Thanks for your input Scot. I wish there were more voices calling it for what it is. There is a lot of poor advice given to those considering seminary from conservative undergraduate programs as well as churches (with graduates from said colleges and connected seminaries). The advice is not necessarily bad (although one might make a case otherwise) because of the schools that are often pushed but because the advice does not include a well rounded approach to life beyond seminary. Thanks for taking the time to interact with Dan, whose words I also appreciated, on this.

Scot,
You talked about most Evangelicals having an “identity problem”… I have often sensed this in my studies, and felt it myself sometimes. As a Seminarian my primary concern is being in a place where I can grow in my ability to serve the Body of Christ most effectively. My background so far has been in exclusively Evangelical settings. I sometimes wonder what it would have be like to study at a school across the great divide. It would be nice to have attended a school that people actually recognize, but that sort of recognition doesn’t really help me in my primary concern (being prepared to serve). Do you see any benefits in Mainline Schools in preparing people for ministry that Evangelical schools lack?

Scot,
I so appreciate your sober comments. One of the problems on the Parchment & Pen blogsite right now is that there are over 500 comments on the post, so it’s easy to get lost in the haystack of competing dialogues.
Overall, I think your caveats are on target. Some evangelicals can be real jerks in their doctoral programs, some are simply not qualified for the best programs (either because of intelligence or training), some are willing to sell their souls to get into such, etc. Evangelicals start with different presuppositions than liberals, and the core values in those presuppositions are so deeply ingressed that only suppressing the witness of the Spirit can alter them. And I’ve seen that all too often: evangelicals who walk away from the faith (and I mean the historic Christian faith, not just the evangelical version of it) because their motives were all wrong when they got into PhD studies.
At the same time, my complaint wasn’t about under-qualified evangelical students (there are plenty of those), but about students who had proved themselves in the classes they took (some already taking doctoral courses, and excelling in them, at the schools where they would be turned down for further work), publications in first-rate journals, and linguistic, exegetical, analytical and synthetic skills, etc. I have had several highly qualified students who have been immediately turned away when they revealed that they were from Dallas Seminary. My concern is that they’re often not even getting a hearing. Some have had to earn a second and even third master’s degree–working in Coptic, Attic Greek, Aramaic, Syriac, papyrology, various exegetical methods, Second Temple Judaism, Jesus studies–before they are even looked at. I certainly don’t expect mainline schools to bend over backwards for evangelical students. But I would hope for some genuine dialogue in the States, the way it is customary in the UK (as you yourself experienced).
As for various liberal professors having no respect for evangelical students: I have heard it from their own lips, learned of it from their colleagues, seen it reported by my students, and found out through other reputable sources. What I am seeing in the States all too often is a liberalism that Hengel characterized as left-wing fundamentalism. It certainly occurs in Germany and in the U.S.; far less so in the UK. Now, to be sure, it is by no means universal in top-tier schools, but I equally suspect that there is probably not one top-tier school in the States in which none of the faculty is closed to well-qualified evangelical students.
Finally, I think there are a couple of very good reasons (and plenty of bad ones) for evangelicals to earn a PhD in biblical studies from a non-confessional school: First, to state the obvious: for the education. Depending on one’s specialty, a particular university may be head and shoulders above any other school. Second, for the credentials one needs to teach in a university setting. And there are some good reasons for wanting to teach in a university as a believer, not the least of which is to be a much-needed witness in a skeptical and hostile environment.
Thanks for your input. Always appreciated.
dbw

Thank Scot for your post. It helped to articulate what I was thinking.

In seminary I came to note an ironic feature of Evangelical higher education: while evangelicalism rejects liberal values and beliefs, it shares the same modern scholastic practices.

Dan,
One of my points is that I expect this sort of thing for your students from DTS. I expect it because the world of a university and the evangelical world of DTS are so far apart that one can only expect that what counts as rigorous scholarship in one may not be that way in the other. So, yes, I would expect that many would not even get a hearing. Maybe it would easier to say that I’m not surprised if they don’t get a hearing.
But I’m not sure this is because the liberals aren’t truly liberal or tolerant; it’s because the academic, critical, liberal scholar doesn’t think the scholarship of non-critical student is genuine scholarship. One can see this as bias or condescension, or one can say this is nothing more than a collision of scholarly worldviews.
On the “no respect” comment: Two very well known historical Jesus scholars have said to me that they don’t even read what evangelical scholars have to say. I’m not offended and I’m not surprised.

I have always wondered why we pursue the task of distinguishing ourselves so sharply from one another.
One thing that characterizes a rigorous scholar is the ability to detach from the subject matter at hand, conduct a research conversation about it without personal involvement, and then (if s/he wishes) appropriate the position that appears most convincing.
I find that if personal evangelical faith is the determining factor one uses to decide what is convincing, then liberal conversation partners are most likely to respect that choice because they were first part of a non-personal conversation about the elements that went into our common, thoughtful deliberations.
Some of the most rewarding and formative scholarly conversations I have experienced are with scholars of personal persuasions that differ significantly from my own. Iron sharpens iron.

I’ve posted some thoughts based on my experience: http://blog.tonyj.net/2009/12/liberal-bias-in-the-academy-in-response-to-jesus-creed/

Scot, is it overly naive of me to believed that the majority of schools accept or reject people based on the quality of their work, their fit within a program and their promise for scholarship?

Scot: I have been really fascinated by this discussion. It has prompted me to wonder whether the same bias against Christians exists in other disciplines, particularly in the humaniites (and my chosen field of history). I have tried to reflect a bit about this at: http://www.philipvickersfithian.com/2009/12/are-graduate-programs-in-humanities.html

Andrew #9, No I don’t think it is overly naive. Furthermore, clearly the universities ostensibly make the case just for that.

Tony #8, good realistic set of ideas. I’d like to extend your thoughts from stereotyped bias (both about DTS and Fuller and, in turn, by those toward university liberals) and suggest that “this is the way it is” and we should not be surprised.
What did McFague have against Moltmann?

John, very good post. Dan Wallace has opened up a can of worms for us all to inspect.

Dan and Scot,
Both the post and the comment are thought provoking… Tony’s comments on his blog are great as well (see #8)
Dan, You said that there are some good reasons for wanting to teach in a university as a believer, not the least of which is to be a much-needed witness in a skeptical and hostile environment.
We need this desperately and across the board – not just in BTS type disciplines or ANE studies, and not just in divinity schools or religious studies departments.
I’ve sat in more meetings, formal and informal conversations, than I would care to try to count where there I’ve heard “from their lips,” from people as high as Deans, a gut reaction bias against anything and everything evangelical (which also gets grouped with the most extreme of fundamentalism). It is worse on some level in the humanities and social sciences than in the natural sciences.
But Scot nails it in #6 where he says “academic, critical, liberal scholar doesn’t think the scholarship of non-critical student is genuine scholarship. One can see this as bias or condescension, or one can say this is nothing more than a collision of scholarly worldviews.”
I think that this is the root cause. From my personal perspective, as one who has been in the secular academy for some 28 years, I have found most overtly evangelical scholarship to be not genuine scholarship. It simply, even to my non-specialist reading, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
One of the things I did several years ago, when starting to interact with Scot, was to buy and read his “Jesus and His Death” – not because I was intensely interested in the topic (and parts of the book were rather dry, others quite interesting) – but because I had been so burned by “evangelical scholarship” in trying to think through our faith on a rigorous level, that I had to know something of how he thought and approached arguments. I have no basis to judge much of this book on a scholarly level – I don’t know what people make of it. But to my read – at least it makes reasonable arguments. the same cannot be said for much of overtly evangelical scholarship – at least in the past.
So when is bias justified?

John,
Yes and no … there is a bias that makes it hard to take a stand in a University setting. This is more pronounced in some disciplines than others – and humanities are not on the good side of the distribution (from our perspective).
Whether this bias affects admissions or not at the graduate school level depends on how competitive a program is and a number of intangibles. Amongst my colleagues there are a handful who would take a negative view of anything faith related in the personal statement essays – but most would ignore it. Most also don’t have a clue which undergraduate institutions are “confessional” and which are “Christian” and which are just liberal arts colleges – or “liberal” liberal arts colleges.
The issue of a degree from a confessional seminary is a different issue, because this field is so much more carefully tied to faith, and because graduate education for a masters degree brings the discussion to a different level.

RJS: I am largely in agreement with you.
I do wonder if it is wise to put anything about one’s personal faith in a grad school application purpose statement or in a job letter. It seems that Christians in the academy, and especially in the humanities, need to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” I am often horrified when I read some of the purpose statements that my Christian students write when they apply to graduate school. They tend to speak in their Christian voices rather than their academic or professional voices. They write about how God is calling them to the academy or how they want to integrate their faith with their discipline or want to serve God through the professorate. While all of these things might be true, they do not belong in a statement of purpose for a Ph.D program in the humanities (I am guessing the same would apply to the sciences as well). I tell my students who want to pursue careers as “Christian historians” that they are not going to graduate school to become better Christians, they are going to graduate school to become historians! They thus need to learn the language historians speak and the culture of the historical profession. Many of them have the “Christian” part already figured out (or at least they think they do), but now it is time to find out what it means to be a practitioner of a particular discipline.

Sorry–I wrote post #16

The linked issues of evangelical participation and acceptance in the broader academy were the subject of my doctoral research and recent biography of George Eldon Ladd. Ladd’s obsessive desire to be welcomed as an evangelical in the academic world became his undoing, and serves as a reminder not only to pursue excellence in our work, but also to remember who we are and whose we are. I attach a link to a recent review of my book.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2009/mayjun/presentandnotyet.html

Scot,
As one who is close to deciding on doctoral work this has been very helpful. I think another much needed discussion is one dealing with the discrimination of D.Min’s – as if practitioners are second rate and theological hacks. Thoughts?

Scot,
While she didn’t explain, I assume that McFague thought Moltmann was another white, German male, and not nearly as radical as the feminist, Marxist theologies most common at Vanderbilt in 1993.
I completely agree that we should not be surprised, nor should we expect it to change anytime soon. In fact, one of the great undoings of modern seminary education is its attempt to “keep up” with other academic disciplines.

RJS-
“I’ve sat in more meetings, formal and informal conversations, than I would care to try to count where there I’ve heard “from their lips,” from people as high as Deans, a gut reaction bias against anything and everything evangelical (which also gets grouped with the most extreme of fundamentalism). It is worse on some level in the humanities and social sciences than in the natural sciences.
But Scot nails it in #6 where he says “academic, critical, liberal scholar doesn’t think the scholarship of non-critical student is genuine scholarship.”
What then is scholarship, and who gets to define it?
This brings to mind David Frum’s words in regards to the Climate Debate:
“The whole global warming debate has been distorted from the start by intellectual self-ghettoization. Suffused by self-righteousness, the East Anglian scientists felt entitled to twist the evidence and delete the counter-evidence.
But it also helped that they felt sure they would not be caught. They had defined their community in a way that excluded skepticism, that defined skeptics as the enemy, as liars, as Holocaust deniers.”
Although there can be overlap, are the various sides coming from such different perspectives that they can never fully agree on how to reach the goal?
As Scot wrote:
“One can see this as bias or condescension, or one can say this is nothing more than a collision of scholarly worldviews.”

Casey at #19, you’ve pushed a button: I don’t consider DMins theological hacks, and I doubt anyone would say it that way. Nor are “practitioners” “second rate” … But, a DMin is not an academic degree but a pastoral professional degree. Academies require, as a rule, academic degrees.

I have heard these claims of bias frequently from evangelical undergrads I am advising as they choose a graduate school. In my experience, the only ones who make this complaint are those coming from a Christian University setting. To me that begs the question, of how well places of higher learning in our own tradition are preparing their students to think critically as scholars who are also members of the Kingdom of God? Are they being prepared to walk that line professionally, academically, and as scholars? Are they being forced to wrestle through differing viewpoints, while maintaing their orthodoxy?
Like a former commentator mentioned, these students are too quick to include their religious perspectives in their personal statements, even if it has nothing to do with the field in which they are pursuing study (ie-not Seminary, religion, languages, or textual criticism).

Rick,
I think we have two levels of worldview collision – and they relate to scholarship differently.
One takes secular materialism as the foundation and declares that God does not exist or he never works in “supernatural” manner.
One says God does exist and he can, and evidence suggests, does interact with his creation.
This is a fundamental collision, it exists. Scholarship will be influenced by this foundation. I’ve read Crossan and he makes no bones – resurrection is not literal because supernatural does not occur. We will never agree because there is a foundational problem. I enjoy reading scholars who approach the subject from a position of faith in God.
But there is another level that comes into play – and this is where the inerrancy debates and the kind of thinking I was referring to in my comment above comes into play. Does the thinking hold water or is it a set of strange contortions to fit a definition of scripture? Does the thinking actually adequately account for and wrestle with the evidence? Many of the problems with “evangelical” scholarship simply strikes me as unreasonable contortion. This is not scholarship. And it does not even serve the church well.

Somewhere in this conversation it seems that Evangelical expect (or at least, hope for) God to utilize the structures and epistemologies of the modern university for the sake of the kingdom. Not to deride the academy, but does the church so desperately need the academy and its conferring of degrees for the sake of the church’s mission? Are too many people wanting to live a life where they get paid for teaching theology and the Bible? Come on, evangelicals. Quit being surprised that the world holds to a different story. Quit thinking that initials after one’s name is what will change the world. Begin trusting that communities that live and believe the good news will transform the world around them.

When I read this article, I immediately thought of George Ladd and his experience of be ignored by the academic community. Even though his work was greatly influential in the evangelical world (and greatly influenced me) he was crushed by his rejection in the larger academic community. I would recommend John A. D’Elia’s book on Ladd (see #18).
When I graduated from Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary (now Denver Seminary) in 1979, one of my classmates was accepted into the U of Chicago’s PhD program, working in New Testament. Unfortunately, she found out upon arrival she was not welcomed and they expected her to, and ended up transferring into Church History where Martin Marty made her very welcomed.

Alan K-
“Not to deride the academy, but does the church so desperately need the academy and its conferring of degrees for the sake of the church’s mission?”
You ask a very good question. This topic, over the past two days, has caused me to rethink that.
As Scot said,
“I have to begin with this: American evangelicals have an identity problem. Too many think acceptance at the University proves they are legitimate scholars; too many strive to be approved by the American University so they can consider themselves real scholars.”
RJS wrote:
” think we have two levels of worldview collision – and they relate to scholarship differently….This is a fundamental collision, it exists. Scholarship will be influenced by this foundation.”
Then should not our focus mainly be on improving existing Christian institutions (not that there are not some already out there)?
To do so would kill two birds with one stone: it would improve Evangelical scholarship and it would open up opportunities for students and scholars from those institutions.
But it does goes back to this question: Why we are so worried about acceptance at secular universities?
How is Notre Dame able to do it so successfully (academics, not football :^)?

Why we are so worried about acceptance at secular universities?
To some degree, at least, evangelical scholars see their work as part of the larger evangelical enterprise, which means that we hope that secular authorities will see our work and be influenced to come to Christ because of it. There is an understanding that, if we are too insular, or use methods that no secular authority considers viable, that we fail in our evangelical mission.
Obviously, this is too simplistic. I would argue that there will always be a tension between evangelical impulse and secular acceptance. However, we construct a clear division between these two at our own peril.

Rick #27 –
To your last point, about Notre Dame, I’ve been thinking about that too.
Now I am sure there are people on this thread who know way more about American religious history than I do. But my understanding (open to correction!) is that the historical basis of Catholic institutions is very different from evangelical colleges/universities. Catholic colleges and universities came out of a desire to show that we can be just as good, just as competent as the rest of the world. A lot of evangelical institutions started off as Bible colleges steeped in a tradition of being opposed to “the world.” We’ve all come a long way, granted, but history makes a difference.
Also, Notre Dame doesn’t require its faculty to adhere to a statement of faith. Alvin Plantinga and Mark Noll are there, after all, but their Catholic equivalents could never go to Calvin or Wheaton. And it isn’t just a question of interdenominational relations — there are plenty of faculty who aren’t religious at all or are not Christian.
There are a small handful of Catholic colleges that do have a statement of faith requirement similar to what is de rigeur at Wheaton, Calvin, Gordon, etc. But they are far on the right fringe (which may be the saving remnant — my point is not that they are wrong but that they are rare). Setting those aside, the most rigorous proposals I’ve come across say that Catholic affiliation should be a highly valued criterion in hiring until the faculty is maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of the faculty is active practicing Catholic. And those are controversial. Anyone want to imagine what would happen if Wheaton said it wanted about 1/3 to 1/2 of its faculty to be active practicing Christians?
So I guess I would say that for a variety of reasons, there is way more similarity between Notre Dame’s project and secular universities than there is between confessional colleges’ project and secular universities. So it is not surprising that Notre Dame’s scholarship is more respected.
I should have stopped talking a while ago …

Kristen-
Good thoughts.
“Catholic colleges and universities came out of a desire to show that we can be just as good, just as competent as the rest of the world. A lot of evangelical institutions started off as Bible colleges steeped in a tradition of being opposed to “the world.” We’ve all come a long way, granted, but history makes a difference.”
True, although some of our Ivy League schools did start off with that balance displayed by Catholic colleges and universities. Consider the fact that none other than Jonathan Edwards led one such university.
You are right about Notre Dame’s faculty, although (unless this has changed) a Catholic much teach the theological courses. Someone please correct me if I am wrong or if this has changed.

i think Tony’s assessment of the past environment at Vandy is correct.
10 years ago there was a prof. who offered a class on Barth. only 5 people took the class. Barth was seen as the enemy.
By my time there these last couple years, that same prof. offered the class and there were almost 30 people in the class.
When you consider an incoming class at Vandy runs about 90 people in any given year, that’s a significant shift.
There is a real attempt at Vandy to hear a plurality of voices and to come to terms with what they represent as each student develops their own theological voice…

Rick,
I am not expert on Notre Dame (although I have and have had friends on the faculty (one Jewish)) – but this is on the description of the theology department:

Notwithstanding our identification with the Catholic tradition, we comprise a wide range of religious perspectives. While the department’s central core is the Catholic tradition, the department is deliberately ecumenical; we are committed to dialogue with one another’s traditions because theology can no longer be done adequately in a narrowly denominational manner.

This is a department that offers MDiv, M.T.S., and Ph.D.
I think we need more schools like Notre Dame – where it is a safe environment for a faith perspective and the integration of faith and learning, while allowing and dialoging with a diversity of opinions.
Evangelical schools with a tight stance don’t serve us well as we move forward.

Do you think that seminaries and/or Christian colleges contribute to this situation? More specifically, who would such a college/seminary be more likely to hire (everything else being equal): an evangelical with a Ph.D. from a mainline school, or an evangelical with a Ph.D. from a well-respected seminary?

Matt, yes, I do. They idealize university PhDs because their identity gets tied to that education. In some ways, this goes back to the intellectualist thrust of the neo-evangelical movement of the late 50s and 60s.
I think your options are “evangelical with PhD from university” vs. “evangelical with PhD from evangelical seminary.” No question: the former. The best chance of a PhD getting a job from the latter may be getting a dissertation published and acquiring good reviews.

Matt and Scot,
This is true -no doubt.
But in any field the chance of getting a job is closely tied to getting a degree from one of the “right” schools. This is a somewhat diffuse list, and varies by discipline, but it is a universal. It is absolutely true in my field. Roughly half of us have a pedigree that contains one of about five schools – the other half is scattered.
I know from talking to others in other fields that it works at earlier levels as well – if a discipline requires a master’s and if the master’s is traditionally done at a different institution – then the school counts.
This isn’t unique to BTS disciplines. My nephew thought and planned to get a master’s in a “correct” program to be in good position to get into one of the right schools for a Ph.D. so that he will be in position to get a job. When I looked for a graduate school this was one of the top considerations – to go to the “best” program I could get into (also considering fit to my interests).
So – I think that there is a bias against evangelicals and this plays a role, but anyone thinking about an academic career in any field should scout the lay of the land and plan accordingly.
Now we can discuss whether this bias (the general one, not the one against evangelicals) is right and reasonable.

With regard to the issue raised by Matt (#33) about Christian colleges’ and universities’ hiring practices, there are at least a couple of other factors to consider. Since I teach at a Christian college and have served on hiring committees, I can speak to these factors as an insider.
To put the “bottom line” on top: I actually think a lot of hiring committees at Christian colleges, if faced with a choice between two strong candidates, one with a university Ph.D. and one with a seminary Ph.D., would probably make the decision based on factors other than the degree-granting institution. I suspect that personality/collegiality, perceived mission fit, and other “intangibles” would actually swing the hiring decision.
Now, having said that, I also know that at Pepperdine we would also take the two following factors into consideration.
1. There is a widespread perception, to which biblical scholars and theologians are not immune, and which may or may not be justified, that seminaries are better at preparing ministers and universities are better at preparing academics. For example, if we were hiring in biblical studies or theology, we would probably have a bias toward a university degree over a seminary degree. However, if we were hiring in ministry or missions or homiletics, we’d have a bias toward a seminary degree. It might not be appropriate to generalize this to all seminaries vs. all universities, but this bias certainly operates on us. Sometimes this distinction isn’t terribly meaningful. For example, my Ph.D. is from Southern Methodist University’s Dedman College, not from its Perkins School of Theology, but most of my professors actually held appointments in Perkins, not Dedman. At universities that also house seminaries, the distinction may be more of a bookkeeping issue than anything else. Of course, Perkins is hardly evangelical, but that’s beside the point; I think, for example, that a Pepperdine search committee would probably be more likely to hire a missiologist with a Ph.D. from Fuller than a New Testament scholar with a Ph.D. from Fuller, just to keep our examples within SoCal.
2. Some hiring decisions are undoubtedly swayed not just by the hiring committee’s own judgments, but the hiring committee’s perceptions of the perceptions/biases held by the college’s constituents, and those constituents include the general public, accrediting agencies, and–let’s face it–U.S. News & World Report. These three constituencies all value university degrees higher than seminary degrees. Let’s face it: if a college can (without lying!) claim that “80% of our Biblical Studies and Theology faculty hold terminal degrees from the top 50 American universities,” that will go over better with the three constituencies I listed than would “80% of our Biblical Studies and Theology faculty hold terminal degrees from some really fine seminaries.” Like it or not, rightly or not, meaningful or not, things like this have a very significant impact on a college’s applicant pool.
I do not mean, by this post, to argue for any particular “how things ought to be.” I am trying to describe “how things really are” to further the discussion.