The Ministers of Tomorrow

"Piety is no substitute for learning," says Executive Secretary John P. Clelland of Philadelphia's Westminster Theological Seminary. "We think that the Christian religion is true and capable of intellectual defense." Most modern Protestant congregations, heavily salted with college-educated people, would agree--and wonder whether the supply of future ministers is able enough and numerous enough. The answer, gathered by TIME correspondents reporting on the country's major Protestant seminaries, is that there is plenty of quality enrolled there, but not enough quantity.

"Students who are interested in the ministry are among the ablest, most perceptive and well-balanced" of the nation's young men, says Union Theological Seminary's President Henry P. Van Dusen. "The men who come here to study do not come to escape society," adds President Alvin N. Rogness of St. Paul's Lutheran Theological Seminary, "but to engage it with vital issues." In one recent year, a third of the students at Yale Divinity School were Phi Beta Kappas; of 39 students who entered Austin (Texas) Presbyterian Theological Seminary last year, 13 had IQs of 130 or more. At Vanderbilt, reports Dean William C. Finch, seminarians are "as a group equal to or better than" other graduate students.

Standing Still. But if they like the looks of the new crop, seminary officials are not happy about its size. Seminary enrollment has hovered steadily around 20,000 since 1956, and the number of vacant manses grows larger each year. "There is no cause for satisfaction," warns the scorekeeper of the profession, Dr. Charles Taylor of the American Association of Theological Schools. "We've got to do more than mark time."

The marginal denominational seminaries are the ones mostly marking time. The big ones are getting bigger. The interdenominational elite--Harvard, Yale, Chicago and Union--get more than they can take. At the University of Chicago Divinity School, reports Dean Jerald Brauer, applications are 90% higher than at the same time last year.

Talent Raids. Seminary officials feel that hundreds of potential ministers are sidetracked to secular fields that offer opportunities for service--the Peace Corps, for example. As a result, many divinity schools are now openly--and successfully --recruiting students of promise. Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena gets 200 inquiries a year in response to its evangelical ads in religious journals, has six part-time recruiters who tour campuses in search of potential ministers. The director of admissions at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary travels more than 5,000 miles a year visiting churches and colleges in the Southwest.

Seminaries also compete--fiercely--for "name" theologians; Austin's President David Stitt complains that "it's worse than the used-car business." Perhaps the most ambitious talent-raiding these days is done by Chicago, which recently has signed up Paul Tillich from Harvard. Langdon Gilkey from Vanderbilt. Charles Stinnette from Union, and Joseph Haroutunian from nearby McCormick Theological Seminary (although it lost Lutheran Church Historian Jaroslav Pelikan to Yale).

"Internship" Is In. Professional mobility is easier than it used to be, because most seminaries have reached a consensus on curriculum: plenty of theology and a minimum of how-to courses (although Chicago's famed Moody Bible Institute still offers a two-year "pre-aviation" course for flying missionaries). The trend now is to systematic theology, Biblical criticism, New and Old Testament languages--and to a study of the most vital ideas found in modern secular thought. Princeton's Dr. Hugh Kerr uses jazz recordings and slides of modern art in his classroom discussions of religious symbolism. "There is no sense in showing a seminarian how to hold a baby for baptism--he'll learn that later," says Dean John Bowen Coburn of Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Mass.

Students do get practice. "The big word now is internship," says President Stuart Anderson of the Pacific School of Religion. Cambridge Episcopal requires its students to spend a summer interning in hospitals and prisons. Lutheran seminarians from Concordia in St. Louis visit general or mental hospitals weekly for lectures on practical psychology. William B. Abernethy, 23, of Union Theological, is typical of those who found some of their preconceptions shattered; when he conducted a Bible study class with a group of East Harlem housewives, he says, marveling, "These women would come up with insights more profound and incisive than my own."

The attitude of theological students these days, says Chicago's Brauer, is "deeply skeptical, but searching." Harvard's Dr. J. Lawrence Burkholder finds that "almost all the students are some what apprehensive when it comes to their faith." Many find serious gaps in the theology that comes to them across the lectern. Says George Pickering, 25, a senior at Chicago: "Problems like disarmament, radiation--they so transcend the kind of 'shall I spit at my aunt?' kind of ethics that we're lost. Ethics have been boxed in over the ages into a kind of gentility."

Barth, Bultmann, Bonhoeffer. The familiar names of contemporary theology--Tillich, Barth. the two Niebuhrs--remain the intellectual staples of the seminaries, but some students feel that there is not enough communication between U.S. and European theologians, and Robert B. Shepard Jr., 27, a senior at Southern California School of Theology, complains of "a serious lag in American theological thought."

At the Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, the students and faculty are caught up in a long-running debate on the value of West Germany's Rudolf Bultmann and his "demythologizing" of the Gospels. Another thinker in vogue is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a theologian of Christian ethics who was killed by the Nazis in 1945. Recently at Cambridge Episcopal, five students asked the faculty to organize a special course on Bonhoeffer. Students also get absorbed in ecumenicism. Episcopal has a seminar comparing recent Anglican and Roman Catholic theology, and students from Union and the Catholic Maryknoll Fathers' seminary at Ossining, N.Y., have exchanged informal weekend visits to discuss the common bases of their faith.

"The seminarian today," says Union's James Livingston, 32, "is not motivated by the need for 'success.' " Yale's Claude R. Peters, 25, who graduated with a major in biology and a Phi Beta key, "prayerfully re-examined myself and came to the conviction that my own particular talents and abilities could serve God and man better in the ordained ministry." His brains and scientific background should make Peters one of the better intellectual defenders of Christianity in the years ahead.

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