In the strange land of the modern university:
an interview with William Willimon
by Andrew W. McThenia

William Willimon has been Dean of the Chapel and Professor of Christian Ministry at Duke University for the past 16 years. His 1995 book, The Abandoned Generation, is one of the most thoughtful books on campus ministry written in the last decade; and his William Belden Noble lecture given on the 25th anniversary of Peter Gome's ministry at Harvard University, "Athens is a Long Way from Jerusalem but Cambridge is Even Farther," is a classic engagement of the powers at that institution. In addition to preaching each Sunday at the Duke Chapel, Willimon serves as a professor at the Divinity School. For the last several years he has taught a popular undergraduate seminar entitled "The Search for Meaning," which challenges the entire enterprise of the academy in this postmodern age.

In preparation for this interview I read, and in some cases reread, several of Willimon's books, including The Abandoned Generation, Resident Aliens: Life in a Christian Colony and Reading with Deeper Eyes. I also found copies of many sermons and lectures. I discerned a couple of important strains running through most of his writing. First, Willimon has spent a good deal of time thinking and writing about the arrogance of the modern university. For instance, at Harvard he argued that the modern university has such a limited view of the intellectual that it is no longer able to say who the God is it no longer believes in. "Indeed, when I read the purpose of this William Belden Noble Lecture, to lift up to Harvard Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, I was reminded of just how odd ... we Christians are. For us, the truth, that truth which the modern university is so touchingly inept in discussing, is a person, personal, a Jew from Nazareth named Jesus. ... That Harvard may not recognize our thinking as thinking is not surprising to us, considering the limits of today's flaccid secularists." Or on another occasion he said, "The modern world thinks of itself as open, broad-minded, enjoying unlimited vistas, when, in reality, it is a very closed, narrow way of living and looking. Many modern people have therefore come to believe that, in modernity, our world did not grow as was promised. Rather it shrank."

Second, he continues to insist that the church be the church and not be seduced by the tolerance of civic republicanism. He worries that the church has become too much like the Rotary Club, giving no theological rationale for people's lives. "We have replaced the intensity for religious experience with reasoned civility."

I was ready -- or so I thought.

The problem with trying to conduct an interview with Will Willimon is that his natural language is the parable. Although he is certainly capable of linear discourse, he refuses to engage in it. I think his manner of speaking reflects a continual engagement with the powers in the academy. To listen to an interview with Will is akin to hearing Seamus Heaney read his new translation of Beowulf. Between episodes of Beowulf's exploits, the action awaits the telling of an even more ancient story which looks backward to an even more distant past. When asked a question that seemingly might be answered in 25 words or less, I generally got a wonderful five- to 10-minute story which wove through the lives of his students, his own upbringing, circled around to include the questioner and finally, after gently challenging the premise of the question, he would stop to breathe. If one reads or listens carefully to this conversation, she is likely to conclude that the world has shifted a few degrees. Where you stand now is not quite so comfortable as it was before Will started speaking.

The competing ways of knowing in the modern university have, as much as possible, banished the notion of promise from the world. Willimon's vocation has been to find, nourish, and celebrate those small islands within the university which insist that the promises of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures are real and important. And that is what keeps hope alive. -- AWM

Were you raised as a Methodist?

Yes, my family lived on the same land in South Carolina since 1740 and we have a Methodist church that our family built and were patrons of over the years. By the time I came along we had moved into the church in Greenville. It looked like a First Methodist bank downtown. I have that background, but my family were farmers, school teachers, etc. I think probably a bigger factor in my life was that my father was in prison for embezzlement at the bank before I was born and, evidently, when he was paroled or let out, that was when I was conceived. My mother was 40 when I was born, my brother and sister were both in junior high and high school.

This is real Southern gothic. They had a family meeting and it was decided that it would be good for my father to just leave, that he had embarrassed the family. My mother was from North Dakota, they had met at college. His family told my mother, we'll look after you and your children. You will now be written into the will and Robert (my father) will be written out. And we will never mention his name again. And so he went away and I didn't meet him until I was a senior in college. So it's Faulknerian -- or probably closer to Flannery O'Conner.

I once spoke to Charles Colson's group in Washington and said, when I was asked to come up here I was thinking I don't know prisons, but then I thought, wait a minute, your daddy was in one, and then your savior was in one, and by my count at least maybe a third to half of the New Testament was written in jail. In fact I heard Paul telling me if you never had anybody in jail or you've never been in jail, you gonna miss a lot of the Gospel. There may be stuff you are going to miss because you don't know Greek, but you just won't get it when I say to you, I write this letter to you in chains. If you have never been in chains you are just gonna miss a lot of the letter and I'm prepared to say that there is something about our faith that goes together with jail.

I also remember in college meeting Carlisle Marney, who was a great Baptist prophet at Myers Park Baptist in Charlotte. We started talking and I said, I have this interest in religion, in God, and I've often wondered if Freud is right, am I projecting, is this my need for a father? And Marney said, "You are goddamn right it is! I've never met a preacher that was worth a damn that didn't have a bad daddy problem." And I said, don't you have problems with that? And he said, "God will use any handle he can get." I remember that being a moment of permission to pursue a religious vocation.

So, I went to Yale Divinity School and thought, I'll never come home again, this is great! I had moved to Nirvana. To hell with the South. I had a couple of experiences there, worked in the inner city on a mission project and I realized sin abounds everywhere, it's not just southerners. But I was a southerner and a child of the Vietnam era and somehow that has affected me. I just always believe the establishment is the problem. It's simple. And now, in the Methodist church the people who have power think of themselves as liberals. They think they are avant garde. They think themselves radicals. But they are in power. And it's my job to throw rocks at them and say terrible things about them.

I thought God had called me to spend my life in Methodist churches in South Carolina. And coming back to South Carolina, I really felt this great sense about coming home. They may be bastards but they are my bastards. They may be sinners but they are my sinners and it just felt good.

I loved being a parish pastor, but somebody from Duke showed up at my church one day saying, we need someone to teach worship. My bishop said, go on up there, you can stay a few years, and I did. But I didn't like teaching full-time, so I went back to South Carolina in an inner-city parish for four years of real hard work. While I was down there I got a call from Terry Sanford (the President of Duke) saying, we're looking for a chaplain up here. When he hired me, he said, "There are some things I like about you." I said what do you like? He said, "You've got your doctorate." And I said, well, how is that necessary for the job? He said, "It's not a damn bit, in one sense, but on the other hand you have a union card. You can stand toe-to-toe with these people." It turned out that Sanford was right.

[During a lunch break, as we walked the 200 yards from Willimon's office in the Chapel to the dining hall, he was stopped numerous times by students. It took us at least 15 minutes to make what would normally be a two- to three-minute amble.]

It is obvious that you have some rather close relationships with what appears to be a varied cross section of the Duke student community. What do you learn from the student community?

One thing I enjoy in working in the university is that you get close proximity to a new generation. One of the characteristics of this generation is that they've never known anything but the American dream that their parents thought they had to have, so that means that some of them offer a good critique of that. They've all had a car since they were 16, so they can say, why give your life to getting another car? And with 50 percent of them coming from separated homes, I find many saying, "I'm going to find somebody and I'm going to make it work. And I'm not going to be like my Dad, who blew his marriage for the company."

There are also some great moments, like when some young Christian is doing a critique of your discipleship and doesn't even intend to. One Sunday after church I had a group of graduate students to my house for a kind of picnic, and to play basketball, etc. One student says, "You realize I've been here seven years and I've never been in a faculty home until today?" And I said, that is outrageous. That is disgusting, that is wrong. I believe in having students over. And then he said, "You've got a great house here with the woods and everything," and I said, thank you. He said, "Let me ask you something, as a Christian do you feel at all uneasy to be living in this nice a house?" And I said, now I'm remembering why we don't have you people over here that much! Now, it's coming back to me. He said, "Oh gosh! I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable." I said, you know, that even makes it more devastating, you're not even intending to hurt me. You people, you all might make a Christian out of me yet, I don't know.

Everyone's always lamenting how apolitical students are. Now, this is a prejudiced Christian comment, but I say that if some of them don't believe that Bill and Hillary are gods, that's okay with me -- I don't have a problem with that. And if some of them are cynical about Caesar, well, sometimes it takes Christians years to learn that. If they figure that out so early in life, forgive me for being kind of pleased, because my generation was told there is only one way to a better world.

Tony Compolo was speaking here and somebody asked about abortion. He said, "I'm sick of talking about abortion with you short-haired evangelicals. There are 980 verses in the Bible on the evils of money and you can't name one good one on abortion. Let's talk about what Jesus wanted to talk about and if we have time we will talk about what you want to talk about."

There really is built into the Christian faith a kind of prejudice about some subjects. I started a sermon once quoting G. K. Chesterson, how we can have a good debate, an interesting discussion, over whether or not Jesus believed in fairies. That would be worth discussing. But, he said, unfortunately we cannot have a debate over whether or not he believed rich people were in terrible trouble. There is too much evidence there -- there are just too many texts.

How do you characterize your role at Duke?

When I came here, I asked my predecessor, how do you see yourself, and he said, well, I like to think of myself as kind of the conscience of the university. I said, whoa, I'm not that good! Instead, the work of Lesslie Newbigin and others led me to the conclusion that the primary metaphor for my work ought to be that I was a missionary. Some of the skills that you learn in cross-cultural work are important. Newbigin said Christianity has had difficulty, and has collided with every culture in which it found itself, including the very first culture in which it found itself. I think Christians ought to remember that the tension we feel is often a tension of speaking French when everybody else speaks English. It is a tension of being a stranger in a strange land.

Everybody serves something and I think one of the missions that Christians may have in the modern university is to at times point out what people are giving their lives to and just to say, "Is it worth it? Do you actually think this will give you a reason to get out of bed in the morning?"

What are some of the tensions and excitement you experience in the University?

In writing Resident Aliens, (a book coauthored with Stanley Hauerwas) people sometimes asked me what the important influences in my life were. Often people thought it was the Mennonite church, but I said no, Stanley knows the Mennonites. For me the influence was the college campus. Young Christians in a college environment really impress me. These kids feel like they are under assault. They feel like "we are the last Christians left, it's us against them."

Recently the student newspaper had an editorial against me on the same-sex union policy. We just don't do same-sex unions in the Chapel and this upsets a lot of people. [When asked about the policy, Willimon said, "The policy on same-sex unions at the Chapel was made by me and the president for a variety of factors: They are not legal in North Carolina, the United Methodist Church prohibits them, and our sense that we are not yet ready to make this move. It's all under discussion."] Afterwards, I had several e-mails from students saying, "Doc Willimon, you don't know me, but I'm a Christian, keep up the good fight, don't lose heart, I will pray for you tonight, if you need to talk to me you can call here, etc."

Well, I probably disagree theologically with most of those kids, who tend to be conservative evangelicals, but these students offer me support and urge me to keep the faith. That is exciting.

Last year I preached Proverbs from the lectionary, the little Proverb that goes: "Better than silver or gold is a good reputation, a good name is better than riches." I told the congregation, I don't as a rule do Proverbs. I let Bill Bennett do Proverbs or that idiot that wrote Chicken Soup for the Soul and all that other crap. I never liked Proverbs because there was no God in Proverbs. The book of Proverbs is like a long road trip with your mother, just pick up your socks, and be polite to people. But here's one, "A good name is better than silver or gold." Get this one out and talk to Don Trump or Ted Turner. Ask them about that. I think they'll say go for the gold. Worry about your name later. Put this on a t-shirt and wear it on campus for about a week, and let me know how you do at fraternity rush.

After chapel, this kid comes up to me and said, "That was really comforting." I said, what? Comforting? He said, "I'm going to call my old man tonight and I'm going to tell him I'm not going to go to law school and he can go to hell." And I said, well don't mention my name when you call him! And I said to myself, isn't that curious? Proverbs is the establishmentarian wisdom for holding the world together. But if you're in the right context, it becomes a bombshell. It will blow something up.

I love those moments of being at the university. I think, isn't it fascinating that something like this will happen. Thank you, God, for letting me be here. So, I say, our modern university has restored the fun of being a disciple.

Is there a sense in which more conservative Christian students feel pretty beleaguered and sometimes unable to live into the tensions that are inherent in a university?

Perhaps. Some of them might say, "We don't have a belief that the world is bad, we haven't started out to withdraw from the world, it is just that when we became Christians the world shoved us out, or the world started treating us like we were weirdos, but that is the world, it is not us." Stanley Hauerwas always says Anabaptists didn't withdraw from the world, they just didn't like their children being killed. And if Christians don't get along with the world, a lot of the time it is a matter of the world, not so much the Christians. So I try not to be that judgmental when I encounter these people.

Touché! What about your relationships with the faculty and administration at Duke?

I work at Duke University, it's not a monastery. We don't want to withdraw from the world. Where the heck would we withdraw to? I say it is all God's world and the university just doesn't yet know that. But that is our problem. The Gospel means that God is going to get back what belongs to him and he's going to do whatever is necessary to get it. There have been times when I've talked about this university as some kind of godless, secular place. Well, there have been wonderful moments when I have been embarrassed to find out that people are asking tough, searching questions. I realize that God is unthreading all this facade we erect.

Tell me about some of your encounters with the principalities and powers at Duke.

Obviously the powers are legion here, as they are at any other institution. My thought on the powers is that they are always good, they are often self-evidently good, noble virtues, that are being used against the Kingdom of God.

I think the honor system at Washington and Lee is like that. To be honorable and to live in a community of trust is a wonderful thing. But so often we fetishize the honor system and it becomes an idol. Any system that defines one's goodness by another's lack of it, cannot be sacred. Jesus died because he was erasing lines, not building systems based on a neighbor's lack of goodness.

I led a discussion of the Duke Honor Code and religion. The students were organizing it and I was supposed to be the moderator. The question was, does your religion teach you that you should turn somebody in that you observe doing wrong? It is interesting. Are you willing to mess up your neighbor over this? I was so pleased that the Christians said things like, "Well, in Matthew, Jesus said, that's something between me and my neighbor. I wouldn't worry so much about turning a person in as I would talking to them." And they said, "My problem probably is that I don't care enough about most people to confront, it wouldn't be that I was afraid that they wouldn't like me. I have to confess that I just probably don't love people enough to even confront them."

Well, you know, truth, knowledge, wisdom, excellence, all of these things get in our hands, and get perverted.

Right after I came here I was telling somebody at the Divinity School that I was speaking to some military chaplains, and he said, "What in the world would you be saying to military chaplains?" I told him that I feel a kinship with a lot of these guys, we have a lot of stuff we can talk about because we are in similar lines of work. And he said, "You are at a university. How could you possibly compare the U.S. military, which is in the killing business, with the university?" Here we were standing there in front of our research labs and I pointed and asked, who do you think is paying for all of those labs over there? That's the Pentagon. I said, we're training people to be the sort of people who are willing to kill for Ronald Reagan, if he ever asked them to do that. And I said, the thing I find that I like about military chaplains is that they are very up-front, the best of them that is, about the deep ethical dilemmas involved in their work. I'm not.

I said, when I put on this suit in the morning I don't think a thing. But I know military chaplains who, when they put on what they wear to work, have a deep twinge of conscience at least. And I said, I ought to worry about the way I'm dressed. And what is that in service of?

What about the culture wars and post-modernism at Duke?

I think post-modernism has been useful. I found a lot of their observations truthful. But what to do beyond that? I like the unmasking they've done. It's great to see that a lot that we call the intellectual life around here, is called working for the Pentagon or Wall Street. It's odd how I feel at times closer to some of the radical fire-breathing feminists than I do to some of the mainline Christian types, because these people at least know everybody is standing somewhere. Everybody is caught by something. Christians, I say, are special, because we can name what we are subservient to.

Former Witness contributing editor Andrew McThenia is a law professor at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Va.