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Hanauma Bay is a snorkeler's heaven. Hawaii's colorful fish species can only be discovered by "being there," a plunge into the waters with mask and air tube. This book, well-named Being There, is a study in snorkeling, the results of a sustained swim in the underwater life of Protestant seminaries.
A team of church social scientists chose two species to track: two seminaries, generically labeled "Evangelical" and "Mainline," understood to be in the "streams" of evangelicalism and mainline Protestantism. The identity of the schools, both of which are described as large, secure, and at the center of their respective constituencies, is disguised. Being Thereis a search for subsurface phenomena, "cultures" below the level of curriculum or conventional self-descriptions. Culture so understood is made up of "shared (publicly available) symbolic forms—world-views, beliefs, ritual practices, ceremonies, art and architecture, languages, and patterns of everyday interaction," the "script" that guides the "actors." The researchers immersed themselves for three seminary years (1989-90 through 1991-92) in the culture of each school, living for periods on campus, attending classes, chapels, and trustee meetings, interviewing students, faculty, administration, and staff, eating in the cafeterias, visiting related congregations, and listening in on campus conversations and controversies.
While they are telling us about the institutions they observed, the researchers are also revealing something about the tacit culture that they themselves bring to the inquiry. As Don Browning points out elsewhere, the "congregational studies" movement (a significant influence on this project) is "theory-laden."1 Watching the watchers, therefore, is worth doing and here includes a look at the snorkelers from the bluff over Hanauma Bay, a perch formed from the reviewer's longtime acquaintance as a mainline outsider with the anonymous Evangelical Seminary (including a course taught there during the research period), some knowledge of Mainline, and decades on the faculties of two comparable mainline seminaries. But any confident talk of a higher perspective—at sea level or above—is forestalled by the reminder that "He who sits in the heavens laughs" (Ps. 2:4) at any claims to a God's-eye view.
and the Christian Century. Being Theremakes its case that a significant part of the preparation of the next generation of Protestant leadership happens in subsurface cultures—and their clashes—only hinted at by curriculum visibilities and institutional self-descriptions. The portraits of faculty, students, and administration, and the narratives of key events and disputes, make for fascinating reading and serve as effective disclosure devices for what the research teams believe to be the contours and substance of each culture. For seminary administrators, faculty, and trustees who hope to transform their institutions, Being There provides a good dose of realism about where change must happen and how difficult it will prove to be.
Especially valuable is the documentation of the diversity of an evangelical world that is often assumed by outsiders to be monolithic. The Modern Theology course at Evangelical, for example, gives students a firsthand encounter with major exponents of alternative views—an exposure to the "other" that has no counterpart in mainline seminaries, for all their rhetoric of inclusivity.
Along with appreciation for the insights of this work, two questions persist for this reviewer: (1) Do I recognize the Evangelical Seminary I know? (2) Is the picture of Mainline to be taken as indicative of mainline seminaries?
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