One of the recent comments on our blessed company of ugly theologians was on the fact that most of them sport beards.  I thought I’d do a bit of research on it see what the actual ratio was.  I threw together a list here of 50 theologians, my sole criteria being that they were established, well-known theologians from the 20th century and that they were male (sorry, but if we counted all the females, we’d never get an accurate theologian to beard ratio).

So what then are the results?

Colin Gunton…beard.
Rudolph Bultmann…mustache.
Robert Jenson…beard.
Thomas Torrance…no beard.
Eberhard Jüngel…no beard.
Jürgen Moltmann…no beard.
Wolfhart Pannenberg…no beard.
Karl Barth…no beard.
Hans Urs von Balthasar….no beard.
James Torrance…no beard.
Alan Torrance…no beard.
Leonardo Boff…beard.
Miroslav Volf…no beard.
Pope Benedict XVI…no beard.
John Webster….no beard.
David Cunningham…beard.
John Milbank…beard.
David Bentley Hart…beard.
Lewis Ayres…beard.
George Hunsinger…beard.
Stanley Grenz…no beard.
Kevin Vanhoozer…beard.
Michael Horton…no beard.
Walter Kaspar…no beard.
John Zizioulas…beard.
John Meyendorff…beard.
Vladamir Lossky…no beard.
Rowan Williams…beard.
John Howard Yoder…beard.
Stanley Hauerwas…beard.
Walter Brueggemann…beard.
N.T. Wright…beard.
Oscar Cullman…no beard.
Richard Hays…beard.
George Eldon Ladd…beard (in fact he looks just like Col. Sanders).
Timothy Ware…beard.
Karl Rahner…no beard.
Henri de Lubac…no beard.
Pope John Paul II…no beard.
Alexander Schmemann…beard.
David Schindler…beard.
William T. Cavanaugh…no beard.
Oliver Davies…beard.
Bruce McCormack…beard.
George Lindbeck…beard.
Paul Tillich…no beard.
H. Richard Niebuhr…no beard.
Reinhold Niebuhr…no beard.
Hans Frei…no beard.
Peter Leithart…beard.

All tallied this equals: 

Beards: 25 theologians
Non-Beards: 24 theologians
Mustache: 1 Rudolph Bultmann

These finding indicate that if you are a theologian, you have a 50% chance of having a beard.  You have a 48% chance of being clean shaven, and a 2% chance of having a mustache and inventing demythologization as a New Testament hermeneutic.  This, I think is quite good news.  Even Bultmann fans should agree that we only need one of him.