Young Seminary

Hardly since The Hunting of the Snark had there been such a quest. But by last week the University of Chicago's Federated Theological Faculty had found and installed its first permanent dean and was ready to start moving into place among the great seminaries of the U.S.

Dean Jerald Carl Brauer is only 33, and the faculty he heads includes seven members under 40 and 13 more under 50. Crop-headed Jerry Brauer, who looks more like a football coach than a theologian, intends to make teamwork the watchword among his young faculty. "The age of theological geniuses is past for a while," says the Rev. Dr. Brauer. "People like Niebuhr and Tillich do not appear in every generation, and no longer is any theological school going to have its predominance through giant men who tower over the others . . . There may be another Reinie Niebuhr hiding under a barrel somewhere, but I doubt it."

Ecumenical Symbol. Dean Brauer's team has had its troubles in getting organized. In 1943 four separate theological schools merged on the campus of the University of Chicago to become the Federated Theological Faculty: the University of Chicago Divinity School (Baptist), the Chicago Theological Seminary (Congregationalist), the Meadville Theological School (Unitarian), and the Disciples of Christ Divinity House. The resulting pool of teaching talent made up one of the largest single Protestant faculties in the U.S. Its tradition, exemplified by Bible Translator Edgar Johnson Goodspeed and liberal Theologian Shailer Mathews, was solidly liberal. But in 1943 theological liberalism looked like an outworn creed beside the fashionable stringencies of Niebuhr's neo-orthodoxy.

A massive transfusion of young blood was administered to replace aging faculty members. At first, the seminary's four denominations squabbled, but in 1953 the F.T.F. board took a deep breath, decided to get a unified curriculum and a permanent dean to be undisputed boss. After almost two years of rumors, feelers, overtures and turndowns (during which top Theologians Wilhelm Pauck and Daniel Williams left to join the competition at Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary), F.T.F. settled on its own Jerry Brauer. Says Dr. John Rylaarsdam, chairman of the committee that picked him: "He is a capable young scholar who furnishes as a Lutheran a real symbol for the ecumenical character of the school."

Flying Theologian. Dean Brauer's specialty: Puritanism, on which he is currently writing two books. A Midwesterner (from Fond du Lac, Wis.), Brauer studied at Northwestern Lutheran Theological Seminary in Minneapolis, took his Ph.D. in church history at F.T.F.. then spent two years at Union Theological teaching and serving as assistant to Theologian Paul Tillich. Puritan Expert Brauer sees a new kind of theological liberalism emerging at F.T.F. "It still asserts the creativeness and potentiality of the human spirit." he says, "but it is also much more aware of the limitations of the human spirit--for example, it takes sin seriously. It is not as optimistic as it used to be, but it is not as pessimistic as neo-orthodoxy."

Dean Brauer feels that his students must hear the neo-orthodox case. For that service, modern-minded F.T.F. relies on the airplane and on British Congregationalist Daniel Jenkins, who commutes to Chicago from just outside London for a quarter of each school year to teach ecumenical theology.

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