I attended Vanderbilt for my PhD in Theology for a variety of reasons. Among them: its unique Program in Theology & Practice, the collegiality of people I encountered while interviewing, and its regional location (Nashville is awesome).
On a deeper level, though, I was driven by a desire to intentionally pursue intellectual and relational diversity in my doctoral studies. Up until that point, my theological education—a B.A. and M.A. in theology from Wheaton College and an M.Div. from Princeton Seminary—had been fairly homogenous: a lot of Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a mix of predictable evangelical sources, and a sampling of liberationist, feminist, and black theologians added in along the way.
I could have stayed at Princeton for my PhD, but to this day I think I would have burned out writing the “Bonhoeffer & Barth” dissertation that I successfully pitched in my application. I’m grateful God steered me toward a broader scholastic path.
One of the enduring advantages of the American/German doctoral model: it provides more time and space for the fertility of intellectual curiosity and discovery. By definition, reading original theological sources takes time. It takes even more time to read original sources that are not naturally in your intellectual ambit. That is one of the chief benefits that two years additional of coursework + a university context + comprehensive exams offers doctoral students in a program like Vanderbilt’s.
I’m under no illusions about the privilege such time and space assumes. My participation in the program would not have been possible without the generosity from institutions like Vanderbilt Graduate School and the Lilly Endowment (and my wife Courtney, who spent years as our family’s primary breadwinner).
But I can also say this: in my judgment, evangelicalism has suffered for too long because it tends to treat intellectual curiosity and diversity as a threat instead of an opportunity for refinement, growth, and testing. In my experience, heeding Peter’s invitation to be “prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have… with gentleness and respect” (1 Pt. 3:15) doesn’t come from self-soothing theological and political silos; it comes from the hard work of constructive engagement, empathetic learning, and creative response.
I’ve recently been reminded of the practical and ecclesial relevance of this critique watching the accelerating Southern Baptist controversy regarding “Critical Theory” and “Critical Race Theory.” I’ve found myself thinking: how many people in this debate have actually sat down with Hegel, Marx, Freud, Derrida, Foucault, Judith Butler, Kristeva, or Irigaray? More than that: how many have actually made friends–or had at least one regular, charitable conversation partner–with people who haven’t just read them, but are genuinely convinced by them?
One of the gifts of my Vanderbilt education was getting to read each of these figures and also to make some of those friends. And I can honestly say this: my enduring, though admittedly nuanced and often brokenhearted, evangelical faith is stronger having learned from them. If there is any hope in the future of a publicly engaging and transformative evangelical theology, we actually have to go about the work of hearing (and learning from!) the often devastating critiques voiced by these figures on such matters as (1) the complexity of sexual desire, gender, and bodies, (2) the systemic components of racism, colonialism, and sexism, and (3) the historically conditioned quality of language and thought.
We cannot just get angry and declare entire intellectual movements as “incompatible” with the Bible or evangelical theology. We are still called to “answer… with gentleness and respect.”
This points to a parallel gift of my time at Vanderbilt: the rediscovery of the “Great Tradition” of Christian theology that runs through Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Through one lens, one could say that I went into Vanderbilt as an evangelical Barthian and came out the other side as an evangelical Thomist. There’s a lot of truth to that.
But a more subtle version might go like this: at Vanderbilt I received the opportunity to wrestle with a number of intellectual challenges to the faith (many of which I described above) that I ultimately found couldn’t be answered by evangelical theology on the basis of its own resources.
For instance, for as long as evangelicals resist being open to learning from other intellectual traditions, we will keep spinning our wheels—and default to political fights because we actually don’t have refined intellectual answers—on complex matters such as creation, gender, and sexual desire, and the nature of truth.
Nonetheless, the good news I genuinely found at Vanderbilt is this: there are distinctly Christian and biblically-defensible answers to these questions! Accessing them, however, requires a deep dive into another tradition that evangelical Protestantism has long maligned as well: the Catholic theological tradition.
I had two professors at Vanderbilt—Paul DeHart and Patout Burns—who patiently taught me to read Augustine and Aquinas well and, more importantly, personally represented that tradition’s intellectual acuity with charity and passion. I’ll never forget when I was about halfway through Insight, Bernard Lonergan’s 900-page tome on the intellect and truth, and I paused and simply acknowledged in my heart two things: the broad claims of this book are undeniably true and Protestantism simply has nothing even remotely comparable to this in our tradition.
In this Thomistic framework, I discovered a refined sense of truth, intellect, will, understanding, creation, and desire that continues to fuel much of my thinking, pastoring, and discipleship in my post-doctorate life.
So why, one might ask, am I still an “evangelical” after such a conversion-like experience? It’s true that I’ve seen many friends walk a similar path as mine toward either “ex-vangelical” or Roman Catholic destinations. Perhaps here there is one last gift from my time at Vandy to consider. Vandy was a crucible that refined my understanding of evangelicalism into an appreciation of three qualities in particular: (1) the vitality of a personal relationship with Jesus, (2) a commitment to personal holiness that translates into pursuing the common good, and (3) a joyous pursuit of missional creativity.
I’ve read a lot of books and appreciated a lot of traditions, but I’ve never truly encountered a rival for how the very best expressions of evangelicalism mix those qualities together into an utterly compelling form of ecclesial life.
Exploring those evangelical distinctives, and how I mix them into being a critically-minded Thomist, will have to wait for another day and another article…
Daryl Ellis serves as the Executive Pastor at Presbyterian Church of the Master in Mission Viejo, CA. He holds a PhD from Vanderbilt University and is a member of the St. Augustine Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Thelogians.
