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The mainline clearly dominates the top endowments category, with Presbyterian institutions (Princeton, Columbia, Union in Virginia, Austin Presbyterian, McCormick, Louisville Presbyterian, and San Francisco) holding a remarkable 54 percent of the total (see "Endowments to the Top 20," p. 49).

What has been true in the pews has been true in the seminaries: the mainline schools get the money, but the evangelical ones get the people.

The conservative institutions have been investing their smaller resources in larger faculties. This increases the conservative presence in Christian intellectual life in two ways. Not only do these larger faculties allow the evangelical schools to reach more students; they also directly employ more Christian scholars, researchers, and writers. In other words, the conservative institutions are increasing the supply of conservative writers at the same time that they are increasing the supply of conservative readers.

In addition, a few leading mainline and Catholic institutions—especially Yale Divinity School, Duke Divinity School, and Notre Dame University—have hired some prominent evangelicals, such as Miroslav Volf, Richard Hays, and Nathan Hatch.

This has encouraged a strong group of students from Christian colleges, especially in history and philosophy, to pursue graduate work at such schools. This flow of students, in turn, appears to make these institutions mildly more conservative.

It also shows other mainline institutions that there's gold (and students) in them evangelical hills. This could prompt a further broadening of some uniformly liberal faculties.

In 1965, Lexington College of the Bible celebrated its centennial as the flagship seminary of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) by changing its name to Lexington Theological Seminary.

The Disciples denomination and much of the College of the Bible faculty grew more rigid in their orthodoxy as the 19th century gave way to the 20th. At the same time, a competing group in the school wanted to upgrade the prestige and the academic credentials of the faculty. Some of the new faculty members were, in keeping with the general trend of the academy, religious liberals.

The inevitable conflict came to a head in 1917. The heterodox views of one of these new faculty members led more conservative Disciples to demand a trial. The liberals argued that a heresy trial was "un-Disciples" since the movement had been founded on a creed of having no creeds. Faced with these choices, the administration blinked, and there was no trial.

As a result, the liberals stayed, the conservatives left to create Cincinnati Bible College, and the seminary became increasingly academic, respectable, and liberal, in a genteel southern way. In 1965 the events of 1917 still lived in school lore as the turning point that made Lexington what it was meant to be.

The neo-orthodox theological consensus of the 1960s gave way to process theology, feminist theology, liberation theology, and finally to theological pluralism. In the late 1980s, an eloquent new dean, Michael Kinnamon, made a strong case for an activist ecumenical theology for the school and the denomination. In Kinnamon's subsequent bid for the highest elective office in the Disciples of Christ, he ran aground over opposition to his support for homosexual ordination and stepped down as dean in 1998.

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March 11 2002, Vol. 46, No. 3