Ryan Seals argues for tossing the study of theology out of Emory. His prose, unfortunately, is better than his reasoning or experience.

He first suggests that any subject left over from the Middle Ages should be jettisoned, on the analogy that modern science has left behind alchemy and astrology. But alchemy and astrology were never central to the Medieval university, while theology was — along with law and medicine. No one would suggest that Emory should drop law and medicine, let alone the Quadrivium and the Trivium (still taught in various ways), just because they were taught 500 years ago. Something else must be bothering him besides the ancestry of the discipline.

That something else is Mr. Seals’ belief that the theology school is out of step with the intellectual rigor of the rest of the University. This argument rests on his erroneous assumption that the theology curriculum “is predicated on the dogmatic acceptance of a revealed truth,” while “the assumptions and beliefs in every other department and school” can be subjected to critical questioning. Theology schools, in his view, have not shed “their unquestioning obedience to tradition and authority.”

Mr. Seals perhaps has never sat in a Candler course or had a thorough-going conversation with a faculty member there. He seems to imagine indoctrination sessions. In reality, theology schools harbor as much doubt and skepticism as any department in the College or in the other professional schools, which in turn are not immune from their own forms of faith, or even dogmatism. In my experience, theology students show no more reverence for the authority of their churches than do, say, medical students for the practices of the residency system or law students for the monopoly of the ABA.

Indeed, schools of theology often are places where men and women exhibit great intellectual courage, from Martin Luther to Martin Luther King Jr. After all, why should the dogmatisms of secular power and principles be spared critique from a stand outside secularism’s own system?

And what of the argument that a graduate or professional school should be abolished because its function could be filled by any number of departments in Emory College? If that were true, Mr. Seals’ own school, the Rollins School of Public Health, might fall by the wayside. The courses required for the MPH degree — statistics, epidemiology, health care management, the nature of the U.S. health care system — might well be assigned to the departments of math and computer science, biology, sociology and political science. No one, however, would advance the proposition that these College courses are an adequate substitute for the rigors of professional training in the School of Public Health — or for any professional training at a university.

What, then, are the rigors of professional training in theology, comparable to training in medicine or law, that justify its perpetuation at a university like Emory? And then, what makes theological education within a research university desirable for the university?

Well, for one thing, as Mr. Seals acknowledges, religion is not going to disappear as a human phenomenon. Thus, he says, “we need to shine a brighter light on religion’s role in modern life.” Emory does this, but also does the converse; it shines a bright light on modern life’s role in religion.

That is to say, Candler is not training snake handlers or mountebanks. It applies all the tools of modern scholarship — from postmodern thought to statistical modeling, from archival research to institutional review boards — in preparing men and women to help address the endemic ills of the spirit suffered by modern men and women.

These ills are no less real — whatever their etiology — than the ills Mr. Seals is preparing to address as a public health practitioner. Nor is the theology graduate’s mode of addressing them necessarily less effective than the modes of graduates from our other professional schools. Some research, in fact, suggests that particularly in meeting the public health needs of the world, graduates of theology schools can serve as important allies to graduates of public health schools. How are public health students to learn these things without theological allies in their university?

The distinctive feature of the Theology School that makes it worthy of its place in the University is its capacity to train people in a particular way of knowing. This is the feature of each professional school. In theology’s case, it is a way of knowing that no religion department is prepared to undertake and no arts and sciences college could perform. It is the blend of the practitioner’s craft with the scholar’s knowledge. If there is an analogy, it would be the kind of learning that takes place in a school of music, in an MFA program in poetry or in the science labs where textbook knowledge and some degree of artistic competence come together. To suggest that the rest of the University has nothing to learn from any of these ways of knowing is its own form of intellectual smugness that has no place in a university.

Gary S. Hauk is vice president and deputy to the president of Emory University and earned a Ph.D. degree in the Graduate Division of Religion, whose faculty includes members of the Candler School of Theology and the College Department of Religion.