Theology Today - Vol 45, No. 2 - July 1988 - THEOLOGICAL TABLE-TALK

The histories of American educational institutions, including seminaries, are rarely exciting, provocative, and influential works. These are two exceptions, both published in the same year, both written by superb American church historians, and each covering very different institutions: Union Theological Seminary in New York and Fuller Seminary.

Each seminary has known its share of controversy and debate, as well as prosperity and difficulty. With their roots in American Presbyterianism, both have had a stormy relationship with the denomination. In fact, the histories of Union and Fuller are institutional representations of the Old School, New School split in Presbyterianism, which began in the nineteenth century but continues even into the latter part of the twentieth, though with different and additional issues shaping the debate at various times.

Of the two works, Handy's is the more ambitious, covering the 150 years of Union's existence since 1836. It is also the more difficult as a work of historical interpretation, since Handy was deeply involved in Union from 1950 until his retirement in 1986. His personal investment in Union's past and future has not produced a work of institutional hagiography, though subsequent historians will undoubtedly dispute some of his judgments as too charitable or less than sufficiently critical.

Union's origins are striking as predictors of its later development and problems. Nominally begun as a mild objection to the Old School Presbyterianism of Princeton, it had in fact no firm theological identity. Rather, it was committed to providing theological training for students in the New York area. Utilitarian at its roots, Union stumbled and lurched along till the latter nineteenth century when it began to attract the first generation of distinguished faculty members that established its reputation-Briggs, McGiffert, and others.

It was during the Briggs era that Union ultimately separated from the Presbyterian Church over the issue of biblical criticism and the authority of the church over theological professors. For the entire twentieth century, Union has been a non-denominational seminary, though its

John M. Mulder is President and Professor of Historical Theology at Lousiville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. He is also a member of the Editorial Council of THEOLOGY TODAY. Here he comments on two recently published studies of prominent theological seminaries: Robert T. Handy, A History of Union Theological Seminary in New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987) and George Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987).

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influence in American Presbyterianism was and continues to be profound. Particularly under William Sloane Coffin and Henry P. Van Dusen, Union produced a significant number of the leaders of the northern Presbyterian church, and its influence was felt in southern Presbyterianism as well.

Union occupies a unique place in American theological education because of the depth of its impact through its graduate program with Columbia University. Far more than any other "free-standing seminary," Union trained scores of people who have occupied faculty positions at other theological institutions and at colleges and universities. It often claimed to be a "theological university," and in many ways it fulfilled that boast. Further, despite its lack of formal denominational identification, or perhaps because of it, Union attracted a large number of international students and has exerted enormous theological influence on churches around the globe. Finally, its setting in New York and adjacent to Harlem inevitably shaped the moral vision and commitment that has been characteristic of Union-not only in recent years but throughout its history. Race, class, war, urbanization, poverty, and most recently feminism divided the Union faculty as well as the Protestant churches, but at Union the issues were and continue to be addressed vigorously and vehemently.

The history of Union is also a case study of the fortunes of Protestant liberalism in the twentieth century. Buoyed by the generosity of the Rockefeller family and other wealthy Protestant liberals, Union prospered even after World War II. But as these wealthy benefactors died, their children lost interest in the liberal Protestant cause and the institutions that embodied it. When the crises of the 1960s hit Union, the responses by the Seminary-be they prophetic or foolish-alienated it from new constituencies as its traditional ties with Protestant liberals were disintegrating from within.

For the last twenty years, Union has been beseiged by recurring financial crises. The seeds of the crises began during the Van Dusen years when the Seminary expanded in both numbers and programs, and the support came primarily from foundations and/or annual gifts. Without adequate endowment of such programs, the absence of continued annual funding and the escalating inflation of the 1960s and 1970s were devastating. Union's famed music program was shut down and moved to Yale. The faculty is now a fraction of its former numerical strength. The cost of operating and maintaining an aging physical facility in New York saps funds from the instructional program.

Critics of Union have often maintained that the Seminary capitulated to the "student revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s, symbolically captured in the Columbia student revolt and in the Seminary's attempt to incorporate students into its plan of governance. Then-President John C. Bennett's painful recollections of that period make clear that the Seminary should, perhaps, have been more forceful in dealing with the students. However, Bennett also recognizes that there were many

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factors which left the Seminary without many options. While Handy does not emphasize the point, one is left with the conclusion that Union fell victim-far more than virtually any other seminary-to the shattering of Protestant and political. liberalism in the '60s. Perhaps because it embodied that tradition so fully and so well, its predicament is understandable and yet tragic.

Marsden's history of Fuller is a different book. After completing his superb Fundamentalism and American Culture, Marsden began looking for a way to study fundamentalism from the 1940s to the present. David Hubbard, the President of Fuller commissioned Marsden to write a history of Fuller Seminary, and Marsden has used Fuller as a prism for analyzing the post World War II fortunes of the fundamentalist movement in American Protestantism and American Presbyterianism. By Marsden's own admission, his account is more an analysis of Fuller and what became known as the "new evangelicalism" through the mid-1960s than an extensive treatment of Fuller's first forty years, but what a magnificent account it is.

If Union's original theological vision was inchoate and partially indebted to New School Presbyterianism, Fuller was the opposite. Convinced that Old School Presbyterianism had been expunged from Princeton Seminary following the fundamentalist controversy and the reorganization of Princeton, the founders of Fuller sought to provide a home for the kind of Calvinist orthodoxy they hoped to defend as the legitimate tradition of American Presbyterianism. They also began with incredibly bold dreams of establishing a conservative seminary that would become the leading institution of evangelical scholarship in the world, and the obsession with scholarship clearly separated Fuller's visionaries from the obscurantist and anti-intellectual impulses of American fundamentalism.

From the very beginning, Fuller found itself beseiged from two different directions. On the one hand, it was aggressive in its critique of theological trends in mainstream Protestantism, particularly in American Presbyterianism. On the other, it had to defend itself constantly from the critiques of the separatist wing of fundamentalism, represented particularly by Carl McIntire. What made its strategy even more difficult is that the debate was waged within Fuller's faculty and board as well as within its fundamentalist-evangelical constituency.

The tag for their position became "the new evangelicalism," represented in the forming of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942, the founding of Fuller in 1947, and the creation of Christianity Today in 1956. While critical of liberalism, neo-orthodoxy, and modernism, "the new evangelicalism" also attempted to put distance between itself and its fundamentalist heritage. In particular, it muted the calls for combativeness and separatism in favor of a more irenic discussion of theological issues and denominational loyalty. It rejected the dispensationalism

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of the fundamentalists, adopted critical methods of interpreting the Bible, and yet still clung to what became an increasingly ambiguous understanding of biblical inerrancy.

The result was a fissure in the fundamentalist movement. Prior to the 1940s, the terms evangelical and fundamentalist were often understood to be synonymous. Since the 1950s, the "new evangelicalism" has made it clear that it designates a different party within conservative Protestantism. This development has only gradually and partially been recognized within other wings of American Protestantism. Throughout Fuller's first two decades, mainstream Protestantism's views of fundamentalism and evangelicalism have been almost as threatened and as monolithic as American perceptions of the Soviet Union and China during the same period. The results for American Presbyterianism have been ironic. As the new evangelicals were reaching out for alliances within the Presbyterian church, they were perceived as nothing more than the old wolf of Machen in sheep's clothing. At the same time, the evangelical strength of American Presbyterianism continued to build, even as its leadership saw the decline of its own base of support and affirmation within the denomination.

Marsden's book is remarkable. Anyone who has ever been inside of an educational institution knows the virulence that accompanies debates by people of high intelligence and strong commitments. Fuller gave Marsden what appears to be complete access not only to all institutional documents but also to the personal papers of many of the principals. These were supplemented by interviews with those who are still living. In Marsden's talented narrative hands, what would seem to be a work of limited interest becomes one of the most engrossing and engaging accounts of twentieth-century American religious history published in recent years. Perhaps because he wrote as an outsider, Marsden is capable of telling the story with a power and verve that are not as evident in Handy's treatment.

While both of these volumes are tremendous achievements, both are relatively weak in analyzing the financial histories of the two seminaries. Neither Marsden nor Handy ignores the key role that finances played in influencing the vitality of these institutions, but both the sources of financial support and the administration of the budgets over time would tell volumes about how these seminaries have endured.

From Union to Fuller, from New York to Pasadena-in these two books lies an intriguing and complex chapter of American religious and social history, and it is a joy to see that chapter written so well by such talented historians.