To Count Our Days: A History of Columbia Theological Seminary by Erskine Clarke

Abstract

Reviewed by: To Count Our Days: A History of Columbia Theological Seminary by Erskine Clarke Lee Ann Caldwell To Count Our Days: A History of Columbia Theological Seminary. By Erskine Clarke. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. xvi, 369. $49.99, ISBN 978-1-61117-996-5.) In To Count Our Days: A History of Columbia Theological Seminary, Erskine Clarke displays the same meticulous research and captivating narrative style that won him the Bancroft Prize for Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (New Haven, 2005). This study of Columbia Theological Seminary is more than a chronicle of the economic, curricular, faculty, and service components seen in institutional histories. While those topics receive adequate attention, Clarke also examines the larger story of Southern Presbyterianism in the context of southern history, from the contradictions of slavery and Jim Crowism to the growing challenges to both the institution and traditional religion in the face of cultural modernity and consumer capitalism. As Clarke states in the preface, he hopes that even those without "personal connections" to the seminary "will find in the history of Columbia a story that intrigues and that helps to inform their understanding of southern history with all its ironies and of the religious life of the American people with all its complex intermingling of peoples and traditions, of light and deep shadows" (p. ix). In its beginnings in an antebellum mansion in Columbia, South Carolina, the seminary trained "gentlemen theologians" to be knowledgeable in Greek and Latin, science, history, and moral philosophy (p. x). By the 2010s the seminary, on an expansive campus in Decatur, Georgia, since 1927, served a much more diverse constituency as it sought to provide education appropriate for the twenty-first century while navigating cultural fault lines in both the church and society. In the almost two hundred years in between, the seminary faced the trauma of Civil War, the emergence of Lost Cause mythology, the controversies provoked by evolution, periods of great poverty and great growth, and the growing secularism and materialism of the modern world. [End Page 914] A particularly strong theme throughout the book is racism and its impact on the church, the seminary, and the people of the South. Chapter 2, entitled "Slaves: In the Shadows of Columbia," begins, "Hidden in the shadows of the seminary's history, waiting to tell their stories, were black men and women whose labors, sorrows, and dark bodies provided the financial foundations for Columbia Seminary and its development" (p. 15). Clarke gives voice to those enslaved servants who cooked, cleaned, and kept the seminary functioning day-to-day. He also tackles how erudite, religious men explained their hierarchical society and, recognizing "slavery as that which 'so radically and fundamentally distinguishes' the North and South," were willing to leave the Presbyterian church to form their own southern version and to secede from their country to maintain the racial status quo (p. 73). It was not the last time race led to disunion. The civil rights movement in the 1960s pressured white Christians to reexamine racial assumptions and southern norms. Clarke points out that, as in the antebellum era, most nonwhites on the seminary campus were those who worked there, and, "like those who had gone before them, they kept their own world and their own perspectives largely hidden from the whites who thought they knew them so well" (p. 221). Ultimately, the controversy over desegregation in the southern church helped lead to another breakaway in 1973. Columbia Theological remained in the fold and in 1983 was part of the reunion of Northern and Southern Presbyterians in the Presbyterian Church (USA). In the last chapters Clarke examines the seminary's efforts to find its place in a rapidly changing, diverse, individualistic, and secular society. The dilemmas are those facing our era. Clarke finishes with many questions, including about the very place of the institution's history in its present and future. This thought-provoking, engaging study by an insightful scholar and talented wordsmith is well worth a read. Lee Ann Caldwell Augusta University Copyright © 2020 Southern Historical Association