"Dismantling the 'Master’s House': Building a 'World House' Curriculum for Twenty-First-Century U.S. Protestant Theological Education"

Audre Lorde proclaimed four decades ago, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” As a self-identified “Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, poet, and mother,” Lorde fearlessly resisted White, heteronormative, patriarchal, hegemonic, and “pseudo-master” frameworks that were institutionally and structurally embedded within society. Lorde’s timeless, provocative, and even prophetic utterances continue to echo today and hold relevance within the theological academy. This dissertation builds upon Lorde’s powerful metaphor by arguing that twenty-first-century Protestant theological education in the United States is the “master’s house.” The master’s house must be dismantled because its core commitments—definitional, pedagogical, institutional, and curricular—are one-dimensionally oriented and Eurocentrically expressed. Specifically, this dissertation employs Critical Race Theory as a justice-oriented, methodological prism to expose various problems within the architectural and infrastructural frameworks of the master’s house. These issues include systemic racism, the prioritization of theory (science) over practice, the erasures or silencing of certain people, cultures, and histories, the presence of masculine civilizing ideals, language laced with ethnocentric, androcentric, and Eurocentric biases found in Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher’s nineteenth-century Brief Outline, “master scripts,” “racial paterfamilias spirits,” and “white ghosts of theological oppression,” as well as other persistent harms embedded in its curriculum that continue to influence theological education. Nevertheless, other problems persist. Studies from The Association of Theological Schools, the accrediting agency for theological schools in the United States and Canada, reveal that people of color will constitute the majority of students in theological education by 2040. Despite evidence of these demographic shifts, the ATS’s curriculum and other structural components of theological institutions lag behind this changing landscape, leaving them unprepared to engage with a multiracial society or confront the global issues it faces. Therefore, this dissertation’s thesis posits that the one-dimensionally oriented and Eurocentrically expressed curriculum governing the “master’s house” of twenty-first-century U.S. Protestant theological education must undergo a “curricular transformation” by adopting a model inspired by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision for a “great world house,” focusing on the hopes and “pains in society” as the foundation for the “formal” curriculum, welcoming “an array of epistemologies and histories,” and embracing the D-E-I (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in the Imago Dei while exploring how theological education can actively participate in genuinely shaping and improving the world.

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