Theology & Life

Before the 44th annual convocation of Yale's Divinity School, the Rev. Hugh Hartshorne. 68, professor of the psychology of religion, poured out some of the lessons he has learned in over 40 years as a teacher. "I am the senior member of our faculty," he said. "I can say what I like, and I shall."

Dr. Hartshorne was worried. "Many young ministers," he said, "are ill prepared for the tasks that they have actually to do." Part of the reason is that the churches themselves keep adding "odds and ends of new responsibilities until they resemble a modern drugstore or shopping center . . . No school could possibly prepare ministers for such a job in any three-year . . . course."

But do the schools make the best use of the three years of training that are available? Congregationalist Hartshorne thought not: "What is going on is neither theological nor education."

Too often, divinity schools teach theology without sufficiently relating it to contemporary life. While science "seeks a theoretical system which can be ... translated into practical procedures for the production of machines, goods and institutions, theology has tended to move toward the abstract and to be content with general postulates." Dr. Hartshorne applauded the introduction of such subjects as sociology and church administration into seminary classrooms, but "as things are now, these are . . . unrelated systems, each going its own way . . . We have no curriculum, but only subjects of study."

What is needed? Theologian Harts-horne's answer 1) for the theological seminaries, a broad "philosophy of education" now lacking; 2) after that, much closer ties between schools and churches. Seminarians must do their field work under the closer guidance of parish clergymen. "Somehow, the pace of the schools must match the pace of the churches . . . [Otherwise] theological education will not become professional education, and the churches will go on reproducing the outworn patterns of a bygone age."

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