at Union Theological Seminary in 1946, and his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1949, having studied under Lionel Trilling, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Jacques Barzun.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, theologians found themselves looking to the literature of the post-World War II period for articulate expressions of theological themes such as despair, alienation, redemption, and revelation.
Drawing primarily on Paul Tillich's theology of culture—which defined religion as the substance of culture and culture as the form of religion—Scott eloquently explored the crisis of faith in modern literature, the climate of faith in Kafka, Camus, and Bellow, and the themes of alienation and reconciliation in modern plays, poetry, and novels.
Scott taught several generations of students that a dialogue with the literary imagination of the age would provide rich rewards for Christian theology by offering a deepening awareness of itself and the time in which it finds itself.
In one of his most eloquent and astute observations, Scott pointed out that the sense that the anchoring center of life is broken and that the world is abandoned and adrift is a basic premise underlying most of our literature.