Light and Truth: The Seminary and the University

As some of you know, this farewell has been going on since last October, during Convocation. At that beginning of the end, a number of students made very kind, thoughtful, and in some cases possibly even true remarks, but one in particular has stuck with me as I thought about this evening and what it represented.

Robbie Pennoyer '15 said this: "One question persisted through my time at Yale and beyond: Why did Andrew and Felicity come to Berkeley?" Then, after an amusing complimentary anecdote about one of my early morning sermons, he added "He deserved a larger congregation than our set of under-caffeinated grad students."

Of course I appreciated the sentiment, but felt myself inwardly answering the question at that very moment. No, I did not deserve, or just as importantly, did not want any other congregation.

So to Robbie in absentia, here now is the answer to the first question: we came to Berkeley because we believed that the possibility of leading the work of Anglican theological education in the context of one of the world's great universities was the most significant thing that we could be called to do. And I still believe that's true.

This belief that the church and the university together constitute a uniquely important thing for both entities has been a defining part of my whole professional and ministerial life. My time as a seminary student at Trinity College in Melbourne, of which both Bishop Andrew St John who has spoken earlier this evening and I are alumni, instilled this notion into me very deeply. 

The twelve years have been somewhat dramatic ones for theological education anywhere, and not least in the Episcopal Church. During my first year, two of the other seminaries that we could get to on Amtrak in less than a couple of hours found themselves in crisis and open conflict. A friend who is an alumnus called me and congratulated me on having become, even with such a brief tenure, the most popular seminary dean in the Northeast. The change after twelve years is striking: I am now the only seminary dean in the Northeast. 

Last weekend, Ryan Burge, who provides some of the most interesting data about religion in North America at the moment, shared figures about the decline of the mainline churches and of their seminaries. The short version was that the membership of the Episcopal Church had dropped by a third since 2003, but the number of seminarians had dropped by 50% in the same period. It's worth noting that the number of students at Berkeley Divinity School from year to year has remained basically the same through that period and hence has risen proportionately to the whole Episcopal seminarian population by a considerable figure. I will avoid the temptation to say it’s 600% (let the reader understand)! We did much more than just stand still or hold our ground here, of course, but Berkeley should be seen now as both quantitatively as well as qualitatively significant in the ecosystem of theological education for the Episcopal Church.

And yes, I did say "the church and the university together constitute a uniquely important thing for both entities." I've spoken a lot in the last 12 years about the church and what it is and where it's going. What though of the university?

If it seems strange or presumptuous that I would ask such a question from over on Saint Ronan Street, let me urge those of us who are members of this University, or of any other, to remember that the university is not someone else; it is not the administration or one division thereof, however storied or venerable. Historian George Pierson called Yale in particular "a company of scholars, a society of friends." This complements John Henry Newman's more general definition: "the assemblage of strangers from all parts in one spot." The university is the whole, not its leadership or governance; it is a historic community of the living and the departed, and it is us, even this little group celebrating in East Rock tonight.

Berkeley Divinity School’s dependence on this reality is manifest. We are a small part of the whole, and maybe that is why Robbie and a few others asked the first question. For those who know not just physics but a little metaphysics however, the whole is sometimes just as manifest in one part as in another, regardless of size. Berkeley Divinity School is the university too.

The benefit to Berkeley of being part of that greater whole, embodied first in Yale Divinity School, hardly needs any exposition. Berkeley students have the unique experience of learning with a highly capable group of ecumenical peers as well as secular colleagues and others, in and from what is genuinely one of the world's great faculties of divinity. And those of you such as trustees who have shared in responsibility for governance, finance, and those other logistical parts of this exercise for Berkeley know how fundamental this relationship is to our practical sustainability.

It might seem, however, bizarre or at least presumptuous to say that Berkeley had significance for Yale University. I've already suggested, however, that the university is the whole of this company of scholars, and not simply some central part of it. That is, it is not ridiculous for any sub-community within this great network, this assemblage of strangers in one spot, to claim its own part in that whole and its own contribution to that whole.

Some of you will be aware of an apparent shift in Yale's mission statement last week in response to an important faculty report a couple of weeks earlier. At least on the surface of it, the new mission statement backs away from claims in the previous version to “improve the world” and “to educate leaders”; the faculty committee had claimed these aims constituted a departure "from its traditional emphasis on the creation and dissemination of knowledge."

Now, some of us know that mission statements come and go, and do not actually define that whole reality of the University, or even its mission. Sometimes, just as in the Church, leadership and renewal in mission come from below and from smaller entities, not just from the center or the top.

Yale, of course, was founded, like Harvard, like Oxford, like Cambridge, as what we would call a seminary, or at least as a center for theological education. And remarkably, each of these four still has some form of faculty or school of divinity. The fact that we at YDS now overlook the University's central campus at some distance from Prospect Hill, or down on Saint Ronan Street, may seem to some to mean the questions of faith that drove the founders to create the institution have been marginalized.

If you've heard my theory of what constitutes the university, then it will perhaps seem less odd for me to deny this. We at Berkeley Divinity School, with the rest of the Yale Divinity School community, must continue to regard ourselves as at the heart of the university, and the mission of the university not just as the "creation and dissemination of knowledge," nor even as "improving the world" and "forming leaders," although we will make our contributions to these. 

The questions of divinity are neither simply of professional training for clergy, nor are they a glance towards an oddly circumscribed set of issues now designated "spiritual." The question of divinity is the question of meaning and purpose, of life and death, and truth and justice. In a society that seems to have lost its way, we cannot afford to underestimate the vocation of the Divinity School. 

We are not here just because the University provides us with things that are helpful for the Church and its preparation of ministers. We are here because the Church still has things which are necessary for the University. Some of us will continue to regard Yale's mission as more enduringly represented in its coat of arms, where on an open book the Hebrew words Urim v' Thummim appear, as also (by tradition at least) in the very center of the Torah, and which we often translate as "lights and truths"; hence the University's motto "Lux et Veritas." And we for whom divinity is not marginal but central know that to pursue lux et veritas, light and truth, is to work in service of the one who is the light of the world and the way, the truth, and the life.  

So that, Robbie and friends, is why we came, and why we are staying for a while longer. Thank you all for making that possible.