Yale Divinity School

History

Theological education was the earliest academic purpose of Yale University. When Yale College was founded in 1701, it was as a college of religious training for Congregationalist ministers in Connecticut Colony, designated in its charter as a school "wherein Youth may be instructed in the Arts & Sciences who through the blessing of Almighty God may be fitted for Publick employment both in Church & Civil State." A professorship of divinity was established in 1746. In 1817, the occupant of the divinity chair, Eleazar Thompson Fitch, supported a student request to endow a theological curriculum, and five years later a separate Yale Theological Seminary was founded by the Yale Corporation. In the same motion, Second Great Awakening theologian Nathaniel William Taylor was appointed to become the first Dwight Professor of Didactic Theology. Taylor was considered the "central figure" in the school's founding, and he was joined in 1826 by Josiah Willard Gibbs, Sr., a scholar of sacred languages and lexicographer Chauncey A. Goodrich in 1839. A dedicated student dormitory, Divinity College, was completed on the college's Old Campus in 1836, but the department had no permanent classrooms or offices until several years after the end of the American Civil War.

After a significant period of enrollment decline, the school began fundraising from alumni for new faculty and facilities. Divinity Hall was constructed on the present-day site of Grace Hopper College between 1869 and 1871, featuring two classroom wings and a chapel. Around the time of the new campus' construction came the arrival of new faculty, including James M. Hoppin, George Edward Day, George Park Fisher, and Leonard Bacon. The first Bachelor of Divinity (B.D.) was conferred in 1867, and the department became a separate School of Divinity in 1869. The school remained across from Old Campus until 1929, when a new campus was constructed on the northern edge of the university campus, at the top of Prospect Hill.

Berkeley Divinity School affiliated with Yale Divinity School in 1971, and in the same year the university replaced the B.D. with a Master of Divinity (M.Div.) program. While Berkeley retains its Episcopal Church connection, its students are admitted by and fully enrolled as members of Yale Divinity School. The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University, a division of the Divinity School, maintains a large collection of primary source materials about Jonathan Edwards, a 1720 Yale alumnus. The Yale Institute of Sacred Music (ISM) is jointly-affiliated with the Divinity School and School of Music. It offers programs in choral conducting, organ performance, voice, and church music studies, and in liturgical studies and religion and the arts.

Deans

When the Divinity school was first established in 1822, there were no deans, instead the presidents of Yale presided over Divinity School faculty meetings. This occurred during the preseidencies of both Jeremiah Day (1817–1846) and Theodore Dwight Woolsey (1846–1871).

Beginning with the appointment of George Edward Day in 1888, there has been a dean of the Yale Divinity School. Gregory Sterling, a New Testament scholar and Church of Christ pastor, has been the dean of the divinity school since 2012, succeeding New Testament scholar Harold W. Attridge, who returned to teaching as a Sterling Professor upon completing two five-year terms as dean. The leaders of the affiliated seminaries are Andrew McGowan, Dean and President of Berkeley Divinity School, and Sarah Drummond, Founding Dean of Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School. Organist Martin Jean is director of the Institute of Sacred Music.

Academics

Yale Divinity School is accredited by the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada (ATS) and approved by ATS to grant the following degrees:

Master of Divinity (M.Div.)

Master of Arts in Religion (M.A.R.)

Master of Sacred Theology (S.T.M.)

Campus

When the department was organized as a school in 1869, it was moved to a campus across from the northwest corner of the New Haven Green composed of East Divinity Hall (1869), Marquand Chapel (1871), West Divinity Hall (1871), and the Trowbridge Library (1881). The buildings, designed by Richard Morris Hunt, were demolished under the residential college plan and replaced by Calhoun College, now known as Grace Hopper College.

In 1929, the trustees of the estate of lawyer John William Sterling agreed that a portion of his bequest to Yale would be used to build a new campus for the Divinity School. The Sterling Divinity Quadrangle, completed in 1932, is a Georgian-style complex built at the top of Prospect Hill. It was designed by Delano & Aldrich and modeled in part on the University of Virginia.

A $49-million renovation of Sterling Divinity Quadrangle was completed in 2003. Sterling Divinity Quadrangle contains academic buildings, Marquand Chapel, and graduate student housing for YDS students.

Yale Divinity School is currently planning the construction of the Living Village, a zero-waste, sustainable living community that will house 155 YDS students.

Notable alumni

Government and politics

John D. Baldwin (B.D. 1834), U.S. Representative for Massachusetts's 8th congressional district

Lois Capps (M.A.R. 1964), U.S. Representative for California's 24th congressional district

Walter Holden Capps (M.A.R. 1963; Ph.D. 1965), U.S. Representative for California's 22nd congressional district

William Sloane Coffin (B.D. 1956), Central Intelligence Agency officer

Chris Coons (M.A.R. 1992), U.S. Senator from Delaware

John Danforth (M.Div. 1963), U.S. Senator from Missouri

Walter Fauntroy (B.D. 1958), U.S. Representative for the District of Columbia

Robert Bernard Hall (B.D. 1835), U.S. Representative for Massachusetts's 1st congressional district

Gary Hart (B.D. 1961), U.S. Senator from Colorado

Guy Vander Jagt (B.D. 1955), U.S. Representative for Michigan's 9th congressional district

James A. Joseph (B.D. 1963), U.S. Ambassador to South Africa

Sen Katayama (Attended), founder of the Japanese Communist Party

James T. Laney (B.D. 1954), U.S. Ambassador to South Korea

Ernest W. Lefever (B.D. 1945), foreign affairs expert and founder of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Academia

Kate Bowler (M.A.R. 2005), academic and writer

Donald Eric Capps (B.D. 1963; S.T.M. 1965), scholar of Pastoral Theology

Harvey Cox (B.D. 1955), theologian and Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School

Raymond Culver, (B.D. 1920), President of Shimer College

David F. Ford (S.T.M.), Regius Professor of Divinity Emeritus at the University of Cambridge

Milton Gaither (M.A.R. 1996), historian of American education

Serene Jones (M.Div. 1985), President of Union Theological Seminary

Candida Moss (M.A.R. 2002), Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham

Reinhold Niebuhr (B.D. 1914, M.A. 1915), philosopher and public intellectual

Douglas Oldenburg (S.T.M. 1961), President Emeritus of Columbia Theological Seminary

George Rupp (B.D. 1967), 18th President of Columbia University

John Silber (Attended 1947-1948), 7th President of Boston University

Rena Karefa-Smart (B.D. 1945), first Black woman to graduate from Yale Divinity School

Rufus W. Stimson (B.D., 1897), Professor of English and President of the University of Connecticut

Religious leadership

William Ragsdale Cannon (B.D. 1940; Ph.D. 1942), Bishop of the United Methodist Church

Roy Clyde Clark (B.D. 1944), Bishop of the United Methodist Church

Michael Curry (M.Div. 1978), 27th Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church

Paul Vernon Galloway (B.D. 1929), Bishop of The Methodist Church

Allen Kannapell (M.Div. 1997), Suffragan Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of the Great Lakes

Boise Kimber (S.T.M.), president of the National Baptist Convention

James Massa (M.A.R. 1985), Auxiliary Bishop of Brooklyn

Other

Diogenes Allen (B.D. 1959)

Ian Barbour (B.D. 1956)

Gregory A. Boyd (M.Div. 1982)

Will D. Campbell (B.D. 1952)

Orishatukeh Faduma (B.D. 1894, graduate study 1895)

Frederick William Chapman (A.M. 1832), Congregational minister, educator, and genealogist

Zebulon Crocker

Tom Vaughn (Doctorate in theology), jazz musician and Episcopal priest

Leroy Gilbert (S.T.M. 1979)

Lisa Grabarek, Baptist preacher and teacher

Stanley Hauerwas (B.D. 1965)

Richard B. Hays (M.Div. 1977)

Sallie McFague (B.D. 1959)

Otis Moss III (M.Div. 1995), Pastor of Trinity Church, Chicago

Richard T. Nolan (M.A. 1967)

Ashley Null (M.Div., S.T.M.), Anglican theologian

William H. Poteat (B.D. 1944)

Clark V. Poling (1936)

Peter L. Pond, human rights activist and philanthropist.

Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. (attended 1895–1896)

V.C. Samuel (PhD. 1957), Theologian and Historian.

Notable past professors

Former faculty: 20th–21st centuries

Roland Bainton

Brevard Childs

Rebecca Chopp

Adela Yarbro Collins, 2000–2015

Jerome Davis

Margaret Farley

Hans Wilhelm Frei

Serene Jones

David Kelsey

Kenneth Scott Latourette

George Lindbeck

Sallie McFague

Douglas Clyde Macintosh

Abraham Malherbe

Reinhold Niebuhr

H. Richard Niebuhr

Henri Nouwen, 1971–1981

Liston Pope (Dean)

Letty M. Russell (1974–2001)

Lamin Sanneh

Emilie Townes

Denys Turner

Nicholas Wolterstorff

Henry Burt Wright (1877-1923)

Former faculty: 19th century

Lyman Beecher

George Park Fisher

Current faculty

Harold W. Attridge

William Barber II

Teresa Berger

John J. Collins

Bruce Gordon

Margaret A. Farley

Margot Elsbeth Fassler

John E. Hare

Jennifer A. Herdt

Martin Jean

Willie James Jennings

David Kelsey

Andrew McGowan

Teresa Morgan

Sally M. Promey

Bryan D. Spinks

Harry S. Stout

Kathryn Tanner

Linn Tonstad

Jacqueline Vayntrub

Miroslav Volf

Tisa Wenger

Christian Wiman

Adela Yarbro Collins