Religion: Prickly Presbyterian

• Share

Theodore Alexander Gill has the lanky, bespectacled good looks that go with Hollywood's idea of a successful minister —but not the sweet disposition. As managing editor for the past two years of the nondenominational Christian Century, prickly Presbyterian Gill has told off churchmen, politicians and the public with a pungency rarely equaled in U.S. religious journalism. Last week Gill announced that he was leaving the Century to head a seminary himself—San Francisco Theological (enrollment: 272).

Minnesota-born President-designate Gill has studied under the Big Four of contemporary Protestant theology: Karl Earth, Emil Brunner, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (at the Universities of Basel and Zurich, Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary). No stranger to parish work, he has also served churches in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri and New York City. In his book-cluttered little cubicle in the Christian Century's ancient Chicago office, Editor Gill. 38. last week explained why he had decided to leave journalism for another job: "Part of the reason is my particular distortion of the Calvinistic conscience, or at least my Presbyterian version of it. Perhaps it is the feeling that I am too fascinated and excited by this whole business of observing, watching and commenting from the outside. Maybe, in other words. I have some guilt feelings."

Gill also believes that the denominational seminaries are not getting the intellectual support they should have. "The big ecumenical seminaries—Harvard, Yale, Union, and the University of Chicago—have regularly conducted raids on the faculties of the denominational seminaries. They have been able to attract many of the prima donnas in American theology —the men of academic glamour." As a result, many denominational seminaries feel "that they ought to focus down on the education of ministers and pastors, and leave the training of scholars to others. This is the mood that rang all the alarm bells for me."

Short of scholars of their own denomination, many seminaries have hired teachers from other church groups—often under the guise of ecumenic broadmindedness. Partly as a result, says Gill, U.S. Protestant theology today "looks like a witches' brew." Part of his new task, he clearly feels, will be to drive out the witches of confusion.