A SYMPOSIUM ON KEITH WATKINS: "CHRISTIANTHEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, INDIANAPOLIS: A HISTORY OF EDUCATION FOR MINISTRY"

Watkins is careful to note that the seminary's decision to identify itself as a seminary of the Disciples has not been without its costs. On the opening day of the fall semester in 1961, three years after the incorporation of Christian Theological Seminary, the final enrollment count for the day was under two hundred, less than half the number at the beginning of the last year of the Butler school. Many of the school's graduates from earlier years were Independents and could no longer recommend the school. The more liberal views and commitments of the faculty have not been universally appreciated in the generally conservative cultural climate of Indiana. Moreover, since the 1960s, more liberal or mainline denominations, including the Disciples, have declined numerically. This has taken its toll on the seminary's financial receipts. From 1982-1983 to 1986-1987, despite the increasing amount of money received from Disciples sources, the percentage of budget covered went down from 24.8 percent to 16.9 percent. Watkins adds that there is no reason to believe that support will come from other church bodies with large enrollments at CTS.

Watkins concludes that the seminary has always been poised in an uneasy tension between liberal and conservative elements in the churches, having to define and defend its identity and often alienating one part of its constituency while embracing another. As one reads his history, one gains an impression which Watkins puts into words only in his postscript: "Through all of these struggles, the Seminary has persisted in its mission to be faithful to God, loyal to the church, and useful to the larger human community." This book is of inestimable value to persons who would understand Christian Theological Seminary and the nature of the challenges before it. It will also be of value to anyone seeking to understand the history of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

Paul M. Blowers

Keith Watkins's timely chronicle of the life of the Butler School of Religion/Christian Theological Seminary and the development of its program of theological education is not only an important institutional history, but also a significant contribution to the critical study of higher education in the Stone-Campbell tradition. The School of Religion came into being precisely in the third and fourth generations of the Disciples of Christ, at a time when this body of churches was experiencing a wide of array of challenges related to the embrace of urban culture, and so too the emergence of competing voices clamoring either to resuscitate or to reinvent the Disciples "plea." In the wake of the Disciples Centennial in 1909, it was a time of significant rethinking of past achievement and mounting tension over the question of whether the pursuit of ecumenical Christian unity could be served by the "restoration" agenda. Into this picture in 1917, as Watkins shows, stepped the crucially important figure of Frederick Doyle Kershner, a "moderate" Disciple with a vision to develop a program of graduate ministerial education at Butler University that would seek to maximize the practical ("Applied Christianity") over the dogmatic: "more religion and less theology, more spirituality and less formalism" (Kershner quoted, p. 33). Kershner's genius, as it were, was a deep commitment both to the unique vocation of the Stone-Campbell movement and to the need for Disciples of Christ to rise to the challenge of the ecumenical movement.