Snorkeling at the Seminaries

Hanauma Bay is a snorkeler’s heaven. Hawaii’s colorful fish species can only be discovered by “being there,” a plunge into the waters with mask and air tube. This book, well-named Being There, is a study in snorkeling, the results of a sustained swim in the underwater life of Protestant seminaries.

A team of church social scientists chose two species to track: two seminaries, generically labeled “Evangelical” and “Mainline,” understood to be in the “streams” of evangelicalism and mainline Protestantism. The identity of the schools, both of which are described as large, secure, and at the center of their respective constituencies, is disguised. Being Thereis a search for subsurface phenomena, “cultures” below the level of curriculum or conventional self-descriptions. Culture so understood is made up of “shared (publicly available) symbolic forms—world-views, beliefs, ritual practices, ceremonies, art and architecture, languages, and patterns of everyday interaction,” the “script” that guides the “actors.” The researchers immersed themselves for three seminary years (1989-90 through 1991-92) in the culture of each school, living for periods on campus, attending classes, chapels, and trustee meetings, interviewing students, faculty, administration, and staff, eating in the cafeterias, visiting related congregations, and listening in on campus conversations and controversies.

While they are telling us about the institutions they observed, the researchers are also revealing something about the tacit culture that they themselves bring to the inquiry. As Don Browning points out elsewhere, the “congregational studies” movement (a significant influence on this project) is “theory-laden.”1 Watching the watchers, therefore, is worth doing and here includes a look at the snorkelers from the bluff over Hanauma Bay, a perch formed from the reviewer’s longtime acquaintance as a mainline outsider with the anonymous Evangelical Seminary (including a course taught there during the research period), some knowledge of Mainline, and decades on the faculties of two comparable mainline seminaries. But any confident talk of a higher perspective—at sea level or above—is forestalled by the reminder that “He who sits in the heavens laughs” (Ps. 2:4) at any claims to a God’s-eye view.

and the Christian Century. Being Theremakes its case that a significant part of the preparation of the next generation of Protestant leadership happens in subsurface cultures—and their clashes—only hinted at by curriculum visibilities and institutional self-descriptions. The portraits of faculty, students, and administration, and the narratives of key events and disputes, make for fascinating reading and serve as effective disclosure devices for what the research teams believe to be the contours and substance of each culture. For seminary administrators, faculty, and trustees who hope to transform their institutions, Being There provides a good dose of realism about where change must happen and how difficult it will prove to be.

Especially valuable is the documentation of the diversity of an evangelical world that is often assumed by outsiders to be monolithic. The Modern Theology course at Evangelical, for example, gives students a firsthand encounter with major exponents of alternative views—an exposure to the “other” that has no counterpart in mainline seminaries, for all their rhetoric of inclusivity.

Along with appreciation for the insights of this work, two questions persist for this reviewer: (1) Do I recognize the Evangelical Seminary I know? (2) Is the picture of Mainline to be taken as indicative of mainline seminaries?

We must acknowledge the difficulties inherent in portraying an institution, especially when the researchers must employ pseudonyms for the individuals they describe. Still, there are misleading emphases in the account of Evangelical Seminary. “Reg O’Neil,” for example, cited often as both formative and indicative of the school’s normative culture, was in fact a one-course, one-term visiting professor, is a sociologist not a theologian, and has had little influence on the school. So too the chapel dean: “Andrew Watson” is assigned a representative and interpretive role in the message and culture that does not comport with his recent arrival and part-time presence at Evangelical. Several new and younger faculty get high visibility as reinforcing the sharply right-brained and Reformed image of Evangelical, but little attention is given to other longtime faculty members whose piety and theology do not fit this picture.

Indeed, the researchers’ portrayal of Evangelical’s dominant culture as essentially didactic cum scholastic misses the accent on interiority, a conversion piety that is common to both faculty and student cultures and is one of the marks of being “evangelical.” Again, while “Robert Harlan” is given the attention he is due as a “variant” presence, there is no clue that he is a remnant of the “moderate” party, most of whom departed Evangelical in the preceding years.

Another puzzle: Is it true that most of the students “(like most of the faculty) pay little attention to world events unless they have religious implications”? Perhaps the pro-life political passions of both students and faculty count only as the latter for the researchers. And perhaps my association over the years with both faculty and students in public issues that run from racism, urban poverty, anti-Semitism, science-technology, and the perils of political fundamentalism is too limited. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine a culture in the Reformed tradition that is not intrinsically “world-formative” (Nicholas Wolterstorff).

The tales told in this report of underwater life are well worth hearing . … Being There makes its case that a significant part of the preparation of the next generation of Protest ant leadership happens in subsurface cultures—and their clashes —only hinted at by curriculum visibilities and institutional self-descriptions.

I have questions about the portrait of Mainline as well. Surely diversity/ inclusivity is a mark of today’s mainline seminary message. But is it the defining characteristic of its dominant culture? Whatever may be the case at Mainline, this is not so of mainline seminaries in general. My own modest research (in one field, theology, receiving responses and syllabi from theologians in 140 seminaries in the same time period as the research of Being There), shows a determined effort to retrieve the classical theological tradition as the necessary basis for justice, inclusivity, and peace commitments.2

In an interesting and somewhat conflicted discussion of current Right-Left culture-war commentary, the authors of Being Thereagree that “the two [seminaries] do divide along lines suggested by [James Davison] Hunter,” but they add that the culture-war “metaphors overstate the differences that we found in the two schools”; other data show that there is a “large middle … not likely to be easily mobilized by one extreme or the other. Our experiences in the two schools support this view.” But in spite of this welcome disavowal, the bipolar schema of the project and the juxtapositions expounded throughout are clearly kin to the two-party theory. Accordingly, Being There‘s stories tend to obscure the existence of a “centrist culture” in both seminaries.

This missing culture is only now getting the attention it is due.3 Of course, there are readily apparent differences between the cultures of mainline (“ecumenical”) and evangelical seminaries and constituencies. But given such differences, it is all too easy to ignore a growing center-left in mainline Protestantism and a center-right in evangelicalism. These groups find common ground in the Christological centereach accents, the doctrinal centralities each espouses, and the commitment they share to a center span of conversation across the chasm dividing Left and Right.

There is a more substantial, more vital center in the dominant cultures of both Evangelical and Mainline seminaries than Being There’stwo-party typology suggests, a presence discernible even in the researchers’ own descriptions. The research team at Evangelical finds—indeed, features—a forceful internal critique of contemporary evangelicalism, its narcissisms and intellectual vacuity. This Barthian-like assault on “culture-Protestantism” resembles the internal critiques of mainline religion mounted by today’s self-defined centrist movements.

Reinhold Niebuhr spoke of our human nature as a divine image inseparable from the “contingencies and necessities” of both nature and history. Being Thereis a salutary reminder of the role subsurface cultures play in the formation of those of us whose vocational dealings are with the imago, a focus that too often invites forgetfulness of our creatureliness. Yet, the stewards of this sobriety are not exempt from their own contingencies and necessities. Better that both the observed and observer acknowledge our underside lest the pretensions of the Fall compound the exigencies of our finitude.

Gabriel Fackre is professor of theology at Andover Newton Theological School. A different version of this essay appears in his book Restoring the Center: Essays Evangelical and Ecumenical, just published by InterVarsity.

1. “Congregational Studies As Practical Theology.” In American Congregations, Vol. 2, James P. Wind and James W. Lewis, eds. (University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 192-221.

2. See “Reorientation and Retrieval in Seminary Theology,” The Christian Century, Vol. 108, No. 20 (June 26-July 3, 1991), pp. 653-56.

3. A good example is the important new research of Douglas Jacobsen and William Trollinger, Jr., on “Re-forming the Center.” See the April 1997 issue of Interpretation for some of its results and a discussion of today’s mainline centrist phenomenon.