Anatomy of a Decision

Dale Arthur Johnson (1936-2014), emeritus professor of church history at Vanderbilt Divinity School, died August 10, 2014 in Nashville after a long struggle with lymphoma and colon cancer. I knew Dale first as a teacher, dissertation advisor and housemate in Oxford during a period of sabbatical research for him and of dissertation research for me. After I emerged from Vanderbilt’s graduate program in 1987, Dale remained an interested and welcoming colleague and friend. This, my first venturing on what I anticipate may be a number of reflections about this good man and his influence concerns my initial encounter with him in the pages of the 1975 edition of the Vanderbilt Divinity School catalog.

The course of a life can turn on small incidents. Funny that I never told him about this. But seeing the photograph of Professor Dale A. Johnson in the Vanderbilt Divinity School catalog in the summer of 1975 triggered the internal motion that resulted in my enrollment at VDS later that same summer.

To be sure, other factors contributed to this choice. Encouraged by a Church of Christ mentor in whom I had developed an uncritical trust, I had cobbled together a complicated arrangement for funding my divinity school career abroad. It involved a group of Church of Christ congregations in Texas. I am pretty sure this “arrangement” had reality only in my own wishful dreamscape. Nothing was ever signed or even verbally agreed to. No memorandum of understanding between me and these congregations was ever drafted.

Amazingly, I had never even met the good people of the plains whom I nevertheless expected to make it possible for me and my young wife to travel to Scotland, where a bursary – the Scottish word for scholarship – was being held for me by New College, Edinburgh. There I would add to my stellar academic work labor as assistant to the previously mentioned mentor, a Church of Christ “missionary” from my home town in Texas who was being supported by churches in the States to persuade the working class Scots of Glasgow’s Castlemilk housing project to “obey the Gospel” and become members of the True Church. As Jack Paar would say, I kiddeth thou not.

That this ill-advised funding scheme fell through in mid-summer I regard now as great good fortune. But in the event I felt pressure to come up with plan B. At the eleventh hour – just two weeks before classes were to begin – Frank Gulley, then associate dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School, called to say that VDS wanted me as a student and could provide me with a partial scholarship that I could supplement with a job in the school’s work/study program.

I had applied to Vanderbilt Divinity School just before I got married in July, thinking it might be a good idea to have a backup plan in case the funding scheme for Scotland evaporated. It was just about the only prudential thing I managed to do that summer. A college professor I respected and admired – after four years toeing the ideological line at Abilene Christian College I was willing to say that about very few of my teachers – a teacher I admired who was a widely respected scholar of the Hebrew Bible had graduated from Vanderbilt’s Graduate Department of Religion with a Ph.D. When I encountered him one morning in the college bookstore, I asked him whether he would advise me to go to Vanderbilt Divinity School. Professor John T. Willis said yes, but added that I would need to be strong lest Vanderbilt cause me to lose my faith.

Hard upon Willis’s qualified endorsement, the scholarship offer from Dean Gulley was a major incentive. My parents had been clear that they would not provide financial support beyond my college graduation. At the time, this seemed reasonable enough. Besides, I was eager for the freedom and the challenges of being on my own in the world. Newly married at 22, I was – we were – now to sit on our own bottom financially. And we did. We both found jobs soon after unpacking our modest assemblage of belongings in a Nashville apartment.

Our friends Michael and Marceline had graduated, married and moved from Texas to Nashville earlier that same summer, both with intentions to go to Vanderbilt, he for divinity, she for law. It helped that college friends we knew and liked had already blazed a trail to the Athens of the South. We were callow, exuberant, curious and full of the sort of rebellious intellectual piss and vinegar that an upbringing in the Churches of Christ can create in some people. We drank a fair amount and tried exotic recipes on each other. Marceline smoked Gitanes, stopped shaving her armpits and discarded her bra. We went to foreign films at VU’s Sarratt Center and deconstructed them long into the night before turning our analytical prowess to post-Watergate politics. We went together – to a drive-in, of all unlikely venues – to witness the first porn movie any of us had ever seen, which, as far as I can remember, was Debbie Does Dallas.

But the photograph was before all that. Before John Willis’s endorsement, before the scholarship offer and before Michael and Marceline had moved to Nashville ahead of us, a 22-year-old with dreams of academic adventure (and maybe even glory) sat in the Abilene Christian College library thumbing through the faculty section of Vanderbilt’s divinity school catalog. And there was the fateful image, an unremarkable sidewise profile of Dale A. Johnson, B.A., M.A., Oxon. in the classroom.

My response to that photo and the copy paired with it was not irrational, but it was, I think, nonrational, intuitive and emotional. I did not make lists of pros and cons, using deductive reasoning to arrive at a conclusion about the best American seminary or divinity school for me. Prior to my enrollment, I had never visited Vanderbilt, nor, except for John Willis, had I ever known anyone who had graduated from the place. No, simply put, I saw the photo and the Latin abbreviation Oxon. – Oxoniensis, “of Oxford” – and knew that Vanderbilt was the place I wanted. Since I couldn’t have an Edinburgh University education, I later rationalized, I would go one better. I’d place myself under the tutelage of this young, earnest Vanderbilt professor who taught the religious history of modern Europe, America and nineteenth-century England and was Oxoniensis.

I resolved that Dale Johnson was going to become my ideal academic, my new hero.