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The Idea of the University of Chicago Divinity School

By Richard A. Rosengarten, Associate Professor of Religion and Literature | March 25, 2026

Professor Rosengarten by a window in the third floor lecture hall

I am grateful for Dean Robinson’s invitation to reflect on the University of Chicago Divinity School at this historic marker. It has prompted me to return to some of my own earlier attempts in my years as dean of students and then as dean to exegete the School for new faculty, prospective students, the wider University community, and donors. In those conversations, I found myself returning again and again to what I called “the idea of the Divinity School.”

I was drawing, certainly a bit grandly but also needfully, on John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University (1851) and Alfred North Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas (1933). While Newman and Whitehead are pretty far afield in sensibility from the American Baptists who were responsible for the founding of the Divinity School (much less of a university on the German model, indeed one in which Divinity was its first professional school), the notion that a School might represent “an idea,” and that its pursuit of that idea is its ongoing adventure, were attractive to me and descriptive of the history I sought to represent. In what follows, I hope to explain why, first by sketching a brief but, I think accurate and, I hope, compelling history of the School’s fundamental commitment (its “idea”) and then by showing how that commitment has played out (its “adventure”).

At its founding in 1892, the Divinity School’s research and teaching were understood to be education in shared service to two distinct but complementary public lives: ministry in Christian churches and teaching in colleges and universities. One faculty and one curriculum in the shared service of these professions has been the School’s structural hallmark and is central to its ethos.

In late-nineteenth-century America, this complementarity was not, at least at the level of institutional structure, particularly novel. Most divinity schools and indeed some of the larger free-standing seminaries offered both ministry and doctoral programs. In the ensuing decades, however, Chicago’s faculty and curriculum quickly began to distinguish itself by sponsoring a wider range of approaches to religion than many of these institutions. Across the ensuing twentieth century, these included (I list initiating faculty, omitting, for the sake of brevity, successors): New Testament and Early Christian Literature (hosted in the Division of the Humanities but staffed entirely by Divinity School faculty such as Edgar Goodspeed); American Religious History (William Warren Sweet, Sidney Mead); the History of Religions (Joachim Wach, Mircea Eliade); the contribution of process philosophy to theology (Henry Nelson Weiman, Bernard Loomer); the “dialogical fields” of Theology and Literature (Nathan Scott, Preston Roberts), Ethics and Society (Gibson Winter, Al Pitcher), and Religion and Psychological Studies (Don S. Browning, Peter Homans); and the philosophy of religions “pursued in a properly comparative way” (Paul Griffiths).

Curricular innovations such as these happened neither in this number nor in this range at Chicago’s sibling institutions. The introduction of these new adventures with ideas about religion was taken to be of equal importance to the already well-established curriculum of Bible, History of Christianity, and Theology. Implementing these innovations as areas of study, the Divinity School dedicated faculty appointments to them, resulting in curricula, doctoral exams, and the writing of dissertations. These were understood to be of potential benefit to the entirety of the School’s students, whether they intended to pursue religious leadership or education as a career. They were adventurous enlargements of “the idea.”

The School’s formulations of these new approaches usually deployed the word “religion” in lieu of “Christianity” or specified the use of “Christianity” in some historical and/or dialogical modality. A subtle but insistent note of The Divinity School’s adventures with its idea has been to maintain the focalizing presence of scholarship on the Christian tradition while recognizing and acting on the recognition that this focus is tenable only if it opens out into the study of religion as a human phenomenon, and to the study of religions. David Tracy captured this ethos well in the opening page of Dialogue with the Other: “I believe that we are fast approaching the day when it will not be possible to attempt a Christian systematic theology except in serious conversation with the other great ways. But that conversation needs the further test of an explicitly and lengthy systematic work.”

While not novel in 1892, the initiating idea of one faculty and one curriculum in service of academy and church (or church and academy) was tested in the early 1970s with the emergence of a distinction between “religious studies” and “theology”—or, to put the point more sharply, with the advent of the claim that the study of religion had been restricted and even warped by its theological influence. Whether this test was cause or correlate, in this decade, nearly all the university-related divinity schools either chose to move their doctoral programs into their university’s division of the humanities or arts and sciences. At these institutions, there were now two (sometimes overlapping) faculties and two (rarely overlapping) curricula in the study of religion. And they awarded an ever-increasing proportion of their doctoral degrees in the study of religion not through their divinity schools but through another academic unit. In turn, their divinity schools became responsible chiefly for the classical ministry curriculum and for a master’s program in religion or (more commonly) in theological studies.

Under the leadership of Joseph M. Kitagawa (successor to Wach and Dean from 1970-1980), aided and abetted by University provost (and economist!) D. Gale Johnson, Chicago was the exception that proved the rule regarding this shift. Ph.D. studies in religion at the University of Chicago remained under the auspices of the Divinity School and its faculty.

The Kitagawa-led Divinity School’s fidelity to this founding commitment has fostered a situation in which the School has become increasingly anomalous in the American academy. (The always alert Martin E. Marty, successor to Sweet and Mead in American religious history, once described it as being “creatively out of step.”) As an eyewitness to accreditation visits to the Divinity School from the Association of Theological Schools in 1992, 2002, 2012, and 2022, I have seen firsthand the cognitive dissonance the world of theological education experiences when it looks closely at what goes on at Swift Hall. Similar examples of perplexity can be found in departments of religion and religious studies, which find themselves able to make common cause with some parts of The Divinity School’s curriculum but not others. Across programs devoted to scholarship on religion, what I am calling The School’s “idea” and its ensuing adventure remains counterintuitive, intellectually and/or institutionally, for many of our peers.

Do not imagine for a second that challenges to the founding commitment have been solely matters of external perception, or that this continuity has been easily maintained in a consistent form inside Swift Hall. An immediate consequence of Kitagawa’s decision to retain the Ph.D. program within the Divinity School was that the faculty proved recalcitrant to follow other institutions in shifting its programmatic commitment to education for religious leadership from a four-year Doctor of Ministry to a three-year Master of Divinity. By the early 1980s, the ministry program was severely under-enrolled. Chicago’s commitment to education for ministry came into serious question. This required a decade-long effort to repair.

Less easily captured empirically, but enduring: I suspect that one could pick at random any single year or couple of years in the School’s history and identify faculty holding diametrically opposed views about the tenability of this founding idea. Many of those oppositions have been productive; some have not. I would argue that the Divinity School’s faculty and its commitment to an adventurous idea about scholarship on religion have been strengthened and enriched by its inclusion on the same faculty of such exemplary but differing colleagues as Paul Griffiths, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Bruce Lincoln. A rebuttal, or at least animadversion, would be the less happy but equally true notation that at least three distinguished faculty left the School due to tensions about this balance, to the School’s diminishment.

That said, for all its travails—some constant, some of a particular moment—the commitment at the founding of the School to this idea, later preserved by Kitagawa against the prevailing currents, has proven to be the School’s ongoing adventure for over a century.

On the basis of this admittedly brief but I hope useful sketch of the Divinity School’s adventure, I propose that its history can and should be told from the perspective of this “idea” (warts and all). In closing, then, some rubrics toward what I have termed “The idea of the Divinity School,” or—what amounts to the same thing—what constitutes “scholarship on religion:”

A divinity school’s cardinal commitment is scholarly excellence in the study of religion. That commitment is best served by meeting, and optimally by exceeding, the university’s standards for such excellence.
When realized, such excellence in scholarship and teaching offers an indispensable foundation for a common weal that embraces at once the academy, religious institutions, and wider public life.
So realized, that commitment demonstrates and compels the recognition of religion as a central human phenomenon that complementarily encompasses thought and action, or, in one recurring argot, theory and practice.
From this follows challenging yet crucial recognitions about the role of religion in public life and the experience of pedagogy in the study of religion. For public life, religion has been, is, and will be a force for good or for ill in the world (per the formulation of former Dean W. Clark Gilpin). For pedagogy, the task of studying religion has been, is, and will be like playing with fire—at once a source of heat and light that also has the capacity to burn (per the formulation of former Dean Margaret M. Mitchell).
At its best, the University of Chicago Divinity School cultivates and promotes equipoise about religion and its institutions. It posits that the best scholarship on religion thus embraces and sees no inherent conflict between critique and retrieval. Indeed, it is suspicious of scholarship on religion that evinces one absent the other. The adventure’s bumpy moments might be understood to occur when this balance has been upset.

The phrases “demonstrate and compels,” “a force for good or for ill,” and “playing with fire” underscore the Divinity School’s recognition of the consequentiality of scholarship on religion. To tell the truth about religion involves the recognition that such telling is not a given, whether the context is the academy, the general public, or a particular religious institution. This can be initially disillusioning, even chastening. It can also be a clarion call for those who care about the truth and, in particular, the truths that the religions offer the world.

Read additional faculty reflections upon Swift Hall's centennial: