Seminaries: Chicago at 100

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John D. Rockefeller Sr. was a Baptist of conventional piety, hardly the sort of man to launch a religious insurrection. Without intending to, he did. As the price for bankrolling the founding of the University of Chicago in 1890, he insisted that Chicago's struggling, sectarian Baptist Seminary become the nucleus of the university. This year Chicago's Divinity School, older than the university because it dates from the seminary's founding, celebrates its 100th anniversary-respected everywhere for dynamism, innovation and influence.

In the free environment of the new University of Chicago, the Divinity School quickly lost its denominational character, became committed to the then jarring notion that Christianity is a historical religion that can find its full meaning only within a total concept of human culture. This conviction led the Divinity School to ride the crest of each successive wave of American Protestant thought. First, as a citadel of liberalism, it warred on fundamentalism. Then it pioneered in historical criticism of the Bible, developed professional standards for Sunday-school teachers. Later the school was swept by Karl Earth's neo-orthodoxy and Paul Tillich's existential theology. And it was in the library of fortresslike Swift Hall in 1955 that Student Thomas Altizer, now professor of religion at Atlanta's Emory University, came suddenly to the conclusion that "God is dead" for modern society.

Today Chicago's student enrollment of 375 is an ecumenical admixture of Protestants (including 55 Methodists, 54 Lutherans, 40 Baptists, 31 Presbyterians, 25 Episcopalians) seasoned with 17 Roman Catholics, four Jews and a solitary Buddhist. Characteristically, they put their theological studies ahead of formal religion; Professor Joseph Sittler mournfully notes that there are seldom more than 20 to 30 students at midweek services in Bond Chapel.

Magnet for Teachers. This history and atmosphere has drawn to the school some of the most lively, creative and talented theologians and church historians currently teaching in the U.S. They include:

> JERALD BRAUER, 43, Lutheran, the dean. Brauer's scholarly field is English Puritanism, and his modern interest is the effect of religion in politics and education. Appointed dean eleven years ago, he is committed to the credo that "knowledge, although of value for its own sake," must lead to social action. >GIBSON WINTER, 49, Episcopalian, professor of ethics and society. Having earned a Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard, he went on to be a pioneer of church renewal and writer of the provocative Suburban Captivity of the Churches. >ROBERT GRANT, 48, Episcopalian, professor of New Testament. The top expert on patristics (the study of the writings of the early church fathers) and gnosticism in the U.S., Grant writes limericks ("Most of them can't be printed"), short plays and books, ineluding one on World War I antisubmarine warfare.