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.
Women comprise a slight majority in the Master of Divinity and Master of Theological Studies degree programs. There are increasing numbers of African Americans and other minorities, and religious backgrounds vary widely. Carol Orsborn, whose book Return From Exile chronicles her first year at the school, describes a prayer circle that consisted of a Baptist, an atheist, a Jew, an Episcopalian contemplating a Catholic conversion, and an African Methodist Episcopal minister. “All this comes to a head in community worship, which is always an interesting experience,” says Chris Haynes, an alum who is now associate pastor at Fairfield Glade United Methodist Church near Crossville. “It can become a political process. We have some atheists who aren’t going to participate in worship at all. Then there is the majority who are Christians, but from widely diverse denominations. If you want to have a worship experience that represents the entire community, how are you going to do that? One approach is to try to find the commonalities, the common yearnings of all religions, but if you try to translate that into an actual worship service, a lot of times it comes across as a hodgepodge that doesn’t really represent anything. It’s a strange tightrope to try to walk.”
Vanderbilt Divinity School is housed in a modernist building next to the university’s main library. Inside the 21st Avenue entrance, guests are greeted by a painting called “The Mockery of Christ,” a sort of Picasso-meets-Duchamp-meets-Dali depiction of Jesus looking like a skinny Lou Reed and being mocked by a soldier wearing what looks like a sheer, frilly tutu and holding up a mirror. Next to the soldier is a naked man on all fours enthusiastically mooning Christ as a bare-breasted woman leans out a window in the background. You are aware at once that you have not stepped into your average Baptist Bible college. Perhaps the most telling fact about the school in the year 2001, though, is this: In the heart of the Bible Belt, in a city where you can count on one hand the number of truly powerful people who aren’t male and Christian, where in the 1980s the head of the Southern Baptist Convention said that God does not hear the prayers of Jews, the New Testament scholar teaching first-year students the Christian Bible this semester is a woman—a Jewish woman.
Lighting the way
From all appearances, fate has smiled on the man chosen to lead Vanderbilt Divinity School into an uncertain future. He is James Hudnut-Beumler, and a year ago, he was seven years into his tenure as dean of Columbia Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian institution in Decatur, Ga.
“I loved what I was doing, I felt I was effective, and I didn’t think I was going anywhere,” he says.
Vanderbilt, seeking to replace the popular and highly effective Joseph Hough, who had left Vandy to become president of Union Theological Seminary in New York, wasn’t really looking for Hudnut-Beumler either. Its search committee was hoping to name a woman or an African American to the job. That didn’t work out, though, and, according to Eugene TeSelle, an emeritus professor of church history and theology who was a member of the committee, Hudnut-Beumler’s “was one of three names that kept coming up.... He was, in a sense, the riskiest choice,” TeSelle says, “because he was the youngest [at 43]. But in hindsight it was certainly a risk worth taking. His orientation is clearly shaped by his study at Union, then Princeton. He understands ecumenical study and the intellectual study of religion, and, being a Presbyterian minister, he understands the church side as well.”
What’s more, any potential risk was certainly mitigated by the assets Hough passed to Hudnut-Beumler. They include a handful of first-rate young professors appointed during Hough’s tenure, and, for a school that has long been Vanderbilt’s financially strapped stepchild, a pile of money in the form of five endowed faculty chairs and an endowment swelled by aggressive fund-raising, brilliant management, and the dizzyingly expanded bull market of the ’90s.
“Joe may have just set things up well enough,” TeSelle says with a cautious smile, “that it may be an easy ride from here on in.” Then again, of course, it may not. Those new faculty members, including Leonard Hummel and Kathleen Flake, are following an internationally respected, widely published, and cohesive faculty that helped anchor the school since the 1960s. Most of that group has recently retired, and the others plan to do so soon. Liston Mills, emeritus professor of pastoral theology and counseling, quotes former dean and respected feminist theologian Sallie McFague as saying simply, “They’ve got a lot to live up to.” Hudnut-Beumler’s challenge, Harbaugh says, “is to help the faculty articulate what the curriculum and mission of the school is in this day and age.”
“This day and age” is shorthand for the world into which Hudnut-Beumler and the divinity school are stepping. After a century largely dominated by the historical/critical method of biblical study, the ’60s and ’70s ushered in an era characterized by scattershot, post-liberal, contextual theologies exploring feminism, ecology, minorities, and economic and political justice and equality. As social activism overtook the personal redemptive message, churchgoers drifted away. It became clear that it is difficult to galvanize people with a message that is shifting and, at any moment, fuzzy at best. “They’re going to do a lot of raising of social consciousness,” says Michael Moss, associate dean of Lipscomb University’s College of Bible and Ministry, “and there is a place for that. But in terms of being where the average person is, I’m not sure they’re there.” The mainline Protestant churches into which many Vandy graduates are sent—the moderate to liberal branches such as the United Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and United Church of Christ, among others—have been losing members for 40 years. The one exception is the Unitarian Universalist Church, an ultraliberal entity often parodied as playing theological tennis without a net. Meanwhile, conservative churches, particularly the Southern Baptists, have been gaining members dramatically. Partisans on both sides are convinced that the message—or the lack of a message—is part and parcel of the exodus. Even the liberals acknowledge that what recent guest lecturer Marcus Borg calls “a vivid sense of the reality of God”—something you’re much more likely to get from a conservative preacher than from a liberal—is the factor putting butts in pews. “The liberal denominations are growing smaller and less relevant to American Christianity,” says R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. “Their membership rolls have been hemorrhaging, their cultural influence has been declining, and their hold on American culture has been lost. I would argue that liberal theology draws a very small audience, and liberalism has been the death of the mainline churches. An accommodated theology impresses neither the believing Christian nor the committed secularist. It is merely tolerated as inoffensive and nonthreatening.”
Against the grain
That Vanderbilt Divinity School exists at all is at least mildly surprising. While its relations with Vanderbilt’s board of trust are warm these days, they have in the past been downright hostile. Liberalism has seldom been a growth stock in Nashville, and the school was long in overcoming two watershed events that left it with few friends on the board of trust, among the Vanderbilt administrators in Kirkland Hall, or, for that matter, in the community at large.
The first was the James Lawson affair. In 1960, Lawson was a 31-year-old African American divinity school student and ordained Methodist minister who was part of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Drawing on his experience with Mahatma Gandhi in India, Lawson taught workshops in nonviolence to students from Nashville’s four predominantly black colleges, and as such, he was a leader of the city’s lunch counter sit-ins. After he was quoted in the Nashville Banner as saying he would encourage students to “violate the law,” Vanderbilt Chancellor Harvie Branscomb gave him the choice of giving up his role in the sit-ins or being expelled.
Both city newspapers, the board of trust, a majority of the university’s students, and much of the community were on Branscomb’s side, and Lawson was expelled. In the ensuing firestorm, all but a handful of the divinity school’s faculty members offered their resignations, effective at the end of the following school year, and its dean was forced to leave. The school might have been cut loose altogether except that some professors in the sciences and the Vanderbilt University Medical Center threatened to resign as well. A new dean and a compromise solution offering Lawson the chance to complete courses in which he’d been enrolled (although he declined, having chosen to finish his studies at Boston University) brought back some sense of normalcy, and faculty members withdrew their resignations. The school slowly rebuilt through the 1960s, but the backlash continued, according to Professor Dale Johnson, who has edited a history of the divinity school scheduled to be published by Vanderbilt University Press next fall.
“I think the 1960 event changed how Nashville viewed the divinity school,” he says. “We didn’t have much of a constituency of support at that time, and it was hard to develop contacts of church people who had interest in supporting the divinity school monetarily and personally.” Liston Mills saw the backlash firsthand when he came here to begin teaching at the divinity school in 1962. He got a lift one day from a man who told him the only money he ever regretted giving to anyone was a contribution to “that damned place.” Then Mills and his wife declined to rent a house off Woodmont Boulevard when the owner, on learning Mills was teaching at the divinity school, told him, “I don’t want any niggers in it.” That radical reputation was helped along by the activist stance of other new faculty members. Professor TeSelle, who moved into a racially mixed neighborhood on coming to Vandy in 1969, helped found the Belmont-Hillsboro Neighbors in response to housing discrimination, the threat of urban renewal, and the school desegregation lawsuit. He also took up a host of other local and international causes, including fighting right-wing coups and aid for the Contras.
“I can remember being accused on one occasion of being a ‘pseudo-carpetbagger,’ which was somewhat puzzling,” TeSelle says, “but [former dean] Jack Forstman helpfully assured me that I was the real thing.”
The second watershed event involved the 1978 regional Davis Cup tennis match at Vanderbilt. Divinity Dean Sallie McFague, the first woman to head a major theological institution in this country, took part with other faculty members in student protests over the presence of a team from South Africa, a country known for its apartheid oppression. McFague’s outspoken stance alienated key board of trust members, and she stepped down soon afterward.
There were again rumblings that the school, which, on top of its radical politics, was incurring increasing annual deficits, might be cut loose. That never happened, but those incidents, coupled with the leadership of students and faculty in anti-Vietnam War protests, “distanced the divinity school from a major segment of the Nashville community,” according to Forstman, who was dean from 1979-89 and interim dean before the recent arrival of Hudnut-Beumler.
Forstman began the process of rapprochement and, with the help of board “champions” like Ann and Pat Wilson and Allen Steele, undertook an effort to boost the school’s anemic endowment and ease its deficits. Forstman also found a way to keep the school’s progressive/liberal agenda moving forward without a lot of controversy. He and the faculty wanted to expand the school’s formal list of stated commitments to include the precursor to the current “confronting...homophobia, recognizing gay rights in religious and civil settings, exploring gay concerns in the curriculum, and affirmation and support of gay and lesbian people within our community.” He took the statement to Provost Charles Kiesler, who told him, “Jack, I’d rather you didn’t do that.”
Forstman knew that many of the school’s supporters and contributors might well object to such an addition, and he brought together what he called “a group of close friends of the school.” Over lunch, he told them what he and the faculty had done, explained their reasoning, and asked for their help in dealing with objections. “There was never a flap about that,” he says. “If you do things in an open way, I think more people in Nashville are going to understand you than not.”
The financial turnaround and improved donor relations flowered under Forstman’s successor, Joseph Hough, a Baptist minister’s son from North Carolina who was named dean in 1989 and who left last year to take the post at Union.
Hough, Mills says, “was, in my humble opinion, our most effective dean. He brought an extraordinary array of gifts which enabled him to build on and enhance Jack Forstman’s tireless earlier work.” Hough could display an almost avuncular pastoral sense toward faculty and students alike, and he was charming enough to win board members and contributors. At the same time, he used a no-nonsense, in-your-face approach to make sure everyone knew precisely where he or she stood in his eyes. A roaring bull market helped his fund-raising acumen, and his tenure saw the appointment of several women, including L. Susan Bond in homiletics and Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore in pastoral theology and counseling. Hough was also a showman and someone who enjoyed a good fight and the chance to put his liberal principles before people. He once told a conservative churchman on Teddy Bart’s radio show, “You know, if you look at what Jews have done over the past 2,000 years, and what Christians have done, I think all those Baptists ought to become Jewish, because it would be better for their souls.”
Questioning the Gospel
Academic ground zero at Vanderbilt Divinity School is a pair of first-year courses called the Literature, Religion, and Faith of Ancient Israel and of Early Christianity, popularly known as LRF. One of the people teaching the Christian scripture is Amy-Jill Levine, a raven-haired, hyperenergetic scholar who inspires both awe and fear among her students. She is known for walking into her classroom on impossibly high heels, kicking them off, and talking her students through a high-stakes roller coaster of a ride. Her intensity and energy belie the fact that she has had open-heart surgery and is, as she says, “held together by a variety of little metal plugs.”
As a Jewish girl growing up in the Catholic fishing community of North Dartmouth, Mass., she heard frequently about her role in killing Jesus, and she decided one day to take a close look at the New Testament that had her in such hot water. She is, she says, “still looking.” Her scholarship and speaking skills are such that she is in great demand across the country discussing religious issues before church groups and in the national media. She was nearly snatched away last year by Texas Christian University’s Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, but the efforts of interim dean Jack Forstman and Provost Tom Burish kept her here. “She could teach a course on the Yellow Pages, and 50 students would sign up,” says Lloyd Lewis, dean of students. “She is,” says Hough, who hired her, “the best classroom teacher I have seen in my 35 years in theological education, bar none. She was one of those major appointments that helped assure the future of the school when we were losing so many of the stalwarts.”
The search committee was, Forstman says, “astonished” at her presentation, and if there are circles in Nashville (both Christian and Jewish) that were shocked at her selection, they have nothing on her. “The idea of interviewing a Jewish woman for this position was already surprising,” she says. “Their actually offering me the job was unimaginable. If I believed in hell, I would have sworn it had frozen over.” For students who have never looked critically at the Gospels, LRF can shake the very ground they stand on. Comparing one Gospel with another, analyzing how the early church’s theological leanings might have affected the writing of the Gospels, and weighing that against historical, linguistic, and other research are all heady stuff. There are people whose faith will not stand the strain of contradiction and metaphor that are part of the mix. They come to the course after introductory remarks like these from a dean quoted by Orsborn in Return From Exile: “You must be willing to change the way you look at God, yourself, and life.” It is a gauntlet thrown down, the theological equivalent of John Housman’s statement in The Paper Chase to his attorney-wannabe students: “You come in here with a skull full of mush and you leave thinking like a lawyer.” “I probably do take them for a ride,” Levine says. “Am I out to deconstruct their Bible? Not in any sort of negative way. But I do think it’s important that students know what other academics and popular writers are saying about this material. Were I not to present to them, say, the work of the Jesus Seminar or of Marcus Borg, they would not be sufficiently prepared to deal with those articles that come out every Eastertime in Newsweek or Time.”
Levine presents very liberal views and their conservative responses, then says, “Folks, I can’t tell you what to believe. I can only provide you the information and the critical tools you might need to make these decisions for yourself,” adding that there are people of goodwill on various sides. Still, it can be disconcerting.
“I don’t think anyone who is serious can go to a seminary without at some point in that enterprise experiencing distress—perhaps even anguish,” Mills says. “The Roman Catholic Church provides that while students are in seminary they will have spiritual advisors to help address that sort of thing. The Protestant seminaries don’t do that. We just kind of leave you out there on your own.”
Reactions to the course, Orsborn wrote, ranged “from mild upset to near total devastation.” She quoted a student saying plaintively, “If the Gospels can’t get their story straight about Jesus’ resurrection, then who are we to believe? And if we can’t believe any one or the other, then what if it’s not true? And if it’s not true, if Christ did not die for our sins and get resurrected for our salvation, then why be Christians?” Haynes says simply, “The first year of study is usually a year of deconstruction for people.” Then “the next years are usually years of reconstruction, as ultimately, I think every student has to decide for himself or herself how to build everything back up again and put all the pieces back in place. They go about it in different ways. There are some who are essentially atheists and some who hang on to most of what they brought into the school.”
It’s true, Hough says, that for some people the experience is traumatic. “But most of them, the vast majority of them, move on to enlarge and enrich their understanding of God and the world,” he says. Levine herself tells her students, “Just because there are discrepancies between the narratives does not mean you can’t still choose what to believe. It’s simply that you will now be able to have your beliefs informed by a more complete picture. You can be educated and faithful.”
She wants her students to carry away two things in particular. “I’m concerned about the fact that they know the material so that they don’t embarrass themselves, or me as their professor, when they actually get up and start preaching,” she says. “I hate it when preachers get up in the pulpit and make asses of themselves because they haven’t done the work. I also want to keep ministers-to-be from getting up in the pulpit and saying things that would hurt other people. In particular, I don’t want them to wind up hurting people in my family. So if they can avoid saying from the pulpit something that will cause anti-Semitic impressions, good. If they can avoid saying something from the pulpit that will sound sexist or racist or homophobic or just plain mean-spirited, good. And that’s part of what I try to do.”
She also is not fond of some of the methods of proselytizing she has seen. “If they go up to one of my kids and say, ‘Unless you believe in Jesus, you’re gonna go to hell,’ I find that not only offensive, I think it’s obscene, and what I suggest to them is that there are better ways of preaching the Gospel.”
What people believe isn’t the critical thing, she says. “I really don’t care what people believe. I care what they do. Feed the poor, visit people in prison, and stop telling people [they’re going] to hell, because it’s not helpful.”
What 'is' is
Martin Luther and other reformers held that scripture was sufficiently straightforward to allow its direct exegesis, but it was quickly apparent that things were not that simple. Protestants found plenty to argue about, including, in 1528, fully 470 years before William Jefferson Clinton brought the matter to the philosophical forefront, what the definition of “is” is. Luther argued that when Jesus said, “This is my body,” he meant it, and was indicating his real presence. Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli held that “is” meant “signifies,” and that the line was symbolic. It was among the first of many differences that led to everything from mild argument to denominational splits, and it proved that the Bible is by no means unambiguous.
Protestants parted ways often and vigorously, and they continue to do so. The Methodists split in 1844 over slavery—the Southern, pro-slavery faction founded Vanderbilt—and it’s not inconceivable that they could split again over the ordination of gays.
If early reformers could prove the Bible wasn’t free of ambiguity, later scholars could claim it wasn’t free of self-contradiction either. There are two separate accounts of creation in Genesis 1 and 2, with the former holding that animals were created before humans, the second that they were created after Adam but before Eve. The genealogies of Joseph in Matthew 1 and Luke 3 are clearly incompatible. John says the cleansing of the temple was at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry (John 2:13-17), while the Synoptics say it was in the last week of his life (Matthew 21:12-13, Mark 11:15-19, Luke 19:45-48). Mark 15:25 holds that the Crucifixion happened at 9 a.m., and John 19:14-18 says it was after noon, and there are varying reports on who came to the empty tomb, who was guarding it, and whether Jesus permitted himself to be touched after he rose, among many other details.
Comparing biblical statements with other historical documents brought more problems. There was, for instance, no time when Herod was alive and Quirinius was also governor of Syria, and there is no contemporary record of the slaughter of the innocents, which is mentioned only in Matthew and which would surely have been recorded by contemporary historians.
Then there was science. Galileo, of course, met the wrath of the Vatican for challenging the clear biblical notion of geocentrism, and Darwin overturned the notion of special creation. Religious bodies have long since given up the former, and the arguments that linger regarding the latter no longer hold any but political interest for mainstream scientists.
Many moral questions were no easier to deal with. The children of Israel sometimes undertook the gruesome, God-ordained slaughter of foes, including children and animals. Elisha took offense at being called “baldy” by some kids and cursed them in the name of the Lord, who sent two bears to rip 42 of them apart. Neither Jesus nor Paul condemns slavery. Faced with all this, many people gave up on the Bible and Christianity altogether.
By the start of the 20th century, some denominations were attempting to accommodate science with biblical relativism. One group, though, the Fundamentalists, affirmed its defense of certain basic doctrines—such things as the virginal conception, the miracles of Jesus, the Resurrection, Christ’s divinity, hell, and creation without Darwinism.
Vanderbilt, like every other institution weighing dogma and scholarship, faced a decision. Against a backdrop that saw many mainline Protestant institutions break away from ecclesiastical governance, James H. Kirkland, Vanderbilt’s second chancellor, saw a choice between remaining sectarian or breaking free and bidding for national recognition. Spurred both by notions of academic freedom and by Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt money earmarked for nonsectarian schools, Kirkland guided the school through a split from Methodist control in 1914. Over the years, further liberalization became something many conservatives saw as a sellout. “Most of the liberal divinity schools, such as Vanderbilt, were once paragons of Christian orthodoxy,” says Mohler, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president. “The rise of the modern research university established a secularized culture as the academic norm. Scientism reduced Christianity to a spiritualized philosophy of life and the institutions grew embarrassed about their Christian ties.”
The chasm between liberals and conservatives had been established, and it was more than simply academic. It extended into each side’s outlook on society’s ills and their role in addressing them. “A hundred years ago, what we’ve come to call liberal Protestantism had a concern for social justice, and the welfare of children and the poor and downtrodden that so-called conservatives paid no attention to,” says Rubel Shelly, pastor of Woodmont Hills Church of Christ. “The conservative approach was to preach the gospel and get people ready for heaven. The tragedy of that to me is that the polarization became extreme, as the concerns of liberal Christianity became almost totally of this world, and those of conservatives almost totally with the next.” Consequently, Shelly says, conservatives did practically nothing about child labor laws or women’s and civil rights. “I think in the last 25 years there is an awareness on the part of both that these were extremes.”
Shelly himself admits there may be more hope than realism to his view that both sides are softening. One key is the role rationality is allowed to play. Many conservatives hold that the intellect cannot trump the Bible, and so fundamentalists view evolution, which is as true and valid as heliocentrism to mainstream scientists, as something that must be explained away. Liberals would argue that the only way for a thinking person to deal with the Bible is to recognize its contradictions, its scientific limitations, and its metaphors, and to search for ways to apply Christ’s teachings to our very complicated world without regard to whether miracles or biblical cosmology are factually true. Their approach is to save Christianity for people who would otherwise throw out baby and bathwater. “People like Marcus Borg get people to take the Bible seriously,” Levine says. “I disagree with a great deal of what he concludes—I think the Gospels, for example, record much more factual history than he does—but he and others like him provide people who had figured, ‘I can’t deal with the Bible anymore—it’s a stupid, ancient, silly, superstitious document,’ with a new way of looking at it. One of the marvelous things about teaching this material is I can say to these students, ‘Now, look at the Bible like a husband or a lover. You can actually adore somebody, but that doesn’t stop you from fighting.’ ”
Faith and fact, Levine argues, are not mutually exclusive. “I don’t believe that Adam and Eve is a literal story, but I can see where people would take cultural truths from it. That doesn’t make it untrue. We’re all picking or choosing anyway, and I don’t think we’re being dishonest by doing so.” That is not an approach conservatives find tenable. “The question is, ‘What is your structure for religious authority?’ ” says A. William Merrell, vice president for convention relations for the Southern Baptist Convention. “We believe the scriptures of the Old and New Testament are the word of God, that they are exhaled, breathed out by God, to use the New Testament phrase. They do not come to us as the well-conceived thoughts of good and honorable men, but as the expression of God.” For Hudnut-Beumler, of course, engaging in such arguments is part of his job description. “Many churches,” he says, “think the only way to oppose those forces is to pretend they’re not there, to shout louder in the face of modernity, ‘Moses wrote all five books of the Pentateuch!’ I think what we do is the difficult work of recovering authentic religion, the good and the bad, and helping make assessments after this process has begun.” At the Vanderbilt Divinity School, a giant part of the learning process is marrying the academic with the spiritual, Hudnut-Beumler says. “People disagree intensely on exactly how to read particular, significant portions of the biblical text, but nevertheless are trying to be in a relationship with God and to be disciples of Jesus of Nazareth. We get caricatured from time to time as very out there and liberal, but what I’m always amazed by when I go to the student common room is just what a wide spectrum of people—from very conservative traditional beliefs and churches to agnostic seekers—gather in that room and seek out something from our education.” Haynes, as a minister, sees reaction to the school in the world, but he has known it from inside as well. “You get a sense [that] people outside the school, even some alumni, discourage people from enrolling in the school,” he says. “There’s a sense it’s just a bunch of liberal politics disguised as religion. But as a counterpoint, one of the things I found is that nearly all of the divinity school faculty are practicing members of their own faith community, and they are able to express that in some way. Even the professors most committed to social justice issues are rooted in this faith tradition they are trying to espouse.”
God and man
When William F. Buckley Jr. wrote God and Man at Yale half a century ago, it was news that many of that institution’s faculty were in effect agnostic and treated religion with some belligerence or as a historical oddity. It is no longer news on many campuses. “I do not know how extensive such sentiment may be at Vanderbilt,” Mohler says. “Having sold themselves to the secularized academic culture, [such divinity schools] now find themselves unwanted by their adopted family. The divinity schools are stepchildren in most university settings.” Vanderbilt Divinity School has indeed been a stepchild over the years, although its perceived radicalism and its financial troubles have been the chief causes. Money is not so much a worry these days. It is safe to say, though, that the liberal predilection will continue. Forstman calls it “almost inconceivable” that the school would ever appoint a professor with views far to the right of center. What the school looks for, he says, are scholars “comfortable with criteria for knowledge and understanding that are characteristic of a university and who, consequently, do not engage in special pleading.”
In carrying the school forward ideologically, Hudnut-Beumler is faced with a number of practical considerations. He is being urged to use some of the school’s money to protect faculty ripe for raiding by other schools, and for aid packages to attract top students, who are often wooed successfully by the well-endowed programs of Duke, Emory, Princeton, and others. He plans to tie the school more strongly to Middle Tennessee religious communities, and to strengthen ties with the other professional schools at the university on issues ranging from ethics to genetics. He has spent much of the year simply listening to those around him. “He’s being quite cautious,” Levine says. “He’s listening. I think he’s very savvy. I think his ultimate goals are much like Joe’s were—progressive, interested in diversifying the faculty in terms of religious and cultural backgrounds, with a strong concern for cutting-edge academic excellence.” His bottom line is simple. “Vanderbilt Divinity School should remain the place where religious people of varying faiths, or no particular faith but with interest in the subject, come and meet one another and think about this thing we call religion,” he told The Tennessean’s Ray Waddle recently.
If there is a simple metaphor for the approach Vanderbilt has chosen, it lies in a story Forstman tells about his early days. He was an insurance adjuster in Atlanta serving as a fill-in preacher in a new church of just 19 members in Huntsville. A church executive gave the people a grant for a full-time pastor, and they asked Forstman to take the spot. “I was not ordained,” he says, “but they met together and said, ‘We’d like you to quit being an insurance adjuster and move to Huntsville.’ ‘That’s a very serious proposal,’ I said, ‘and I have to be honest with you. I’m not sure what I believe.’ There was absolute quiet, and then one of the people present said, ‘You know, we’re not sure what we believe either. Why don’t we work at this together?’ ”
