Open letter to my classmates

In lieu of chapel last week, the seminary community participated in a diversity workshop. One of the activities was reacting to the results of an online survey the consultant asked us to take in advance. In general, the community gives itself above average marks for acceptance of diversity, but not so if you are one of three groups: theological conservatives, people of color, and gays and lesbians (if I recall correctly).

My question is about the first group's experience. What gives? Are professors belittling conservative students in class? Are people who express conservative opinions in class subject to social ostracism out of class? Are grades affected?

I'm curious because my experience at Union is far less polarizing than my experience at Columbia 20 years ago, and I'm not sure why. Both schools seem equally liberal to me, and I wonder if it has more to do with the degree program than the school. Acquiring an M.Div., unlike a Ph.D., is as much about formation as it is information; perhaps the exposure to new ideas that is part and parcel of both programs is more threatening at the M.Div. level than it is at the Ph.D. level because it's more personal.

Or maybe it's because I'm older and a bit more settled in my theological and personal identity, and I can read and appreciate thinkers with whom I disagree without being threatened by them. If I had read Gordon Kaufman's In Face of Mystery when it was published in 1993, that for me would have been a profoundly disturbing experience, but I really enjoyed reading the book last spring. I appreciated Kaufman's irenic tone; I appreciated the way that his method and the questions that preoccupy him reveal blind spots in my own theology, and I appreciated the book for helping me to clarify my own theology.I haven't given up on a personal God, but I was captivated by Kaufman's case for an impersonal Ultimate.

On the other hand, had all 1,600 pages of Eckard Schnabel's Early Christian Mission been available to me as an M.Div. student, I would have been annoyed at his contempt for redaction and form criticism as well as his unapologetic exclusivism, but as I plowed through the second volume today I was mainly gobsmacked by the scope of the thing. His conservative assessment of New Testament mission is thoroughly in conversation with every nook and cranny of New Testament and classical scholarship--liberal, moderate, conservative, and of all confessions or none. Where does the man find time to eat and sleep?

My education isn't all sweetness and light. My research focus is late antiquity, when monasticism and asceticism really took hold. In the stuff I read, no one's debating the ordination of homosexuals. They're debating whether or not heterosexual, procreative, married sex is something the Church should tolerate, or renounce altogether.

I'm not sure if this is conservative, even reactionary, or if it's beyond liberal, even anarchistic--living naked in the Syrian desert on a loaf of bread a day and decrying procreation because it feeds the death machine could go either way, I suppose--but anyway, in my study carrel, where my "class" at times consists of me, Jerome, and the Desert Fathers, I too feel a bit defensive. I even find myself saying (to no one in particular), "Well, I don't care what you think, Mister Holier-Than-Thou Egyptian Monk; I like having sex with my wife and I'm going to keep on having it!" (With her permission, of course).

But this irritation I experience with the communion of saints is nonetheless a good thing. Like reading Kaufman, it forces me to clarify my own understanding (in this case, of sexuality). And like reading Schnabel, it often elicits a low whistle from me in the face of their herculean efforts.

The point of all this is, Are your opinions really not valued, or is the discomfort you're experiencing a natural part of the growth and change that is a hallmark of a liberal arts education? Hopefully, no one leaves higher education the same as he or she enters it. And I don't know of any experience of growth or change that didn't demand a pound of flesh.

This is not a rhetorical question. I genuinely don't know what your experience is since I'm not in class with you. Please feel free to comment either here or on Facebook. Or email me.

Comments

[Paula Skreslet]

Are conservative students being challenged to grow and change, while liberal students are being confirmed in their preexisting ideas? That wouldn't be much of an educational experience for the latter. We owe it to our students to make sure that none of them is left marinating in complacency.

I will tell you what I thought about that diversity exercise (though you didn't ask me!). I found it to be drenched in 21st century American cultural obsessions. Well intentioned, but with a case of tunnel vision. These ideas are to us what Reformed neo-orthodoxy was in the 1920s-30s, and maybe what asceticism was to the early Egyptian eremites. It's the thing that we are bound and determined to be RIGHT about! (As per coffee mug, above.)

I hope students will reply to your questions. Not just cranky librarians.