Response to “Students flounder at Divinity School”

Response to “Students flounder at Divinity School”

The recent article regarding Divinity School students’ disappointment in a graduate school’s role in complementing spiritual formation is somewhat misleading. I came to Duke Divinity School in 1955 from a small liberal arts college of 600 students where “everyone knew everyone.” Duke was academically daunting! It is true there was no “dorm life” for bull sessions in the evenings. Indeed we were usually in the library in the evenings doing parallel reading in “primary documents.” However, the Duke faculty, in their classroom lectures, academic excellence and social justice witness changed my life and the shape of my ministry. We were promised an “F” in ethics if, in the Fall of 1955 in downtown Durham, we Anglo students were seen drinking from a water fountain labeled “White.” Dr. Beach demanded that every white student of his must drink from “Jim Crow” water fountains with a “Colored” sign over it. Dr. William H. Brownlee convinced me that, in his words, “the Bible is an anvil that has worn out many hammers,” and was one of three faculty who mentored me with lots of patience and grace from a rigid Fundamentalism. Dr. McMurry Richey was, in Martin Luther’s terminology, a “little Christ,” whose graciousness as a “liberal” embarrassed me as a sophomoric “know-it-all.” Dr. James Price enlightened me in the history of New Testament theology in a way that took me into the scriptures as a source of “wine for the wilderness and bread for the journey” of my life and ministry.

Had it not been for the spiritual formation I received at Duke, my ministry would have been a “paper tiger.” I could not have been a “man for all seasons” as life happened.

Because of Duke I am now at age 76 and in the 57th year of “being a pastor/teacher/writer” teaching “History of Christianity” in an accredited seminary (Hood), serving as pastor of a church and writing a biweekly column for The United Methodist Reporter. My grandson is a student in the Divinity School. I know that the Divinity School has a collegial group called “Methodist House” because I will be speaking to them in January.

Bottom line: Duke Divinity School, like the schools of law, medicine, forestry and the natural and social sciences, is a graduate school—not a church and not an undergraduate small college. Its mission is to prepare its own graduates to be some congregation’s “theologian in residence.” Its method is primarily cognitive, not emotive. Relationships can still be formed with other students and with faculty, but those developmental interactive groups must be sought or created with intentionality and openness on the part of the “seeker.”

Also, I don’t think The Chronicle’s sampling was broad enough to justify the headline and the rather hortatory invective!

Donald Haynes, Divinity School ’58