Piety and Profession: American Protestant Theological Education, 1870–1970 (review)

With Piety and Profession, Glenn Miller provides the long-awaited sequel to Piety and Intellect: The Aims and Purposes of Antebellum Theological Education (Atlanta, 1990). In his first volume Miller demonstrated how dogmatic theology built its home in a new institution, the American Protestant graduate theological seminary, and from this fortress established its hegemony in response to the intellectual and social challenges of the day. In Piety and Profession, Miller narrates how theological education between 1870 and 1970 is the place to observe the breakdown of confessional theology’s unifying power with the rising influence of other “points of reference,” beginning with biblical criticism. By the 1870s seminary professors could not dodge the question: is biblical supernaturalism “a necessary part of faith?”.

During the antebellum period, theological education aimed to prepare “the learned” minister for service in well-defined denominational traditions. Between 1870 and 1970 Protestant ministers were equipped increasingly as religious professionals to guide congregations through uncertainty toward an unknown future. A “characteristic way of thinking about theological education and its practices” (p. xxiii) emerged, shaped especially by the influence of the research university, the new social sciences, industrial capitalism, the modern city and suburbs, continental and global networks of communication, and two catastrophic world wars. The accreditation movement through the American Association of Theological Schools came to define graduate theological schools and advanced a structural consensus. At the same time, the seminary displayed its sensitivity to changes in the intellectual landscape.

In section after section Piety and Profession offers illustrative vignettes and deft summaries of developments to characterize one segment or another of Protestant theological schooling. Especially rich is his account of how by the 1970s Fuller, Gordon-Conwell, Trinity Evangelical, and Dallas seminaries had engaged in “a largely self-conscious theological layering” (p. 647) with each other as distinctive competitors and leaders within the Evangelical movement. His masterful account of the 1960s and the unraveling of denominationalism in American culture is more nuanced than most accounts. His description of the “divorce” between religious studies and theological studies details the costs for both as religious studies set the standards for the professoriate in theological education.

Miller argues that by 1970, an era was passing. Middle-class loyalty to mainline Protestantism had declined, and denominations were losing members. At the same time, fundamentalism and evangelicalism were emerging into the mainstream. A time of violent warfare within denominations was underway, ending an era of “generous orthodoxy” (p. xvii). Moreover, postmodernism’s acknowledgment of multiple perspectives, methods, and subject matters was leeching out agreement on the content of theological education. Miller’s account underscores why the accreditation movement with its emphasis on the structure of degrees created a safe place for cooperation among denominational warriors and those above the fray while continuing to attract Evangelical and Roman Catholic theological schools.

Miller is open about the formative influences of Ernst Troeltsch and H. Richard Niebuhr on his own thought and describes himself as an Evangelical Baptist with a bias toward those movements stressing the need for clear, critical thought about “both the intellectual and practical implications of Protestant faith” (p. xviii). For historians of American Catholicism, Miller has become a necessary conversation partner. His description of how in Protestant theological education the self replaced the Church in the task of theological integration and his delineation of seminaries’ sensitivity to intellectual change invites revisiting the history of Catholic seminary education. Joseph White provides a starting point with his The Diocesan Seminary in the United States: A History from the 1780s to the Present (Notre Dame, 1989).