, and my friends noticed. One friend wondered, “You sure you want to go on this path?”
“Yes, I do!” Eric shouted. But he didn’t try to explain. How could he share the attraction of the evolution of darkness that he was experiencing? Crowley was the Don Juan of England, the Charles Manson of the monstrous. But Crowley was a high-class witch, a Trinity College man. Eric thought he had found a Harvard-Cambridge way of the occult.
A bookstore salesman, a spotter for an occult group, asked Eric, “Do you want to practice?” However, the man represented a form of darkness that made Eric uneasy. Leering at Eric through broken teeth and a dirty mouth, the man unctuously suggested that Eric come with him to London for a meeting of The Golden Dawn. But Eric fled the man–and the incipient uneasiness with witchcraft. Still, there was an attraction to the darkness that lingered.
He recalls, “I was hooked on the occult as a rational religion. And England was filled with magical places like Stonehenge.”
Eric found a friendlier mentor, a shabby, hobbit-like occultist with a house filled with books on the occult. This Merlin-like figure would hand Eric a book to read and then they would discuss it. “I would wander around looking for a mystical connection through what was lodged on the bookshelves.”
In 1970 with his love life in ruins and nonexistent future plans, Eric was briefly possessed by a sort of H.P. Lovecraft magical horribleness. Sailing into an LSD trance, “I wanted to experience the dark side. With zeal, I had been looking for all the horrible passages of Crowley on human sacrifice, the mad Arab’s magic of H.P. Lovecraft, and the gothic horror stories revealing a divine, vile madness. I snapped.”
Grabbing hold of his friends, he wailed, “I am going to hell and am demon possessed!”
He imagined a mad Kafkesque truck was running over and over him, while Eric chanted, “What did I do? What did I do?”
Faced with a Sisyphean eternal crushing from the truck, Eric wanted a way out.
“I was writhing in fear and anguish on the floor.”
Coming out of the gothic horror trip, Eric begged his friends for books about escaping the devil. He felt that “his soul was smoking, damaged.” He had blundered into a spirit world about which he really didn’t know anything, though he had lots of book knowledge. He graduated from Cambridge with a bachelor’s/masters in economics.
Escape to California
According to legend, the three princes of Serendip searched for Calitopia, the land where all life’s problems were resolved. Hence, the name California and its historic role in American religious history as a spiritual frontier and last stop for the search for rebirth.
Eric made a magical mystery relocation to the Bay Area of California, land of sunny trips and white magic, he thought, an Israel of cosmic new beginnings.
He had heard that Berkeley even had a department of witchcraft, the backdoor entrance to the irrational at the supposedly rational university. Reading John Fowles Magus, he alighted in California, hopefully observing “at least there is good weather.”
Earning a living as a rowing coach for Stanford University, he hooked up spiritually with a cosmic conscious group called “Servants of Awareness.” Soon, he had his crew parading around to their rowing contests with “Servants of Awareness” team t-shirts. “Crowley really prepared me for this. The idea was that through ritual, techniques, and drugs one could unite one’s consciousness with divine consciousness and so become a channel of what was on the other side.”
But the great darkness that overcame Eric in England spread its dark fingers over sunny California toward Eric. He still couldn’t get away from his guilt, and the kindliness of the Cosmic Circle couldn’t obscure his cosmic loneliness. “I was still confused. Crowley died on the same day as my hero JFK with the words, ‘I am perplexed.’ It was emblematic of the devil’s bargain. The devil didn’t deliver the goods. The servants of the devil ended confused. I was confused.”
Yet, the Servants of Awareness were sunny gentle souls, the smiling hippies of the occult. To Eric, they were nice but naïve and unknowledgeable about the dark side. Further, they lacked the-will-to-power dimension of much of the occult world that thirsts to change and control lives and the world.
From witchcraft to soulcraft
Moving into a boathouse on the Pacific, Eric was possessed by alternating currents of occult practice and the symbolizing life of the barbaric sword and loincloth of Conan the Barbarian. However, after starting a screenplay based on the Conan novels, he grew depressed about how weak were rippling muscles when faced with life’s burdens.
Though a top athlete, Eric felt tired, worn out, defeated–Conan was just a two-dimensional superhero that acted as a funhouse mirror joke on the weak. No matter how perfectly strong one becomes, age and life’s battles wear one down to imperfection. then death.
Indeed, Robert E. Howard, the author of the Conan books, built himself up from a weak sheltered child to a kick-sand-in-their-face bodybuilder who then killed himself. Mishima the great Nobel Prize-winning Japanese novelist-militarist sculpted his body into Greek-god perfection then splattered his blood on a white death mat when he realized that he could only go downhill from such perfection.
“One day I was reading the Kabbala, a Jewish mystical text, sitting on the fountain in the main square of Stanford,” Eric told me. The atmosphere was not too far removed from the Safid mystics of the Middle East who dreamed up the Kabbala in the first place. Sunny weather, adobe walls, warm Mediterranean breeze over dry land. Who knows, Eric thought, following along with the mystics’ esoteric reading of Scripture, one might just drink divine waters bubbling up between Hebrew Eleph and Zed!
A ‘60s gypsy with a truck camper to match came over to Eric. Short with bare feet and a light-brown cowlick, he greeted, “Hi, I am Timothy English.”
Sensing a possible communion with the stranger, Eric said, “I’ve been very interested in occultism. I’m convinced of spirit forces behind daily reality.”
“Yes, I know,” English agreed, “My bed spontaneously combusted one night because I was practicing black magic.”
“No kidding,” Eric said. “That seems to be a problem with the occult. I think I was demon possessed or close to it.”
Timothy played back how he had plagued by several demons, “particularly lust and pride.”
“You’ve been plagued by lust, too?”
“Yes, I was a sex pervert.”
Eric wondered if drugs had led English into that behavior. English admitted his friends called him a drug fiend because he would do anything to get a heroin fix.
A couple of days later, Eric joined English in his camper. English looked at his new friend, “You feel like a sheep among wolves.”
“Yeah, I do,” Eric deadpanned. It was the metaphor for his life. In the Bay Area, they sometimes used sheep to keep down the grass on the hillsides. A shepherd always tends them, but Eric’s shepherd was more like a wolf.
They sat in the truck with the backdoor open to let the sunshine stream in. In the shadows on the sides Eric sat, he could almost hear the wolves howl.
English went on, “Jesus said he comes for the lamb among wolves.”
Eric thought that was nice, Jesus was a kind man. “Jesus said a lot of good things,” he allowed.
But it wasn’t Jesus’ goodness that touched Eric. His feeling of guilt over betraying friends— he had recently betrayed another girlfriend, losing his way, attacks by demons — seemed beyond the Band-Aids of nice words and good deeds.
So, English shifted grounds, “You are sinning. The Bible says no adultery.”
Wow!”
English had come to the seat of Eric’s sorrows, his overwrought guilty heart. Eric’s heartfelt bad, his being almost emptied out. Crouching at his heart lay his multiple sins howling for justice. Guilt feelings came from real guilt.
“Jesus says in Mathew 13, “Come to me you who are weak and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.'”
Eric began to weep and laugh. That night Eric was planning to be initiated into the cosmic consciousness of the Servants of Awareness.
English then explained who Jesus really is and Eric confessed his faith.
The spell of the occult was broken, and Eric started “to pull away from the dock of Hell,” as he put it, in a ship with Jesus as the helmsman.
At Cambridge, Eric sought to be the magician-hero who would shed his blood to create a magical place of power. In “The Highwayman” Alfred Noyes wrote,
“They shot him down in the highway
Down like a dog in the highway
And he lay in his blood in the highway
With a bunch of lace at his throat.”
Eric had donned the magician’s dandy outfit of a black silk shirt with an Edwardian ruffled collar. As a self-styled lawless man in a death pose, he thought the lace at his throat on a pool of blood would provide a startling transcendent moment of heroism and death to the onlooker. But it was only a feeling of a passing moment. Darkness, death, blood remained; the white ruffles shriveled up like old carnations. The magic of the ‘60s had lost its alchemic allure.
In April 1971, Eric was baptized into the Christian faith and started attending Peninsula Bible Church. He returned to New York City for the summer where he re-read C.S. Lewis. As a freshman at Harvard, Eric had dumped Lewis, “spit him out,” as having nothing of interest. He thought, “Now, I know what Lewis was talking about.”
My remembrance here brings us to how Jesus made Eric a Christian. However, for much of Eric’s later life, he was particularly influenced by Cornelius Van Til. Some have called Van Til the most influential Christian theologian in the Twentieth Century. Certainly, for Reformed evangelical Protestant thinkers, he may be that. Eric explained the impact of this theology in his essay, “Van Til Made Me Reformed.” When Van Til evangelized on the streets of Wall Street, Eric accompanied him as a student.
He was most proud of his editing of Van Til’s corpus of work, which can be found in The Works of Cornelius Van Til, 1895-1987, CD-ROM that also includes images and extensive audio recordings of Van Til. Today this collection is available for the Logos Bible Software. The single best point of entry into Van Til’s writings is Christian Apologetics edited with an introduction by William Edgar. Van Til’s theology was Calvinism mediated through Dutch Reformed thought.
Van Til’s apologetics is often called “presuppositional apologetics,” which means that everyone presupposes some things have to be true if a meaningful life is to be known and lived in a fruitful and orderly way. The questions, then, are which religious faith supports the essential presuppositions for life and reason. Van Til’s students challenged Van Til to come to preach in New York City, which he did for specific meetings in Wall Street, Harlem, and elsewhere. However, no Van Tillian church was founded in Manhattan. The dream of starting a historic Reformed church in Manhattan continued to be unrealized.
In the 1930s, G. Gresham Machen, who left Princeton Theological Seminary after he was driven out of Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., explored whether he could found a new seminary for a renewed Calvinism in New York City. It would have been poetic symmetry to restart the heritage of Dutch Reformed theology of New Amsterdam. Machen regularly visited and preached at Broadway Presbyterian Church, the sponsor of Student Christian House at which Eric lead his first Bible study in Manhattan. Machen was not able to get a Reformed seminary going here in the city, and his group founded Westminster in Philadelphia and recruited Van Til to be a professor. The dream was delayed some more.
The renewal of Calvinism here in the city didn’t happen until after the late 1970s. Eric tried several efforts. But most of the evangelical efforts in Manhattan during the 1970s didn’t have very great success. They hadn’t really figured out what was needed to restart in this very challenging environment. Efforts like Eric’s were too little funded, insufficiently strategized, and not well-tuned to urbane culture. Eric also wasn’t too well suited for leading a church-planting effort. Yet, attempts like his were early experiments about what to do. It would take a professor from Westminster to absorb the lessons of all those early experiments to have success in planting in 1989 Redeemer Presbyterian Church, which has had such great worldwide impact. We can be eternally grateful to Eric that by God’s grace he helped to prepare the way.
Eric had some success in preparing ministers in New York City with seminary classes. Paul de Vries, president of the New York Divinity School where Eric held forth as a professor of theology and other subjects, says that Eric was “a riveting storyteller with a very clear and comprehensive worldview and was inspirational to his students.” The teacher had a thorough grasp of the Scriptures in their original Greek language, a passion for Dutch theologians, and made good arguments. De Vries also says, “Students loved his weird sense of humor that was fun for its brazen rejection of stuffiness.” His wide variety of friendships and family relationships contain countless interesting stories.
Eric was one of a kind New York Calvinist who will never be forgotten.
Eric’s burial will be in New Jersey later this week, details to come. Messiah’s Reformed Fellowship will hold a memorial service at a later date to be announced. The burial will be 10 am Thursday in NJ. Limited to 20-25 attending. If interested, email pastormurphy@mac dot com
A note on sources: When I first started interviewing him, Eric kindly made available a copy of his autobiography From Harvard to Hell and Back. I was surprised that I hadn’t known about it. Evidently, he had been working on the book-length autobiography for a long time. I noticed that he used some language interchangeably in our interviews and his book, so he must have been working on it when we first talked. Eric wrote many essays and gave Bible studies and talks, quite a few I have read or heard. There were other moments and influencers in Eric’s life, which I am sure some will share with the public. Thanks for the advice and some copyediting to Elizabeth St. Clair Smith and to Eric’s cousin Jeanne Casey Seigle and Eric’s numerous friends for clarifying information. (The mistakes are mine.)
Some material has been drawn from Helen Berger’s A Community of Witches. Contemporary Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft in the United States, Roger Hutchinson’s Aleister Crowley, Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon, Ethan Doyle White, Wicca. History, Belief, and Community in Modern Pagan Witchcraft, and Stuart R. Kaplan’s The Encyclopedia of Tarot, I & II. https://wrldrels.org/2016/10/08/wicca/ Many pagans are active in a nationwide movement to reconstitute the witch community into Unitarian Universalism. Some of UU congregations have Modern Pagan groups within them, organized as chapters of CUUPS (the Covenant of UU Pagans).” At present, there are no such chapters listed in New York City.
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