Many think Dean Richard Hays’ replacement in 2016 should be anything else but Methodist. Some in the university troubled by our association with the United Methodist Church (UMC) worry that a continued living relationship with any Christian body is exclusive of those outside the Christian tradition.
Those of us inside Methodism have to struggle with these sorts of questions: What is Methodism for? Does God still need it? Sure, Methodists founded the university, but do we still bring anything essential to anyone else? Sociologists say the UMC may collapse in a few decades. Do we keep our wagon hitched to a dying horse? Everyone in the Duke family is committed to an inclusive university. Isn’t circumscribing our dean search to United Methodists dooming us to a white male candidate when the future of the church universal is going to look very different than that?
We Methodists should not wring our hands that this necessary discussion is happening. God will go on providing what God’s people need even if it’s not through Duke. Basketball tickets and prestige on our diploma are wonderful. But they’re not ultimately important. Those keen for less Methodism can also relax. Duke’s association with Methodism has apparently not hurt us all that badly over the last century. Methodism is declining anyway. Plucking it out and burning it up precisely as it is losing steam of its own accord looks fearful, not brave or inclusive.
The Divinity School is a strange animal. We are a major institution in the church of Jesus Christ worldwide. It is odd that the president of a now secular university will choose a leader so central to the church’s ministry. But it is appropriate to Duke Divinity School; we are also a school of the wider university and of the world. These three relationships together, like a three-fold cord, make Duke Divinity unique.
Why does this one author think President Brodhead should choose a United Methodist Dean for Duke Divinity School?
I’m not sure he should. I could see plenty of UM candidates who don’t care about the ecclesial vision that has guided the school. Methodism as a disintegrating mainline institution whose day is done is something everyone at Duke Divinity has decried for generations. Methodism as a revival movement within broader catholic Christianity is still a living tradition that should continue to guide our work. Plenty of personally non-UM candidates could lead the divinity school this way as previous Quaker, Anglican and a current Baptist Dean of Duke Chapel have done.
The danger is the pattern described by Jim Burtchaell in his book The Dying of the Light. Historic Christian colleges became secular under the leadership of an ordained minister for a president. That president provides religious blessing and verbiage for the school to strip itself of any remaining churchly vestment in an effort to be more open and inclusive. This is a disaster for diversity. Why did we ever think that making every school uniformly secular would enrich the ecology of offerings available to our children? To strip away every school’s religious heritage leaves us with few motivations for education other than students’ future potential for advancement in the market. Not a particularly kind idol, that one.
Those who want a less Methodist Duke and Divinity School have their points. No one should be forced to be part of a faith they don’t want. Duke as a university has not been meaningfully Methodist for some time. Faculty at the Divinity School who belong to other traditions have never been second class. And if guarding Methodism means keeping the church white, western and middle class, then to hell with it.
And yet, it is precisely United Methodism that has grown a divinity school in which faculty and students from all kinds of traditions thrive. Methodism’s breadth is what has made it a home for Catholic Christianity since Dean Robert Cushman discovered it at Vatican II. Methodism’s attention to social sins is what has made it a home for an office of black church studies and a required course in the black church years before “diversity” became the only incontrovertible mantra in higher education. Methodism’s revivalist heritage makes it a home for evangelical students and faculty from all kinds of traditions including non-Anglo ones. Methodism, at its best, produces people of a big tent and hearts on fire. We might think twice before striking the former and dousing the latter.
Methodism has never pretended to be the only church or even an essential one. Our goal has been to “spread scriptural holiness throughout the land.” If the Church of England had renewed its ancient biblical and traditional roots, Methodism’s work would have been over. And all churches are temporary until Christ inaugurates his kingdom and the world is renewed as God intends to do one day.
But that time is not yet.
Jason Byassee (M.Div. ’99 & Ph.D. ’05) is pastor of Boone United Methodist Church. He transitions this summer to be the first Butler Chair in Homiletics and Biblical Hermeneutics at Vancouver School of Theology.
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