Mapping academic theology

Academic theology is a tangled web of influences and institutions. Happily, John Shelton has done us all a favor by untangling some of the thornier knots in a convenient and accessible way.

How? By creating a single image that traces lines of influence, whether direct (via graduate teaching or serving as a doctoral advisor) or indirect (via published work or working as colleagues in the same school), between and among some of the most prominent scholars of Christian theology and ethics since the 1960s. These scholars, to be clear, do not form an exhaustive list; they are Anglo-American mainline Protestants, for the most part, inhabiting (by training or employment) elite Anglo-American mainline Protestant institutions. Theologians, whether systematic or moral, from outside the Anglophone world, not to mention Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and evangelicals, are almost entirely unrepresented; as are historical and patristic and medieval and pastoral and practical and all other theological disciplines.

Nevertheless, given the institutional prestige and influence of American mainline institutions, programs, and professors, the result is both impressive and illuminating. Behold:

(You can view/download the image here.)

Some initial reactions and reflections:

• Lotta dudes! To be expected, but still.

• If I said this image tracks Anglo-American mainline Protestants, what I meant was: this is a web of Ivy League WASP Theologians. Which, again, is to be expected: they’re the ones with postwar clout and influence. But it’s one thing to know that, another to see it laid out this way. So few institutions producing so many students, who then become major scholars in their own right, double back, get hired by the same institution that trained them (or a sister school), and start advising students themselves. So the wheel keeps spinning.

• Based on this image, it was the later boomers who began to break the all-male rule in academic theology: Tanner, Jones, Kilby, Sonderegger, Coakley, Herdt.

• Cone and Carter and Katongole are here. I imagine Willie James Jennings, like Paul Griffiths, is not here because he’d be a circle unto himself, rather than participating in these lines of descent. But to complete the web (which I could, I guess, but my facility with this sort of software is less advanced than a child’s) I’d probably want to add a womanist segment that touches Cone and King and Tillich and Carter but also branches off on its own: Williams, Cannon, Townes, Floyd-Thomas, and Marshall Turman.

• Not everyone on this list would fit the bill of “orthodox,” but there’s a general family resemblance that makes sense of most of the names. The same goes for the style of theology being practiced: either moral or systematic. I suspect that’s why, on one hand, someone like Catherine Keller isn’t found here; and, on the other, why we don’t see prominent Christian philosophers and analytic thinkers like Nicholas Wolterstorff, William Abraham, John Hare, Richard Swinburne, Eleonore Stump, Robert Adams, and Marilyn McCord Adams. Not to mention MacIntyre! Though he probably belongs on here in terms of influence, a la Wittgenstein and Troeltsch and the Niebuhrs.

• Both Reno and Marshall converted to Catholicism after they earned their doctorates, unless I’m mistaken. Kilby has always been Catholic, I believe. Same for Cavanaugh. And Lash and Katongole. Am I missing any others? Hart is the only Orthodox theologian I spy.

• There needs to be an “influenced” line running from Troeltsch to Coakley.

• If the Boomers continue to sit on the academic throne, their most prominent successors, peers, and competitors are all Gen X. Which makes sense, given the trajectory of a scholar’s career: PhD in one’s 30s, emergence in one’s 40s, major contribution in one’s 50s. It seems that, as each generation comes out of doctoral programs, it takes about two decades for the field to sort itself. The upshot, from my vantage point, is that my own generation won’t know which of our peers will rise to the top for another 15 years or so.

• But that’s putting the cart before the horse. The real lesson I draw from this image, granting all its omissions and incompleteness, is how diffuse and disunified the “field” of Christian theology and ethics is today by comparison to the previous three generations. As Chuck Mathewes wrote a few years ago, in a review essay of Oliver O’Donovan’s career-capping trilogy in Christian ethics, the latter works should have been a “big event”—and yet they seemed to pass by without significant comment from (again) “the field.” Mathewes observes that this would not have happened in the 1970s and ’80s, when a few figures dominated the field and their publications and reviews invariably made a splash. What we have now is many fields, sometimes overlapping and sometimes not even touching, each and all of which make some claim to Christian theology and/or Christian ethics and/or philosophy of religion and/or religious epistemology and/or comparative religion and/or critical theory and/or etc., etc. That’s just the way it is today, for better or worse.

• Another thought: This is not a list of “the best” theological writers/thinkers over the last half century. One of my favorites, for example—Nicholas Healy—isn’t represented. I could always add him (he studied under Kathryn Tanner, I believe), just as many others could be added. But this web is using something of a “name-brand recognition” test. Quality and renown are not unrelated, but neither are they identical.

• I haven’t even mentioned that this set of interlocking genealogies doesn’t include (which it couldn’t) biblical scholars. Where would Brevard Childs or Stephen Fowl or Richard Hays or Ellen Davis fit, much less von Rad and other peers of and successors to Barth? Contrary to popular belief, historical critics read theologians and vice versa. The lines of influence just keep expanding…

• I’ve buried another lede. The unsurprising spider at the top of this web is Barth. The more surprising is Niebuhr—H. Richard, not Reinhold. Reinhold’s influence on twentieth century thought, including academic theology and ethics, was great and lasting. But H. Richard always had more theological influence (or so I think), and this map captures that nicely. Niebuhr the younger was an institutionalist, and there is a sense in which his legacy stretches longer and wider than his brother’s.

• I had forgotten just how prominent Gustafson was, both as a writer and as a Doktorvater, but wow, his students make for some impressive names in Christian ethics. I’m glad to see Ramsey, too, alongside Outka, who likewise had a hand in training a number of major figures. There’s a whole Princeton–Virginia thing going on here that should be mentioned alongside Yale–Chicago and Notre Dame–Duke.

• Hauerwas’s imprint on theology and ethics is probably not quite as evident from this genealogy as it should be … but then again, perhaps the proportion is good as is. From the early ’80s through the Iraq War, Hauerwas was hands down the Christian theologian, ethicist, and public intellectual on the American scene. His students flooded the job market. His books (and his students’) were everywhere, as were his big ideas—including downstream from the academy, in popular press and sermons and the like. Yet that omnipresence has subsided somewhat, certainly among scholars. Hauerwas is no longer the only game in town (not that he ever was; I’m talking felt impressions). Ethicists like Herdt and Bowlin and McKenny and Bretherton and Gregory and Mathewes and Tran (the last, Hauerwas’s student) all learned a thing or two from Hauerwas, but their project is not his. If Stout was worried twenty years ago about the American theological academy retreating into a Hauerwasian sectarian hideout, he can rest assured it hasn’t happened. In truth it was never going to happen. The worry was always overstated, even if it was responding to a real phenomenon.

• If I were a whiz with Adobe I would want to color code this map and create more complicated lines of relation. For example, Tanner and Volf have now been colleagues at Yale for more than a decade, and many students have had and continue to have both of them on their dissertation committee (I speak from experience!). Or think of McFarland and Jackson at Emory, or Stout and Gregory at Princeton, or Jones and Mathewes at UVA, so on and so forth. Sometimes an advisor is a hegemon; sometimes a committee is a genuine group effort. It would be useful, therefore, to be able to track who was colleagues with whom, and when, and for how long, and which students they co-advised or co-taught.

• I thought of another A+ theologian not on this list, akin to Healy: Paul DeHart, who studied under Tanner at Chicago and has taught at Vanderbilt for years.

• I don’t see anyone born in the 1980s (or later). Are Tran and Tonstad the lone “young guns” on this list? I imagine I’m overlooking or forgetting someone.

• Just as this image is not per se about quality, it also doesn’t give an accurate perception of a given theologian’s influence or readership simply through his or her writing. I’m thinking of Jenson, Webster, Volf, and Vanhoozer. A stranger to the guild would suppose them on the margins, either in terms of their training or in terms of their reception, when the truth is the opposite. The same goes for names I’ve already mentioned, like Willie Jennings, Paul Griffiths, and Delores Williams.

• Ah, I see that Bruce McCormack is not on here. He obviously fits, given Barth, Jüngel, Jenson, Hunsinger, Hector, et al.

• In one of his books criticizing the Jesus Seminar, Luke Timothy Johnson adds up the total number of doctoral programs represented by participants in the Seminar in order to show the lack of professional, disciplinary, and ideological diversity represented. Academic theology is no different. In one sense that’s perfectly fine: great programs house great teachers who train great students. But it’s important to remember just how small and incestuous this world is. And thus it’s good to get outside of it once in a while. And to listen to voices who never belonged to it. The autodidacts and polymaths and fundies have a thing or two to teach elites, easy though it is to forget that.

• I said the world portrayed on this map has fractured and split and multiplied. Is it also dying? The reputational prestige of liberal mainline theology and its institutions was always a corollary of the numerical quantity, sociopolitical influence, and sheer existence of liberal mainline churches. But as those have died off or entered hospice care, what of their institutions, their seminaries, their endowed chairs, their theological scholars? We’re living in the midst of a shift. The money is still there. Does the funding have a constituency? Do these institutions create a new constituency out of whole cloth? Or is their waning, absorption, and disappearance a fait accompli? I think we’re about to see. Two or three generations from now we’ll know the answers to those questions.

• I’m going to need someone to make similar versions of this web for Catholic theologians (centered on Notre Dame?) as well as adjacent fields like patristics and biblical studies and analytic philosophy. I lack the knowledge and time. But it would be fascinating to see them, not to mention to see if someone could somehow combine them with one another and with this image. Perhaps an interactive 3-D model housed online? Get on it, youngsters!

• I had one last thing to add—a bright clear thought in my mind, something significant—but it vanished when I came to a new bullet point. I’ll update this post if I remember. For now I welcome any and all thoughts, additions, corrections, and other feedback. Send it my way or Shelton’s. He’s the instigator and author here. I’m just using his work to think out loud. Kudos to him for some stimulating off-hours labor, just for fun.

Updates:

• Vincent Lloyd. Another name that should be added. Turns out there’s a whole Union thing going on, too…

• I remembered the comment that slipped my mind. In my imaginary color-coded update, figures would be denominated not only by their institutions, colleagues, teachers, and students, but by the nature of their contributions. In other words, everyone on this map has made some sort of scholarly contribution. Not everyone, though, has ventured into the world of magazines, essays, podcasts, and public speaking. Not everyone, that is, writes for a popular audience or attempts the “public intellectual” thing. But some of them do. Some of them, perhaps, do as much of that as they do the academic thing; occasionally some do more of the one than of the other. It’s a delicate balancing act, after all. You could even mark the careers of some as a kind of “before” and “after.” Think of Tony Judt, as an example outside the guild. He became a public intellectual after his major contributions added up to something so impressive the editors and readers of (e.g.) the NYRB and NYT had to sit up and pay attention. He began to write for them, and all of a sudden his scholarship had a “public.” I’m wondering the same thing about some of the folks on this micro-genealogy.