So you want to get a PhD in theology

I’ve been asked for advice about how to apply to doctoral programs in theology for more than a dozen years. I’ve had the goal, that whole time, of writing up a blog post that I could share with people when they ask. I’ve always found a way not to write it, though, at least in part because the ideal post would be either vanishingly short or impossibly long. In the latter case, a short book. In the former case, a simple sentence:

ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE

Is it possible to split the difference? I think, at long last, I’m going to try. At the very least, I owe it to the students who meet with me each year with the question in mind, as well as the readers who email me regularly asking the same thing. If I do end up saying something useful to them, perhaps I can put it in writing here.

So let’s do it. The format won’t exactly be FAQ, but I’ll frame my advice in response to perennial queries—twenty in total.

NB: I’m not advising folks interested in English or engineering. I’m speaking to students interested in theology of some kind, or at least a theological discipline. The further one’s field is from Christian systematic theology, the less likely my advice applies. I’m also assuming a Christian interlocutor. Plenty of my answers will still apply to a nonbelieving applicant, but those are the folks who come to me, those are the folks likeliest to pursue Christian theology, and those are the folks who share my reasons and goals for becoming a theologian. Reader beware.

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1. Should I apply to a PhD program in theology?

Only God knows, but here are some pointers:

• Ask yourself why you’re drawn to it. A sweet job? Love for God? Like being a pastor, but for brainy types? Because you like to read? Because you feel called to it, as in, this is why God put you on planet earth? Let me tell you now: The first four answers aren’t good enough.

• Here are two related questions that can help in discerning an answer to the larger question. (a) Would you be happy that you spent 6-10 years of your life earning multiple graduate degrees in theology even if you never became a professor? Alternatively: (b) Even if you never pursued graduate studies in theology, would you nonetheless find ways to “be a theologian” (read theology, write it, teach it, talk about it with others) in your spare time, outside of your civilian day job? If your answer is an unqualified and emotional Yes! to both questions, then a PhD might be for you. If a No to either, much less both, then don’t do it.

• How are your grades? Have multiple professors pointed you to doctoral studies? If your grades aren’t top of the class and/or your professors seem not to have noticed you, there may be extenuating reasons, but in general it means a PhD is probably not for you.

2. How hard is it to get into a PhD program?

Pretty hard, though I’m assuming that you mean (a) a high-quality program that’s (b) fully funded. The thing to understand is that, at the best of times, applying to programs is a crapshoot. I got into my program, an Ivy, on my first round of applications (and not via the wait list)—the very same year that nine other programs turned me down. (A few of those did put me on the wait list; one program whittled down the applicants to two others and myself. I was the odd man out; they admitted the other two. I’m still friendly with both!) There’s just no formula for this, much less logical predictability.

You need to know, at any rate, that you will be going up against dozens (occasionally hundreds, at least on the job market) of other applicants, all of whom will have impressive degrees from impressive institutions and loads of experience—even, these days, with a filled-out CV and publications. Them’s the odds.

3. Where should I apply?

That depends. For theology specifically, lists of the best American programs generally include Yale, Notre Dame, Chicago, Princeton Seminary, Duke, Emory, Vanderbilt, Catholic University of America, Saint Louis University, Marquette, SMU, Baylor, Fordham, Boston University, Boston College, Dayton—in something like that order, depending on one’s specific field and areas of interest. I think it’s fair to say the first half dozen or so are typically thought of as the top tier or cream of the crop.

(I should add: These things aren’t especially controversial in ordinary conversation among academics; after all, the rankings reveal themselves in how hard it is to be accepted, funding, stipends, who gets job interviews, and who gets the jobs themselves. Prestige and symbolic capital are by definition unequally distributed. At the same time, it’s a bit awkward to put in black and white, because academics are as a rule fiercely competitive, deeply ambitious, and insecure. But I said I’d try to be helpful, and that means honesty, so there you go.)

Some schools I left off the list:

• British universities: Oxford, Cambridge, Aberdeen, St Andrews, et al. Excellent programs, but not on this continent!

• Canadian schools, like Toronto or McGill. Both likewise excellent.

• Harvard, which so far as I know does not have a PhD in Christian theology. Harvard Divinity School does, I believe, have a ThD, just like Duke Divinity School (which is in addition to Duke University’s PhD in theology via its religious studies department). For those new to all this … yes, it’s complicated.

• Religion programs like Princeton University (≠ Princeton Theological Seminary), the University of Virginia, Brown, Rice, and the University of Texas. (There are others!) Typically these may be excellent programs for Old or New Testament, for church history, for philosophy, and so on, but not for theology. Princeton and Virginia are exceptions; they don’t necessarily produce systematic theologians, but they are happy to produce scholars of religion, philosophy, and ethics who are not allergic to theology; who, even, are theologically literate, informed, and conversant. Mirabile dictu!

• Evangelical schools like Fuller, Wheaton, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Dallas Theological Seminary, and the various Baptist seminaries. These programs include excellent scholars and wonderful programs, albeit with two drawbacks. First, a doctoral degree from these schools almost always means that you will be hired “back” at them. In other words, an evangelical PhD means an employer pool of evangelical schools. That’s not a dealbreaker for plenty of folks, since many would like to be hired by such schools and/or have no interest going elsewhere. But forewarned is forearmed, etc. Second, many (most? all? I don’t know the numbers) of these programs are not fully funded. That means you, the doctoral student, will have to pay for the privilege of being a student out of pocket or via loans. That’s a tough row to hoe without a job—or with a job that doesn’t pay much—awaiting you at the end of five or six years. Compare that with, for example, Yale’s PhD students, who are fully funded for six full years and receive an annual stipend of around $40,000 and have access to free health care in the Yale New Haven hospital system. You can see how at a certain point it’s apples and oranges. No salary cap means the Yankees always have the best roster.

• Primarily or exclusively online programs. Speaking only for myself, but speaking frankly, I would advise against this—which is distinct from advising against programs that facilitate part one’s degree being completed long distance. Certain prestigious and well-funded schools have a long track record of doing just that.

I hope that gives you a reasonable lay of the land.

4. How do you or anyone else know all this?

Gossip. The epistemology of academe is gossip. It’s the only way anyone knows anything about anything.

5. How should I choose where to go?

Well first, you don’t choose anyone, they choose you. But from this direction, too, it’s a crapshoot. If you have the time and the money, apply to five or ten or fifteen programs! Cast the net wide and see if you catch anything. Beyond that, there are different schools of thought, and none of them is “right.”

(a) Some advise that you find a particular scholar and apply to where she or he is so that you can work with her or him.

(b) Some advise that you go where your particular sub-field of study is thriving, whether it’s Barth or von Balthasar, classical theism or practical theology, christology or critical theory.

(c) Some advise that you say yes to the most prestigious school that admits you, no matter what.

(d) Some advise that you put your ear to the ground and head to the school with the reputation for the healthiest environment for student flourishing. (For example, for decades Chicago has been known as the program that will take the longest to finish while taking the most out of you. It also has meant that those who do finish are assumed to be mega-scholars bound for greatness. Like an eight-year medical residency for a certain kind of surgical specialist. It’s all about tradeoffs.)

What do I think? Depends on the applicant, her prior studies, her major field, her interests, who lets her in, and so on. My purely anecdotal two cents is that I’d lean in the direction of a combination of (c) and (d), with less emphasis on (a) or (b). I applied to my doctoral program almost on a whim, and got in knowing next to nothing about the culture or the professors or their expertise. If you had given me a certain kind of lowdown in advance, I would have expected to be an odd fit. And yet my time as a PhD student was pure bliss, more or less. So I’m weary of supposing anyone can know, prior to arriving, whether a program is a good fit. You see the fit after you unpack your boxes! But that’s just my story. You should take all these factors into account.

6. Are there really no jobs in academic theology anymore?

Yes and no. Yes, there are jobs and there always will be, in some form. No, they really are shrinking, and fast. You’d be surprised at the number of Apple and McKinsey employees with PhDs in religion.

7. Whenever this comes up, I hear race and gender mentioned. These really do matter—myth or fact?

Fact. In this country, theology and adjacent disciplines (religion, philosophy, ethics, Bible) have been a white man’s game for a very long time. Accordingly, over the last half century seminaries and religion departments have been responding at two levels: PhD students and tenure-track posts. Even still, the fields of Bible and theology remain some of the most male-dominated in the American academy, alongside philosophy, economics, and physics. Most others have reached relative parity or have swung the other way, gender-wise.

What that means for you is, yes, you will have priority as an applicant if you are a woman or person of color. If that’s you, great! Let it put a little wind in your sails, though don’t let it give you undue confidence; you’ve still got to beat out tons of other folks. If that’s not you, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t apply, but neither should you go in naive. This is simply the way things are, like it or not. Don’t get pouty. I can tell you right now, that will ensure you never advance one inch in this world.

8. You mentioned “tenure-track” posts. I’ve heard that phrase but don’t know what it means.

“Tenure-track” (TT for short) jobs are the most coveted gig for academics. In a word, it signals long-term job security. Non-TT jobs are likelier to pay less or involve higher teaching loads or be nixed when budget cuts appear on the horizon. Tenure track means that you will begin without tenure, but around year six or seven you will “go up” for tenure. This means you will apply to your university to receive tenure (plus promotion—hence “T&P”). This comes with a change of rank (Assistant to Associate Professor) and a raise, usually, but the real thing you get is the other t-word: tenure. You’re now, in a sense, employed for life. (Not really, but this is big picture.)

Tenure functions in theory to protect your free speech as an intellectual. You can study, think, write, and speak whatever you believe to be true or worthy of investigation, and nobody can fire you for having “wrong” ideas or “bad” politics. Now this is an ideal with many asterisks and exceptions. Nevertheless it’s not an empty gesture. It does have teeth. For that reason you have to be granted it; it’s not automatic. Depending on your institution, your application will weight things differently: research, teaching, collegiality, service. Ivy League schools are notorious for being stingy here, lower-tier schools less so. But everywhere occasionally (or more than occasionally) denies professors T&P. If you don’t get it, you finish out your year (or two), and then you have to leave. Yes, it’s that brutal.

9. Say I’m still interested. What should I do to try to get into a program?

Depends on when and where you are in the process. If you’re in high school, as opposed to finishing your second Master’s degree, my advice will be different. But here are some things worth doing:

• Learn languages. Master at least one language beyond your native tongue. If you can manage learning one ancient language and one living foreign language, you will automatically be a strong candidate.

• Study something relevant in college, whether that be religion, Bible, history, philosophy, ethics, theology, linguistics, or classics.

• Get a 4.0 GPA, in both college and Master’s programs.

• Form relationships with your professors. Not only will this begin to induct you into the world of academia, it will grease the wheels for the letters of recommendation you’ll eventually ask them to write for you. Also, just as academic epistemology is gossip, academic training and hiring is nothing but networks. It’s all in who you know.

• Study hard for the GRE, and ideally take it more than once. I’m convinced that I made the cut at Yale because the committee at that time culled applications on the front end with a hard GRE cut-off score. Some programs don’t care, but others do.

• Learn your field. Follow down footnote rabbit trails, ask professors for recommendations—try to get a sense of the hundred or so most prominent names in your sub-area of theology, and if possible start reading their work!

• Read everything. And I do mean everything. The memory that comes to mind is sitting in bed after my wife had fallen asleep, aged 22 or 23, and reading William Cavanaugh’s Torture and Eucharist. No one assigned it to me. I don’t know how I happened upon it. I was just reading it because I felt I should, out of pure interest.

• Reach out to professors elsewhere. Email them, see if they’ll chat by phone or Zoom, ask if they’ll meet you at AAR/SBL. No joke, the summer before I applied to programs, I physically mailed letters to professors there. Many of them replied!

• Go to AAR/SBL. That’s the annual conference for the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion, held in tandem the weekend before Thanksgiving each year. My first time, as a Master’s student, was a revelation. I met people there (circa 2010) I’m still friends with—for example, my now colleague Myles Werntz!

• Visit the schools you plan to apply to. As you’re able, obviously. I took a little road trip myself; I was able to visit Duke, UVA, and Vanderbilt. Worth it!

• Ask a professor to review your materials, especially your statement of purpose and CV.

• Have a community of support. Not entirely something you can control, but necessary all the same. Application season is brutal. My household had a lot of tears before the happy email arrived in my inbox.

• Pray. I saved the most important for last…

10. I’ve heard horror stories. Is a PhD program bound to wreck my marriage and suck my soul while making me work 100-hour weeks and hate my life?

No. At least, that’s not inevitable. There are programs that function like law school or medical school. But even then, you usually retain a great deal of agency and responsibility for your time allocation. In my view, most (not all) programs permit a disciplined student to get his work done while continuing to function as a healthy person with family, friends, church, and a life outside the library. Granted, I do know people who would reject that proposition. Either way, it is not a foregone conclusion that you must decide between what matters most and your degree. No way.

11. What about my faith? Can a PhD draw me closer to Christ rather than “deconstruct” or diminish or steal my faith?

Yes! It can. That’s exactly what it did for me. But it’s good to ask this question and to be aware of the danger. There are people for whom doctoral studies challenged, complicated, revised, and sometimes destroyed their faith. Perhaps that was bound to happen at some point. Some people, though, just may not be cut out for a PhD, at least in religion.

In any case, your faith will not emerge from your studies unchanged. And here, as elsewhere, naivete is the enemy. You will read books by atheists and anti-Christians and members of other religions and representatives of views you find risible, heinous, or dangerous. You will have professors who repudiate all that you hold dear. You will have teachers who claim to be Christian who openly reject or even mock beliefs and behaviors you supposed nonnegotiable for any confessing Christian. You need to have a spine of steel even as your mind is open to learning new ideas and being challenged by what you’ve never considered. Does that describe you? Or does it frighten you? Your answer matters a great deal for whether you should pursue a PhD.

12. What does a PhD program actually entail?

Briefly: Two years of classes, one year of comprehensive exams (“comps,” written and oral), two or three years of writing a dissertation. Comps test your mastery of basic topics and texts in your field. A dissertation is, basically, a book based on your special area of research, led and read and assessed by a committee of three to five professors, headed by a single professor, called your “advisor.” Your “defense” of the dissertation is usually when you “become a doctor,” namely, by undergoing oral examination by the committee and defending your writing, your arguments, and your research “live”—sometimes with an audience! It’s a stressful day, to say the least. For those who pass, and not all do, the catharsis is overwhelming.

13. What’s the point of a PhD, anyway? How should I think about it?

Opinions differ. Some say: To become an expert in one specific thing, perhaps the world’s most informed expert. I say: To become a theologian. That is, to sit at the feet of masters, to apprentice yourself to them, as to a trade, to be inducted into what it means to be a member of the guild, to learn the grammar and habits that make a theologian a theologian. And thence and therein to learn some concrete expertise.

14. Is the quality of one’s doctoral training really convertible with an institution’s money and prestige?

No. Some of the most brilliant scholars I know and learn from got PhDs in out-of-the-way programs or unpretentious institutions; indeed, some of the world’s greatest minds and writers are effectively autodidacts. Don’t fall for the cult of credentials and gatekept expertise. It’s a game. If you want to be a professor, you have to play it. That’s it.

Now, money and prestige don’t count for nothing. They’re often a proxy for a certain quality floor, along with a certain quality ceiling. You’re rarely going to get a poor education at a top-5 school. And the degree will always count for something.

15. Suppose I get in somewhere, and I’m wondering how to flourish. Any tips?

Here are a few:

• Put your head down. You’re there to learn. Study, study, study. Then study some more.

• Set limits and boundaries. One guy I knew treated his studies like a job: he worked from 8:00am to 5:00pm, then he stopped and spent time with his family. Not for everyone, but incredibly useful for some.

• Don’t waste your time. Don’t read online. Delete all your social media accounts. Focus entirely on what you’re there to learn. Some doctoral students “work all day” without getting anything done: Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok see to that, not to mention the New York Times, the Atlantic, and Jacobin.

• Develop good habits now. They’ll stay with you in whatever future employment you find.

• Just as before, devote time to forming relationships and mentorships with your professors.

• Begin networking not just within your institution but outside of it, whether professors or fellow students.

• Don’t try to make a name for yourself yet. Don’t tweet. Don’t write for a popular audience. Don’t, for the most part, publish in scholarly spaces—unless your advisor gives you the thumbs up, and it’s work you think is A-quality, and it’s likely to matter for job applications. If you’re gong to have an academic career, there will be time enough for publishing. Now’s the time for input, not output.

• Learn how to do two things: (a) read for long, uninterrupted stretches of time and (b) write a certain daily word count. Learning how to skim and how to type fast are also useful skills. Best of all, learn how to take quality notes and to organize them in relation to your research and writing goals. These will serve you for a lifetime.

• Keep learning languages. I can’t emphasize this enough: Languages are the secret sauce of theology (and the humanities generally). If you have two or four or six or more, you’re gold. If you’re stuck in no man’s land with one, or 1.5, or a bunch you can only half-read, you’re at a serious disadvantage—for jobs and for your scholarship. Mastering languages pays dividends!

• Listen to your advisor. She knows best.

• Pray. Not a joke! Better to keep your soul than to lose it and gain the whole world. Focus on what matters most, even in a time of stress and compressed study. Focus on God, church, spouse, children, friends, life. It keeps things in perspective. (Also not a joke: Drop out if this isn’t for you. There’s no shame in it if the alternative is ruin.)

16. Any other tips?

Yes, one: Don’t be a jerk. It is not your job to police the opinions or beliefs or politics of fellow students, much less professors. You don’t have to announce yourself in every seminar as the expert or True Believer on whatever topic. Drop the show. Be a normal human. Keep your own counsel. Be collegial. Even if the people around you espouse crazy things, it is not your job to set them straight. It’s your job to get a degree. Do it.

17. Say I make it to the job market, dissertation finished and PhD in hand. What then?

Not much to say here. Apply widely, prepare to move cross-country even as you prepare for nothing but rejections, and keep up those prayers.

18. What about the dissertation itself?

Not every program, not every advisor, and not every dissertation allows this, but in general I think you should write the dissertation as though you are already under contract with a publisher for a book. Write it as a book, that is, not as that unique and uniquely unreadable genre, “dissertation.” Or at least write toward the eventual book.

That, by the way, is what often happens. Your “first book” is the dissertation, in revised form. Not always, not for everyone. But ideally for many, perhaps most. Sometimes it’s chopped up into journal articles. Sometimes it remains background for the next research agenda. How you approach it matters, though, for what it eventually becomes, or is likely to become.

There’s a balancing act to aim for here. You don’t want the dissertation to try to do everything. You don’t want to swing for the fences and decisively answer the biggest question facing the field. On the other hand, you don’t want it to be so niche, so remote, so granular that no one cares. This also touches on the “faddishness” of one’s dissertation topic, its relative “timeliness” or “sexiness” as an academic subject. Sometimes a fad will get you a job; sometimes it will ensure your perpetual obscurity.

I say: Focus on the perennial topics, questions, and figures. They’ll never go away, even if they’re not in fashion for a time. (Miroslav Volf once gave me the advice that Jürgen Moltmann gave him: Always do two things as a theologian. Take up the ultimate questions humans always ask, and do so through engagement with Scripture. That’s what it means to be a theologian, and it doubles as ensuring you’ll never be irrelevant.)

A final addendum: The one thing doctoral programs routinely fail to do is train their students to teach, even as the one thing they never fail to do is train their students to write awful prose. At to the first: Seek out opportunities to teach, and seek to T.A. (be a teaching assistant) for professors who are good in the classroom. Having said that, the best way to become a better teacher is sheer repetition, and you’re unlikely to get that until you have a job, and the truth is that few schools will hire you based on your already being a good teacher. So, in terms of tradeoffs, focus on research and finishing the dissertation, not teaching.

As to the second, then: It’s near impossible not to pick up bad writing habits in a PhD program, for the simple reason that most academics are bad writers, and most academic writing is meant not to be readable but to impress a small circle of experts with jargon, quotations, and footnotes. I suppose the best way to resist bad prose during doctoral studies is by reading poetry, novels, and literary essays on the side throughout one’s time. Another way is to read major scholars in other fields who write for highbrow general-audience publications like NYRB, NYT Magazine, The New Yorker, The Point, LARB, Harper’s, First Things, and elsewhere. Many academics never unlearn their bad writing habits, and for those who do, it takes years. Just knowing going in that your dissertation will be poorly written, no matter how hard you try, is to put you ahead of the curve.

19. What about jobs? Which should I plan on applying to?

All of them!

Besides that answer, which is true, I’ll add that TT academic posts are typically differentiated by “teaching load”: in other words, how many classes you teach per year (or per semester). If you’re at an R1 University (a level-1 research school), then you’re likely to teach a 2-2 (two courses per semester), with generous regular sabbaticals for research. If you’re at an R2 or R3, you’re likely to teach a 2-3 or 3-3. If you’re at a new R3 or teaching university or community college, you’re likely to teach a 3-4 or 4-4 or even 5-5.

A couple years back I wrote a four-part, 12,000-word series on what it’s like teaching with a 4-4 load. Spoiler: Not a fate worse than death! But depending on where you earn your PhD, you might be told that it is. I won’t say much more here except that the mindset that supposes any job outside of R1 or Ivy isn’t worth taking is deadly. Don’t indulge it, and exorcise that demon if it possesses you at any time during your studies.

20. What about serving the church?

Well, isn’t that the right way to end this.

Christians study theology because of the living God, in obedience to Christ’s command to love the Lord with all our mind. We become theologians to serve the mission of his people in the world. Our knowledge, such as it is, exists to his glory and the advance of his kingdom. It certainly does not exist to advance our ambitions or careers.

You do glorify God through academic theological writing, even when such writing is not obviously or directly “applicable” to or “accessible” by ordinary believers in the pews. I can’t say more here to defend that claim—we’re wrapping this post up!—but it’s true. Trust me for now.

More important, it’s crucial to approach the question of pursuing a PhD as an exercise of love for God and service to the church. That will guide you as a lodestar throughout your academic adventures (or misadventures). If this is what God has called you to, so be it. It might involve suffering; it’s likely to involve professional wandering; it’s certain to involve uncertainty. Offer it to Christ; put it in his service. He’ll use it, one way or another. Expect that use to involve a cross, even if the trajectory of your career looks “successful” from the outside or after the fact.

But if he’s not calling you to this, that’s okay too. Don’t do it just because. Discernment works only if it’s possible to hear a No and not just a Yes. Prayer enters at this point for a final time. If the job of the doctoral candidate is study, study, study, the job of the disciple is pray, pray, pray. Prayer will carry you through, whichever path you end up on.

Let’s say, then, that my advice is not for the PhD-curious to abandon all hope. Abandon all false hope, yes. But hope is not optimism. As for pursuing an academic career, put it this way: With mere mortals this may be impossible, but with God all things are possible—even getting a PhD in theology.