Schools

Candler School of Theology

The difficulties confronting Methodist education at the start of the twentieth century were the labor pains for the birth of a new theology school in the Southeast. As the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, watched its flagship university, Vanderbilt, slip from its grasp, the church turned its attention to building a new university from the red clay and pine woods of Georgia. Having decided in March 1914 to look beyond Nashville for higher education, the Educational Commission of the denomination wasted no time. It decided by July to accept Asa Candler's gift of a million dollars and seventy-two acres of land in Atlanta; on September 23 of that year, the first division of the new university—its school of theology—opened the doors to its first students.

Housed at first in the Wesley Memorial Church on Auburn Avenue, the theology school was christened in February 1915 after the man who, more than any other, had guided the establishment of the new university—Bishop Warren Akin Candler, former president of Emory College and younger brother of benefactor Asa. The bishop himself had appointed the first members of the faculty, who numbered six Methodist clergy. Almost immediately the faculty attracted suspicion. According to one of them, Wyatt A. Smart, professor of biblical theology, Bishop Candler received a letter that fall from the principal of a prep school charging that all of the new faculty members taught "higher criticism," which he deemed heretical.

The bishop's reaction was interesting, [Smart goes on]. He called the faculty together, read the letter to them and then started around the circle, asking each man whether he was planning to teach anything that was not true! Dean [Plato Tracy] Durham interrupted, saying that the letter was not a criticism of the faculty, whose members had just arrived in Atlanta, and had not taught anything yet, but a criticism of the bishop for his incompetence in having selected such a faculty. The questioning of the faculty members immediately stopped. The bishop wrote the preparatory school brother a scorching letter expressing regret that the General Conference had not appointed that educator to found the school because of his self-confessed superior wisdom.

Meanwhile, construction on the Druid Hills campus had begun, and in 1916 the theology school moved into its new quarters in the Theology Building (now Pitts Theology Library), one of the first two academic buildings on that campus (the other being the Law Building, now Carlos Hall). Three decades later, after a kind of steady-state existence, the enrollment in the school skyrocketed following the end of World War II; Candler became the largest Methodist seminary in the country. The bishops of the Southeastern Jurisdiction of the denomination helped raise funds for a new building, which was dedicated as Bishops Hall in 1957. Gilbert Hall (1947) provided housing for married students and Wesley Hall (1951, later renamed Trimble Hall in honor of Dean Burton Trimble) housed single students. (Both residences have since been converted to undergraduate housing). In 1988 the old Clifton Court Apartments on Clifton Road were rededicated for use by the theology school as Turner Village.

From the beginning the school offered innovative and strong ministerial training for men (and women—the theology faculty voted in 1922 to begin admitting women, although no woman earned a divinity degree from Candler until 1938). But the deanship of William Ragsdale Cannon ('69H), from 1953 until his election as bishop in 1968, set the school on a course to have a deep impact in theological scholarship. Collaborating with the Emory College Department of Religion, the theology school formed the Graduate Division of Religion to offer the Ph.D. degree.

When the Candler School of Theology opened in 1914, the seminary owned fewer than 2,000 volumes in its library, largely donated by retired clergy and tended by untrained student volunteers. The next year the board authorized expenditure of "not exceeding two thousand dollars" for books and periodicals in the library. When the seminary moved to the Theology Building in Druid Hills in the summer of 1916, the library's assets totaled some $10,000. By the 1990s the annual acquisitions budget would approach $250,000, the collection would include nearly half a million volumes, and the paper in the library alone would be insured for $20 million. The library now holds genuinely rich research collections in Reformation history and theology, hymnody, African religious periodicals, English religious materials (including Wesleyana), and post-Reformation dissertations.

Source:  Hauk, Gary S.  A Legacy of Heart and Mind:  Emory Since 1836.