Searching for God

Lyn Hartridge Harbaugh remembers the fall of 1995 like it was yesterday. With a degree in religion and biblical literature from Smith College, she chose Vanderbilt Divinity School over Harvard for her graduate work—an odd choice, her friends told her.

“I had a very insulated liberal upbringing,” she says. “I grew up in a secular humanist, Unitarian Universalist background. I had never heard of the Church of Christ.”

Before classes started, incoming students met with a faculty panel. One young man said to the assembled scholars, “My congregation told me not to come here because I would lose my faith. What do you have to say to that?” “I remember thinking, ‘Where have I ended up?’ ” Harbaugh recalls. “It was the first time I had run across the idea that education might make you lose your faith. I was absolutely astonished.” She had come face-to-face with the gaping yaw between Christian conservatives and liberals, two groups that start with the same person (Jesus), the same collection of writings (the Bible), and the same history of Western theology, but frequently arrive at diametrically opposed conclusions.

Harbaugh is still at the Divinity School, an enclave of often radical ideas in the buckle of the Bible Belt. She is now the director of admissions, addressing the questions and concerns of prospective students and warning them—especially those with conservative backgrounds—that this is not a Sunday school with ivy.

To the scholars within its walls, Vanderbilt Divinity School is generally what Harbaugh had hoped to find—a cathedral of the mind and spirit. It’s a place where men and women meet in contemplation of an often hard-to-fathom God, and in search of the will of that God in a world that has often gone as mad with religion as without it. To many conservatives, it might as well be Darth Vader’s Death Star, the headquarters of a dark and apostate group busy undermining the very foundations of Christianity. Numerically, it is a small outpost, with just 175 students and a few dozen faculty members (though there are another 125 students in Vanderbilt University’s Graduate Department of Religion) in a world where the large Southern Baptist seminaries number their students in the thousands. Still, it is a major player in theological education for the mainline Protestant denominations. It is one of only four nondenominational university divinity schools in the nation—Yale, Harvard, and Chicago are the others—and its scholars are widely published and highly respected. Its students earn one of four master’s and doctoral degrees, and leave as ministers, educators, or people whose business, service, or professional careers are bolstered by theological study.

Former students include Notre Dame president Father Edward A. “Monk” Malloy, the father of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, and Presidential Medal of Freedom Award winner Rev. Gardner C. Taylor. Locally, Tennessean religion editor Ray Waddle, Metro Council members Chris Ferrell and Ron Turner, Rabbi Randall Falk, radio talk-show host Karlen Evins, and musician/writer Marcus Hummon are current or former students. One of its stated purposes is “to prepare leaders who will be agents of social justice,” a mission embracing aggressive affirmative action, ministries to the disadvantaged, and gay and women’s rights. Its students and alums are on the boards and in the trenches with recovering alcoholics and addicts at Community High School and in halfway houses; with people with AIDS at Nashville CARES; at the Rape and Sexual Abuse Center, Oasis Center, and Reconciliation Ministries (all three of which divinity students helped found), and at Legal Services of Middle Tennessee, among many others.

The Vanderbilt Divinity School’s theological and intellectual missions are liberal as well. Its formally stated “purposes” and “commitments,” which mention gay rights, religious pluralism, and ecological and environmental concerns, do not specifically mention Jesus Christ. Its credo states that “one comes more authentically to grasp the faith by a critical and open examination of the Hebraic and Christian traditions.” As such, it is a place with a built-in dichotomy. It trains ministers and teachers to address people’s needs from a Christian perspective while holding Christian beliefs up to the cold light of rational inquiry—historically, linguistically, archaeologically, and ethically. It is a juggling act that can be disconcerting to the strongest students, and it has been known to derail the weaker ones.

In Nashville, the school attracts notice most often when its social activism makes waves, or when its professors or guest speakers push the edges of religious thought, as when former professor Gerd Luedemann told a Nashville radio audience during Holy Week that not only was Jesus’ body not resurrected, but that it may have been eaten by dogs.

A third of its students are 35 or older, and the average age is nearly 30. Many come looking for second careers or for new and meaningful challenges. Some come from conservative churches, including women who study for the ministry but whose denominations won’t allow them to preach. Others treat the school as a stepping stone to a good ministerial paycheck, and they chat as much about benefits and IRAs as theology. Still others come to seek God’s calling and find it leads to obscure and low-paying social service jobs.