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A9B The Great Commission and Its Filling 1934–1936 Jesus came up and spoke to them. He said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, make disciples of all the nations; baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to observe all the commands that I gave you. And know that I am with you always; yes, to the end of time.”1 In this verse the Savior in whom Bennie Mays believed charged his followers with the duty to convert and thus bring nonbelievers to him. The passage is known among preachers and divinity students as “the great commission.” To serve the commission as he understood it, Mays needed to complete his gradu ate work and begin ministry to students at a black college. To finish the graduate student phase of his apprenticeship and begin the commission in earnest, there was a third long stay Chicago during 1934 and 1935. This time Sadie Mays went along, living and working there as well. This third mission accomplished the goal, the writing and the defending of his dissertation, and with that accomplishment came the outward and visible sign, the Ph.D., a degree earned by no more than a score of African Americans in the year 1935.2 Writing one’s dissertation was the great challenge for scholars at Chicago, and the university was notorious for its demands on Ph.D. candidates in this phase of its program. If accomplished, the University of Chicago dissertation allowed a man to announce himself as a scholar. The University of Chicago scholar could likely publish a monograph based on his dissertation. Yet many never finished this task, and many had to step away from the contest and watch others take the prize. That an African American would fail to write a dissertation was fully 1934–1936 159 expected by friend and foe of the race, and Bennie Mays—the New Negro, the Race Man—thus had the broadest possible social goals in mind when he went back to the university. In his third Chicago residency, Bennie Mays for good reasons focused on his dissertation, aiming sure to do research and to write and to finish the task begun ten seasons ago and postponed twice. In so writing, he brought together different, even conflicting, parts of his being, “strands of his life,” as he phrased it.3 His classically defined vocation, calling, or mission for his entire being was the ministry; and his ordination for this ministry, in his mind, was incomplete until he had made his statement in his dissertation, “The Development of the Idea of God in Contemporary Negro Literature.” There was also the “strand,” or aspect of his being that was the University of Chicago social scientist, the investigator doing his research and rooting out his facts without sentimentality , making his diagnosis by discovering truth, however daunting that truth. Above all there was the strand of the New Negro, the one who would propound the question of the greatness of his people. He knew the essence of that greatness was in the relationship to God, even and especially as some African Americans of the era were questioning this relationship and looking for other gods. There were even some prominent black leaders, the most important being W. E. B. Du Bois, who were questioning the idea of a divinity at all. Mays always insisted that there was a God and only one God and that the different religions were expressing different ideas about facets of the same God and not actually describing different gods. This third strand, the New Negro, was Bennie Mays’s lifeblood, but for him it must be a New Negro who remained spiritual in relationship with the idea of God. All these strands are throughout Bennie Mays’s whole life, but in his dissertation the three strands are pulled together most self-consciously—as the Chicago theologians would say, “with intentionality,” by which the Chicago scholar intended to describe a focused purpose whose driving intention came from God’s will and not from man’s will. Ever the historicist of Dr. Case’s seminars, Bennie Mays in this scholarship was also the ardent student of two University of Chicago men dominant in this new era, Edwin Ewart Aubrey and Henry Nelson Wieman.4 Shirley Case had demonstrated unforgettably that all aspects of religion, especially the Bible, happen in time and...

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