ERNST RECALLS OTHER ERAS OF UPHEAVAL

Dr. Eldon Ernst, distinguished senior professor of church history and former academic dean of ABSW, arrived at the Graduate Theological Union as a young scholar right out of Yale in one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. history. It was 1967. The Vietnam War raged while the free speech movement engulfed Berkeley. What was it like to do theological education in that era of upheaval? Ernst and one of his former students, Daniel Pryfogle, a 2001 graduate of ABSW, “sat down” for this electronic interview.

You started teaching in a time of great turmoil. How did the crises of that era affect your teaching and shape your students?

The turmoil, of course, was most directly related to the controversial Vietnam war, but became intertwined with issues of social justice and liberation … Social traditions and institutions became questioned, challenged, rejected, and resisted in the so-called counter-cultural movement; and all of this brought defensive reactions, resulting in division and turmoil. Churches and seminaries were deeply involved on all sides.

The challenge to my teaching was to find “relevance” of my subject matter (church history) to the social phenomena of the times. Students rightly wanted to find the church historically on the side of social justice and reformist movements. This already was my area of specialization and interest, but the contemporary events and forces caused me to look even more for the creative social aspects of historic Christianity. …

I believe that many students found meaningful ministerial vocations amid this turmoil. To persevere as seminarians and then clergy, they had to know what they were about and why. It took an enormous amount of enlightened faith and courage to enter the Christian ministry in the late 1960s-early 1970s.

If the very structures and institutions they would serve were being questioned and criticized in this era, how did students generally make sense of a call to ministry?

Some students interpreted the ministry … as a reformist, some even revolutionary, movement. They envisaged a new reformation of the church and of society via the church as well as in alignment with other … movements for social justice change. Other students, of course, felt a more traditional call to ministry in the more traditional church trying to persevere during a challenging time of turmoil. Both kinds of response could see their ministry as part of the faithful remnant of committed Christians in a hostile environment of “military-industrial establishment.” I would say that it was not a time of unusual intimidation or even humility on the part of students facing the new age….

It sounds like this era of the late 1960s and early 1970s intensified the experience of studying theology, heightened the sense that something was at stake, and led to much creativity. Was this true in earlier times of turmoil?

… I was in high school and college during the late 1950s. The Cold War dominated everything. But the 1950s also were years of new prosperity and a longing for normalcy, along with the rising movement for civil rights. Theological education and church ministry was challenged by all of these forces. The new prosperity brought church growth, and seminary enrollments grew enormously. The recovery of popular church life meant a good job market for the ministry. Much seminary education responded creatively with curricula geared to dealing with growing church ministries, including specialized ministries such as Christian education, pastoral counseling, youth ministry, etc. … At the same time, social ethical issues related to the Cold War and civil rights caused seminarians to look outward to the social dimensions of ministry as the 1950s moved toward the 1960s. …

Now, looking backward even further to the depression years of the 1930s and moving forward to WWII and the aftermath of the 1940s, I think that seminary education was slowly reshaped by the great Neo-Orthodox and Social Realism theological movements associated with the Niebuhrs, Paul Tillich, Douglas Horton, Barth and Brunner and Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer, among others. This was both a return to Reformation theology as well as the early church … But it also was “liberal” in the sense of assuming a modern scientific worldview …

There were continuing tensions, of course, between liberal vs. conservative inheritances of the old modernist-fundamentalist battles – tensions that continue to this day in new expressions. But overall, in the midst of enormous social problems worldwide in scope, a spirit of exciting optimism permeated theological education. Church life was on the upswing, the denominations were growing and prospering, religion was seen as a powerful social force, and seminarians were eager to move into exciting ministries intellectually armed with profound theological foundations. …

In the 1960s all of that changed. Much came crashing down. The 1950s came to be seen as superficial, blinded to where the world really was going. Change was much more radical than people had envisaged. …

What lessons do you draw from these earlier periods about the task of theological education today?

… I believe that Christians should be knowledgeable about their historic traditions, not just their particular denomination but others as well. For Protestants, classical doctrines as well as the Reformation theologies should be learned in the seminary curriculum. Beyond this, there should be creative exploration of theology engaged with modern knowledge and ideas, including science and technology. … In other words, seminary education should focus on intellectual adventure within the basic historic Christian faith.

We all know that Christianity in the world has been and will be expressed in all cultures. Therefore, seminary education should help students learn how to discover and appreciate various cultures within their environment and beyond. …

Seminary education must be on the cutting edge of social justice issues and movements. This is a must if the churches are to be creative forces in the world. …

Finally, seminary education must teach preaching and worship, not as an isolated subject, but engaging the core curriculum. The message is primary, but the delivery and expression must be able to carry the message effectively. …

How all of this is carried out in the curriculum, including field engagements, is the constant point of discussion and creative planning. It should keep the seminary close to the congregations, and therefore it should include congregational participation in the planning.

Theological education is not easy or clear-cut; it is difficult and always challenging. I must say … that I know of no better place for this to happen than in Berkeley, at ABSW and within the GTU. This is not to say that the GTU has arrived, so to speak, but many of the religious traditions are engaged there institutionally, with great library resources and access to the great “secular” public university down the street. [Although] this means that theological education in Berkeley is more challenging and difficult than at most other places, ... what successes there may be there are vital to the future of the churches’ ministry “for such a time as this.”