Theology and Ethics Then,Now,and In-Between at Union Seminary and Elsewhere

Introduction

This essay tries to make two main points. First, the historic interconnections between Union Seminary, southern Presbyterianism, slavery, the “new South,” civil rights, and new pluralisms in church and American culture indicate it would be unwise to treat theology apart from ethics or treat either as the business of a single academic department. Second, in a distinctive and also instructive fashion, the story of theology and ethics at Union reflects the wider story of theology and ethics in American Protestantism. No single essay can furnish an exhaustive account of these things. Accordingly, I have chosen to outline selected developments then (in 1812), now (in 2012), and in-between.

Then

Friedrich Schleiermacher published his Brief Outline of the Study of Theology, an encyclopedic account of the discipline as he taught it at the newly minted University of Berlin, in 1811. ¹ The next year, the Synod of Virginia voted to establish a seminary, and Dr. Moses Hoge, president of Hampden-Sydney College, was appointed Professor of Theology. ² The two events were more than miles apart. The German university joined teaching and research, and it boasted 52 lecturers in the fields of law, medicine, theology, and philosophy. ³ Schleiermacher, its principal theologian, therefore outlined an approach to his field that combined ecclesial with scientific interests, and paid particular attention to how theology relates to other disciplines. The fledgling seminary retained a single professor who doubled as college president and believed the Bible to be inerrantly inspired. ⁴

The Seminary’s founding and comparatively sparse structure disclosed a good deal about the church it served. Presbyterians in America had required learned ministers from the very first, and, early on, most were graduates of English and Scottish universities. Some who moved to the South from Pennsylvania with Scotch-Irish settlers were educated at William Tennant’s Log College. ⁵ After 1746, southern pastors sometimes attended the College of New Jersey at Princeton. In 1774, Hanover Presbytery of Virginia gave its support to Augusta Academy near Staunton, which later became Washington College in Lexington, and it also helped to establish a school south of the Blue Ridge, which opened on the first day of 1776 as Hampden-Sydney College. By that time, however, the Presbyterian Church required that after obtaining a liberal education, candidates for ministry (much like physicians and lawyers) receive additional professional training from established practitioners. Later, the field education requirement was increased to two years, and candidates were directed to study with ministers designated by presbyteries as “professors of theology.” It was this modified field system that stood to be replaced when a seminary was opened at the College of New Jersey under the auspices of the General Assembly in 1812. That same year, the Synod of Virginia established the seminary at Hampden-Sidney because it judged that the school at Princeton would not serve the needs of southern Presbyterians.

When Dr. Hoge died in 1820, the Synod was ready to support Princeton but for the energetic objections of a group led by John Holt Rice, the organizer of First Presbyterian Church, Richmond, Virginia, who believed that the “experiment” at Hampden-Sydney should continue. Rice himself was persuaded to oversee and develop the school three years later. During his tenure, it acquired a library, a classroom building with a chapel and dorms, two faculty residences, three instructors, and almost 40 students. Eventually, the Synod of North Carolina also supported the school rather than educate candidates in the older field system.

Rice was a conservative Calvinist. He regarded theology as the study of “revealed truth,” and claimed, “our seminary shall be based on the Bible; and we will know no isms but Bibleism.” He was, however, also an astute churchman who labored at a time when a Plan of Union allowed Presbyterians and Congregationalists to share ministers. Accordingly, he maintained that denominations and parties could differ on “circumstantials,” but that seminarians should be taught the “essentials,” “fundamental truths,” or “great . . . doctrines of the gospel” on which Protestants generally agree, such as the fall, Christ’s divinity, the atonement, regeneration and sanctification by the Spirit, the necessity of holy living, and a future judgment. This enabled him to claim that his seminary was not beholden to any single denomination and also to speak against Unitarianism, the principal heresy that threatened Congregational churches in New England. Rice believed, too, that antiquated textbooks jeopardized the vitality of “sound Presbyterian doctrine” because they failed to address current intellectual and cultural challenges. He wanted Presbyterians scholars “to form better Lexicons, better Commentaries, better systems, and better Ecclesiastical Histories.” ⁶

By the time George Addison Baxter, president of Washington College, succeeded Rice in 1832, the ecclesial environment had changed. Liberal-leaning Congregationalists in New England continued to modify the orthodoxy of the Westminster Standards, and a surge in revivals and experiential dimensions of religion, especially in the Midwest and the North, energized “New School” Presbyterians. Baxter proved a staunch advocate of “Old School” orthodoxy, and, in 1837, when the General Assembly abrogated the Plan of Union, he proposed a strategy for excising New Schoolers from the Presbyterian Church. Later commentators therefore portrayed Baxter as theologically less flexible than Rice. Of course, once controversy among Presbyterians had intensified and most of the seminary’s supporters had aligned themselves with the more rationalist “Old School” theology, Rice’s conservative Calvinism might have rendered him less flexible too. In any case, within a year of the fateful General Assembly, two northern New School professors resigned from the Seminary under pressure, and Baxter, the lone remaining professor, helped to secure orthodox replacements from Virginia and North Carolina. In one fell swoop, the Seminary became more firmly regional and its theology more firmly Westminster Calvinist. Addressing the sesquicentennial celebration of the Seminary, Professor Frank Bell Lewis, said it had become “a largely sectional and rather provincial institution.” ⁷

Again, a comparison with Schleiermacher, who published a revised and expanded edition of his Brief Outline in 1831 to coincide with the appearance of his theological system, seems apt. The German liberal theologian tried to identify “the essence of Christianity” through a combination of philosophical and historical studies. When he did so, he found not a set of doctrinal propositions, but a Christ-determined feeling of absolute dependence, a deep-seated piety in which Baxter’s New School opponents might have recognized the experiential core of religion that, in America, had been explored earlier by Jonathan Edwards and others.

In-Between (1)

The sectional cast of Union Seminary and its ecclesial constituency was intensified by subsequent debates over slavery and the rise of abolitionist sentiments among Presbyterians in the North. On December 4, 1861 commissioners representing 47 southern presbyteries voted to organize a new church. ⁸ James Henley Thornwell, Professor of Theology at Columbia Theological Seminary, argued in his address to the assembly that the Scriptures do not condemn slavery and that no injustice is done to the slave when his place in God’s providential scheme is proportionate to his capacity and culture. ⁹ Union was now a seminary of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America (later the Presbyterian Church in the United States).

In this context, the appointment of Robert Lewis Dabney in 1853 (initially in history and polity) proved decisive for theology and ethics at the school. A graduate of Hampden-Sydney College, Union Seminary, and the University of Virginia, Dabney was in many respects the up-to-date and indigenous Calvinist scholar for whom Rice had hoped. He was also the orthodox theologian for whom Baxter had cleared the way.

Dabney read widely. For example, he commented that the theological literature produced by German universities was overly specialized, spiritually detached, excessively speculative in its historical criticism, submissive to philosophy, and too prone to encourage theologians to “do new work.” ¹⁰ This last injunction, he said, “is almost a direct incentive to heretical innovation.” Thus, “a Feuerbach, following Hegel, as he supposes, reduces God to the mere objectified reflex of his own consciousness. A pious and eloquent Schleiermacher imbues his whole system with idealistic pantheism.” ¹¹ Dabney’s own theology led him to adopt a critical attitude toward revivals. ¹² Even so, he criticized Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology, a work he generally admired, for conceptions of sin, faith, and regeneration that focus too much on blinded understanding and intellectual illumination, and so neglect the will as well as the turning of the heart by the supernatural work of the Spirit. ¹³

Dabney’s students published his Syllabus and Notes for the Course of Systematic and Polemic Theology in Union Theological Seminary, Virginia, for use in his class. Each of its 74 lectures begins with references to texts (especially Turretin’s Elentic Theology ¹⁴ ), and then proceeds to “instructions and explanations of the Professor.” ¹⁵ The entire course basically follows the order of the Westminster Confession, except that the first twelve lectures treat natural theology (including teleological and design arguments for God) as well as ethical theories and ideas of human agency, reason, and responsibility. By contrast, Hodge began his systematic with an “Introduction” that explores the speculative method in theology (Deists, philosophically reductive medieval schoolmen, and transcendentalists) as well as the mystical method in theology that emphasizes religious consciousness (largely Schleiermacher). Then it introduces Hodge’s own inductive approach, which he took to be similar to the method that governs science. The Bible, he claimed, furnishes the facts for theology just as nature furnishes the facts for natural science. ¹⁶

Dabney, who (like Hodge) also maintained that Scripture is inspired and infallible, did not understand revealed theology very differently. The Southern churchman asserted that reason is neither the measure nor the ground of the beliefs of revealed theology. But, while “rationalism is the wolf of infidelity under the sheep’s clothing of faith,” nevertheless, “the Scriptures always address us as rational creatures.” ¹⁷ Genuine biblical interpretation therefore employs reasoning to interpret and illustrate the Scriptures, but it is always “independent of all other supposed rival sciences.” ¹⁸

Dabney proved a modern and distinctly American scholastic. He engaged thinkers such as John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, William Paley, and Thomas Hobbes. He also discussed Darwin and others, arguing that evolution is a revival of materialism that (unsuccessfully) tries to replace divine purpose and design with mere mechanism, and human moral sensibility with an ill-advised celebration of the fittest. But were the theory conceded, Dabney said, one must still ask, “Who devised the susceptibility to evolve?” ¹⁹ To his lecture on creation, Dabney appended a discussion of “technical geology,” saying that “this subject must concern theologians” because it amounts to a cosmogony or doctrine of creation. He argued that the greater age of the Earth supposed by many geologists is far from proved, arguments on the basis of fossil remains are flawed, and traits of naturalness in first things cannot disprove a supernatural origin. ²⁰ On religious liberty, Dabney explicitly departed from Augustine in order to reject the persecution of religious sects, as well as from Protestant Reformers in order to uphold the separation of church ands state. ²¹ Indeed, he rejected coercion as a means to faith, insisting, “Roger Williams of Rhode Island deserves the credit of being the first Ruler in the world, who granted absolute freedom to all sects, having the power to do otherwise.” ²² Nevertheless, it was Dabney’s encounter with the fundamental moral and political challenge of his society, as well as his experience of the Civil War and its aftermath, that molded his mature demeanor as an ethicist and a churchman. ²³

Dabney published A Defence of Virginia: And Through Her of the South in 1867, an extended justification of slavery and a bitter diatribe against abolitionism and the North. He began by claiming that only “a retributive Providence” could “affect the perverted judgments of . . . the anti-slavery party which now rules the hour.” ²⁴ He ended by asserting that the South would be avenged, and that “we will meet” the wrongdoers with our defense again, “when it will be heard in the day of their calamity, in the pages of impartial history, and in the Day of Judgment.” ²⁵ His chief argument was that “the relation of master and slave” is, in itself, morally innocent, and he asserted that, as practiced in Virginia, the institution of slavery was honorable, righteous, and attended by positive consequences. ²⁶ In a series of “expositions,” he tried to demonstrate and commend these points on biblical, philosophical, legal, and economic grounds. ²⁷

Dabney noted that, in the Old Testament, slavery is lawful and right if the appropriate protections and responsibilities are maintained. He observed further that Abraham is a slaveholder, God remands Hagar to slavery, and the fourth and tenth commandments refer to slaves as property. ²⁸ In the New Testament, while slaves are often mentioned, slavery is not condemned. Christ applauds a slaveholder (the Centurion at Capernaum) whose slave he heals, the apostles distinguish slavery from its abuses, and slaveholders are admitted to church membership. ²⁹ Against Francis Wayland, the abolitionist president of Brown University, Dabney claimed that, as a specification of fairness, the Golden Rule is as compatible with the restraint of the personal liberties of slaves by their masters, as it is with the restraint of wayward children by their parents and the punishment of murderers by appropriate authorities. ³⁰

A recurrent polemic was that domestic slavery in the South was both practically and morally preferable to the industrial order that had taken hold elsewhere. Dabney argued that under historical conditions a moneyed ruling class must finally have power over others. Given this fact, he said, domestic slavery is the best relation possible between capital and labor because, unlike “the anti-slavery manufacturer of Lowell or Manchester” who has little or no interest in the welfare of his workers, the southern master has an interest in the well being of his property and regards his slaves as parts of his family. ³¹ Moreover, the capital amassed by industrialists through the toil of free laborers is used to buy luxuries. This draws away laborers from the production of necessities in favor of “superfluities,” and the consequent underproduction of food and clothing compounds the misery of the lowest classes who now are unable to afford them. ³² Against Adam Smith and others who “knew nothing of slavery themselves,” Dabney also maintained that slave labor is highly productive. ³³

Dabney maintained that, while slavery or bondage is not ideal, it is needed to remedy “the ignorance and vice in the labouring classes.” That is, “the subjection of one part of society to another” is needed for the welfare of the whole due to the lack of virtue and self-command in a particular class or group. ³⁴ He radicalized this claim with respect to Africans who “were what God’s word declares human depravity to be under the degrading effects of paganism” in Romans 1. Indeed, Dabney asserted, most slaves brought to America were “either the Pariahs” of the larger (and barbarous) tribes, or else “the feeble fragments of bush tribes” who were “living but one remove from the apes around them.” The enslavement of these people, he continued, was not only needed for the welfare of the wider society, but also to benefit the slaves themselves. “Now cannot common sense see the moral advantage to such a people, of subjection to the will of a race elevated above them, in morals and intelligence, to an almost measureless degree?” ³⁵

Dabney’s arguments did not alienate him from his fellow southern Presbyterians, who elected him moderator of the southern church in 1870, and they were of a piece with his wider vision in social ethics. In his Defence, Dabney objected to ideas of “natural liberty and equality” because he believed they involved “the denial of all authority.” ³⁶ Actual governments, he maintained, always involve obligatory hierarchies into which persons are born and over which they have no power, because persons “differ indefinitely in powers, knowledge, virtue, and natural relations to each other.” ³⁷ Thus, “equity . . . demands a varied distribution of social privilege,” and “ the civil liberties of all classes in the same society ought not to be the same.” Different civic rights are therefore properly given to males and females, adults and children, masters and slaves. Laws rightly “give husbands more power over the persons and property of wives, than to wives over husbands,” and also appropriately “exclude women . . . from suffrage, office, and the full franchises of men.” ³⁸

Writing in the Southern Presbyterian Review for October, 1879, Dabney complained again that, if it applies “to ignorant negroes,” the now-dominant theory of human rights must also apply to “intelligent ladies.” ³⁹ The “movement for ‘women’s rights,’ and women’s preaching,” he said, is anti-scriptural, infidel, and rationalistic. Natural differences in strength, talent, virtue, and ability qualify people for “different sets of rights and franchises.” ⁴⁰ Thus, “woman is not designed by God” to be “entitled to all the franchises in society to which the male is entitled.” Indeed, “since the rival interests and desires of two equal wills are inconsistent with domestic union, government, and peace,” the women’s movement “must result in the abolition of all permanent marriage ties,” a loss of mutual affection between the sexes, and a disastrous circumstance for children. ⁴¹ Another essay applied similar ideas to relations between capital and labor in the industrial North. Here again, Dabney argued, strife between rival interests of equal parties would degenerate into chaos and misery; this would lead to forced government controls, and a consequent loss of freedom by all. Indeed, the purpose of labor unions is to coerce employers and subvert “the universal economic law of supply and demand,” in favor of a “virtual communism” which leads “to a form of slavery far more ruthless than domestic bondage.” ⁴²

In-Between (2)

Dabney delivered a commencement address in 1882 at Hampden-Sidney College entitled “The New South,” decrying the new federalism, leveling notions of equality, universal suffrage, and industrialization. He also urged graduates to hold fast to the “Old South,” although he admitted it was probably gone forever, ⁴³ and in 1883, he left Union for the new university in Austin, Texas. Within a year, Walter W. Moore arrived as adjunct professor of Oriental Literature. Moore prepared for his new assignment by studying Hebrew with William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago, who modified Schleiermacher’s picture of theological study to meet current professional and social needs. The two also taught together in summer institutes for pastors at Charlottesville, Virginia. ⁴⁴

Changed conditions since the war, and the rise of Richmond as a commercial and industrial center had led some of Union’s supporters to favor a change in its location for some time. By 1891, Moore was stressing to the Seminary’s board the importance of training ministers “in some center of population and business,” and also insisting that, “the Protestant idea of a divinity school is not monasticism but ministry.” ⁴⁵ Moore became Union’s first president after it moved to Richmond, and in a 1909 pamphlet entitled “The Preparation of the Modern Minister” he argued that pastors should be trained in the four-fold pattern of theological disciplines (exegetical theology, historical theology or church history, systematic theology, and practical theology) as well as in subjects of particular contemporary relevance, including missions and sociology. ⁴⁶ Urban location /relocation, a growing administrative structure, and a modified four-fold curriculum—none of these were especially unusual for Protestant seminaries in 19th and early 20th-century America. ⁴⁷ At Union, they signaled the emergence of a progressive impulse, the first favorable reception of theological study as it was conceived at research universities, and an acceptance of the “New South” Dabney had deplored.

Walter L. Lingle, who later became president of the General Assembly Training School and then of Davidson College, joined Union’s faculty in 1911. Having recently discovered Walter Rauschenbusch, Lingle began teaching courses on Christian Sociology as well as Francis Peabody’s Jesus Christ and the Social Question. ⁴⁸ The Social Gospel had arrived in Richmond, and if it sometimes proved a comparatively tame variety, “the wonder,” as James Smylie, longtime Professor of church history at Union, once remarked to me, “is that the dog danced at all.” The antithesis of a scholastic theologian, Lingle believed our theologies and philosophies “have made Christianity a more obstruse thing than Jesus ever intended.” ⁴⁹ On race relations, he asked, “What would be the attitude of Jesus if he were here again in the flesh?” ⁵⁰ He observed too that many “have the impression that in the contest between capital and labor the Church is on the side of capital.” ⁵¹

Lingle delivered the prestigious Sprunt Lectures at Union for 1929 on “The Bible and Social Problems,” insisting that seminarians should be as interested in housing conditions in Richmond as in conditions among ancient Hittites, and declaring that “no other book has so stirred my soul” as Christianity and the Social Crisis. ⁵² That same year, Ernest Trice Thompson, who had joined the faculty in 1922 and was influenced both by Lingle’s teaching and Rauschenbusch’s book, wrote “Is it ever justifiable to lynch a negro?. . . . If Paul had been living in our day would he have added: In Christ there cannot be black or white?” ⁵³ Thompson called Schleiermacher the greatest modern theologian, although his heart, like Lingle’s, was with the Social Gospel. ⁵⁴ He promoted new attitudes in race relations, helped to establish the southern Presbyterian denomination’s Moral and Social Welfare Committee, and worked for the re-entry of his church into the Federal Council of Churches. Writing in 1956, he claimed that, in an economy of abundance, the injunction to “seek first God’s Kingdom” should lead us to emphasize justice and “security and economic opportunity” for all. ⁵⁵ For most of his 42 years at Union, Thompson taught church history, but it was his theological and social views that frequently came under fire until he was elected Moderator of the southern Presbyterian Church in 1959. For example, he was attacked on the floor of the General Assembly in 1940 on the grounds that he did not hold that the Bible as a whole is an inspired book and therefore took up mistaken positions on political and economic issues.

Things moved more slowly among the theologians. James Porter Smith replaced Dabney’s theology on the syllabus in Christian doctrine in 1931. When John Newton Thomas succeeded Smith in 1940, he required students to read more widely in modern theology, and later became the first teacher at Union to assign John Calvin.

Now

Significant developments for theology and ethics took place in the Bible Department, where John Bright arrived in 1946—the same year Interpretation was launched as a journal devoted to biblical theology, under the editorial supervision of Balmer H. Kelly and Donald G. Miller. Had the school capitulated during the Thompson controversies, it might not have sustained Bright’s path-breaking work on the history of Israel. ⁵⁶ For our purposes here, the chief significance of the biblical theology movement at Union, which later also enlisted the able scholarship of James Luther Mays, was that its emphasis on the God who acts represented a turn away from scholastic insistences on propositional doctrines, as well as an effective way to emphasize prophetic demands for justice. It also brought a perspective capable of entering into conversations with Karl Barth and with American realist theologians such as Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr.

John H. Leith joined the faculty as Professor of the history of doctrine in 1959, and brought a vigorous commitment to the study of Calvin, Westminster, and contemporary theologians, such as Barth, Emil Brunner, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr. Leith had exercised his commitment to civil rights in his peaching, care, and counsel during a pastorate in Auburn, Alabama, ⁵⁷ although he later also proved staunchly critical of the anti-war movement. In the early 1970s, Leith conceived of Christian theology as a “dialogue” informed by engagements with revelation in Jesus Christ, the church’s past articulations of its faith, and culture. ⁵⁸ By the end of the decade, he decried the “faddism” represented by liberationist, black, and feminist currents in theology and ethics, as well as “rootless churchmanship” and experimental forms of ministry and worship. ⁵⁹ During the 1980s and 1990s, he argued that mainline loses in membership and vitality were due to the fact that, very often, its ministers were not preaching the gospel. ⁶⁰

There were also other voices. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Donald G. Dawe, Professor of Theology at Union, who was influenced by Barth but also by contemporaries, such as Wilfred Cantwell Smith, worked to engage religious pluralism. Dawe called for “a fresh enunciation of the Lordship of Christ,” recognizing that “in gracious freedom God utilizes not only Christianity but also the worship, institutions, and traditions of other religious communities to bring salvation to humankind.” ⁶¹ He affirmed the centrality of Christ without embracing a “fence mentality” that insisted on the centrality of Christianity. ⁶² Charles M. Swezey, who was Professor of Christian Ethics and wrote on the theological ethics of James M. Gustafson, brought a persistent commitment to theological ethics as a discipline. For many years, he taught the basic course in Christian ethics at Union by utilizing H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture to correlate a variety of Christian theologies with different stances in ethics. Another nearby voice was Isabel Rogers at Presbyterian School of Christian Education, who became Moderator of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and, among other things, was concerned about issues of sexuality and justice.

I arrived at Union in 1977, worked to revise an H. Richard Niebuhrian Christian realism, and, in courses until 2007, taught Calvin, Reformed Confessions, Edwards, Rauschenbusch, the Niebuhrs, Barth, Tillich, Gustavo Gutierrez, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and others. But my chief role in the story came when Jack Dean Kingsbury, a New Testament professor at Union, attacked my views in the spring of 1995. Kingsbury argued that my book, Jesus Christ and Christian Vision, articulated a liberal theology beyond the pale of what should be acceptable at a mainline and orthodox seminary in the Reformed tradition, and that it was representative of an ominous turn at the school. ⁶³ (We had also disagreed about gay ordination.) He was joined over time by faculty and alumnae, some of whose views, including those of then-emeritus Professor Leith, were presented in The Presbyterian Layman. ⁶⁴ The controversy took a number of turns; however, its theological core concerned the recurrent question of whether Union would embody a more or less flexible understanding of Reformed theology. ⁶⁵

The forces of flexibility had the historical advantage. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.) and the United Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) reunited to form the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in 1983, and Union became a theological school in a larger, more diverse, and nationwide denomination. Moreover, as reunion approached, some conservative southern congregations withdrew to form the Presbyterian Church in America; when reunion came, the Seminary’s supporting presbyteries included African American congregations that had been affiliated with the northern church. Transplants from the North to the “Sun Belt” were fashioning yet another “new South.” The Protestant mainline was fragmenting, evangelical churches were surging, and Latino immigration was increasing. Islam, Buddhism, alternative spiritualities, and explicit atheism became more prominent in American life. A “global” circumstance was emerging in which “new” social realities, such as global markets, international corporations, non-national political movements, and religious groups, often operated beyond the control of nation-states. In both seminary and church, these developments heightened the awareness of plurality within Christian traditions, increased the prominence of liberationist perspectives, and sharpened the demand that Social Christianity and Christian Realism respond to new realities. ⁶⁶

One way to read the wider story of recent theology and ethics in America is as a journey toward increasing plurality or even chaos and confusion. ⁶⁷ Not long ago, Protestant seminaries and divinity schools were stocked with Social Gospelers, Barthians, and realists who, despite their disagreements, drew on a comparatively common canon from Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin to 19th century liberals, and 20th century theologians of crisis. Today, theologians and ethicists who draw on this canon are joined by others whose perspectives emerge from the distinctive experiences and identities of communities and groups shaped by particular histories of oppression. Moreover, there is little agreement about what theology is and does. Some view theology and ethics as the reflective work of specific churches and their traditions, while others attempt global or world theologies that transcend even the great religions, and still others draw on highly developed perspectives in moral philosophy. Some link theology and ethics rather closely to recent scientific findings, others emphasize patterns in biblical narratives, and still others stress the importance of analyzing circumstances. Some insist that theology reflects on revelation, whereas others claim that it is our human effort to fashion imaginative constructs that furnish practical guidance.

At Union, four appointments in theology and ethics signaled increasing flexibility and plurality. Dawn DeVries brought a strong interest in Schleiermacher and broad reading of the Reformed tradition. ⁶⁸ Samuel Roberts, the first non-Presbyterian in Union’s Theology Department, pressed his wide-ranging scholarship in Paul Tillich, the history of theological ethics, Black theology, and virtue theory into the service of writing an African American Christian Ethics. ⁶⁹ Katie Geneva Cannon, a Presbyterian from North Carolina, formulated a “Womanist Theological Ethics” by attending to the social experience of black women and finding there a moral wisdom keyed to survival in the midst of “tyrannical systems” of “white-oriented, male-structured society.” ⁷⁰ Thomas W. Currie, III, a Presbyterian pastor and theologian who became Dean of the Seminary’s second campus in Charlotte, North Carolina, brought an emphasis on Barth and narrative theology. ⁷¹

Epilogue

In 1812, a regional and rural seminary with minimal faculty trained ministers in a more or less stringent scholastic Calvinism. Now, the recently renamed Union Presbyterian Seminary, a school with campuses in two cities (Richmond, Virginia and Charlotte, North Carolina), serves a national church within which there is little theological unanimity, and it supports diverse reflections in theology and ethics. A lot has happened, although I hope that even this selective review is sufficient to establish my principal points. When it comes to Union Seminary, theology and ethics cannot be separated. And, in a distinctive fashion, the story of theology and ethics at Union reflects the wider story of Protestant theology and ethics in America.

Thus, while there were more than a few scholastic orthodox theologians in 19th century America, and while a number engaged the issues of slavery, women’s suffrage, and industrialization, comparatively few engaged all of these issues. Fewer still matched the Calvinist rigor, sustained social analyses, and venom of the vanquished confederate at Hampden-Sydney. Again, the Social Gospel influenced many seminaries, but its exponents in Richmond placed greater emphasis on race relations than did many progressives elsewhere. Questions of race, oppression, and justice, in fact, have a special place in the story (if not also the DNA) of theology and ethics at Union. Or again, issues of experiential piety, abolition, race, modern social systems, and new pluralisms have been pivotal for theology and ethics at many theological schools in America. At Union, however, they have always been refracted through the question of how to understand the Reformed tradition.

Today, I suspect, the question at Union is whether or how a flexible understanding of Reformed tradition, a revised Christian realism, narrative theology, and commitments to Black and Womanist theological ethics can articulate a sufficiently coherent trajectory to engage an increasingly pluralist church and culture with renewed vitality. But this actually is a distinctive form of the question that faces theology and ethics in the troubled (and vanishing?) Protestant mainline more generally.