For his career as a theologian, Luther A. Weigle got an early start. When he was eleven, he was hired as a special correspondent of the Altoona (Pa.) Tribune to write news reports of his Lutheran father’s sermons. At 48, he capped his career by becoming dean of the Yale University Divinity School. Last week Luther Weigle announced his resignation, at the retirement age of 68.
For 21 years bald, bespectacled Dean Weigle has headed the top-rank, nondenominational theological seminary atop New Haven’s Prospect Street hill. Under his “liberal evangelical” administration the school’s enrollment grew from about 150 Bachelor of Divinity students to the present 250. More than 100 of his former pupils are leaders of other schools and religious organizations.
Sunday-School Teacher. Dean Weigle’s educational influence has reached not only academic highbrows, but littlebrows as well. Generations of Sunday-school children have been taught by the methods advocated in his book, The Pupil and the Teacher, which has sold close to 1,000,000 copies. Since 1928, Dean Weigle has been chairman of the executive committee of the World’s Sunday School Association (now the World Council of Christian Education). In this capacity he is still a vociferous opponent of the ban on teaching religion in the public schools. Says he: “When the public schools ignore religion, it conveys to our children the suggestion that religion is without truth or value.”
In 1940 Luther Weigle was elected president of the Federal Council of Churches, which he shepherded through the first two years of the war. His biggest extracurricular job has been as chairman of the committee at work revising the Standard Version of the Bible. Since 1930, headquarters for this ambitious project by U.S. and British scholars have been at Yale. After his retirement, Chairman Weigle expects to devote his full time to the committee, which completed the New Testament in 1946 (TIME, Feb. 11, 1946), and hopes to finish the Old in 1951.
Christian Sociologist. Yale Divinity’s new dean is slim, witty Dr. Listen Pope, 39, who has taught social ethics there since 1938. His father was a North Carolina banker who, says Pope, “knew there were some things going on in the world of business, finance and industry which were hard to square with the New Testament.” When son Listen came home from Duke University in 1929 with a Phi Beta Kappa key and an urge to study Christian sociology instead of investment banking, his father listened sympathetically.
He went back to Duke for a B.D., earned his Ph.D. in sociology at Yale soon after joining the Divinity School faculty. From 1944 to 1948 Congregationalist Pope edited the magazine Social Action, and lectured at Manhattan’s Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations. He arbitrated labor disputes, helped reorganize New Haven’s Labor College, and grew to be well-known for his unflagging opposition to Communism in labor unions. His appointment by the Yale Corporation insured that the Divinity School would continue to emphasize what Pope himself calls the “study of society as it is, in relation to what it ought to be.”
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