Putting Things in Perspective
April 9, 2011
I hope that I’m not sounding too much like an anti-intellectual, but there are definitely times where I am reminded about the frustrating gap between certain academic conversations and the real needs of the Church, as well as the indulgent curriculum offered at some seminaries reflecting more the desires of professors than the recognition of appropriate classes for pastoral training. (See these two articles to really fill this out more – here and here).
My father makes an annual trip to India to evangelize and work with local pastors. A significant number of these country pastors, as it happens, cannot even read. Not a Bible, not a hymnal. When he told me this I remember wondering to myself how they could even perform their pastoral duties.
Now, I am in total support of educated clergy, indeed that is why this tidbit of information really got my imagination going, once again, as it is prone so to do, about seminary education. If one were to teach these pastors, just what might be an appropriate “core” to enable and empower them? And by thinking about this, it began to prompt thoughts on our own seminary education here in the States.
It seems to me that apart from needing first to teach them to read, and considering it is totally impractical to expect these pastors to attend a residential seminary, an appropriate “core” would ideally revolve around four books: The Bible, a Prayer Book, a hymnal and a catechism.
At first I questioned this – surely this is a peculiarly Anglican way of looking at things? But inasmuch as there could be developed a Pentecostal (Pentecostal because my father is an Assemblies of God minister) “Prayer Book, hymnal and catechism” it began to strike me as far more appropriate than I would’ve thought at first. Precisely because these clergy have a “blank slate” when it comes to the Faith, and precisely because they couldn’t be expected to leave their responsibilities for too long, by teaching them to read and giving them these elementary tools, what they lacked in “full training” they made up in practice by really getting to know these books.
What it seems the A/G might need, then, is a Book of Common Prayer -of sorts! – appropriate to their tradition, for the training of clergy where otherwise training is unavailable. And as for us, perhaps our own core should revolve around these rather than having so many electives open for “Feminist readings in Daniel” or whatever.
Seminary V.III : Limits in Round Table Theology
April 8, 2010
Before a brief excersion in response to a friend, I was commenting on how seminaries should be purposeful about formation. How we do and do not educate will – I cannot emphasize enough the will – shape the future of our fellowship. There is no getting around it. “Knowledge is Power,” Foucault said, and I couldn’t agree with him more. Of course this has always been known and responsible teachers through the ages would have had no moral qualms about telling people how and even what to think, especially in early stages of learning.
Of late there has been a minor revival of so-called “classical education” largely in response to an essay written by the famous Dorothy Sayers entitled, “The Lost Tools of Learning.” I take this essay to be essentially correct and this (other) hyperbolic statement by Hauerwas properly frames where I am going with these next couple essays:
“As a way to challenge such a [liberal] view of freedom, I start my classes by telling my students that I do not teach in a manner that is meant to help them make up their own minds. Instead, I tell them that I do not believe they have minds worth making up until they have been trained by me. I realize such a statement is deeply offensive to students since it exhibits a complete lack of pedagogic sensitivities. Yet I cannot imagine any teacher who is serious who would allow students to make up their own minds.” —Stanley Hauerwas, “Christian Schooling or Making Students Dysfunctional,” in Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), p. 220. HT: Faith and Theology
I’m preparing a very incomplete and theoretical curriculum for an entire seminary education that I hope to post in the next week or so. For now let us consider a significant if not the most significant aspect of formation (I’m here speaking as an Anglican but most any “Rule of Prayer” in continuity within the liturgical and spiritual tradition of the Church could work); the Daily Office. Any seminary worth its salt will pray, at the very least, the Morning and Evening Office. I’ve always found the “noon” prayer in the ’79 BCP to be lackluster and unfocused but of course the Compline as well as the Service of Light are both spectacular. It may not be of utter necessity that every student attend every single service, though I can’t imagine anything less than three weekday offices being at all adequate. Whatever the case it ought to be performed daily.
Going a step beyond this I think it would be a stroke of brilliance to incorporate the material of the Office directly into the taught classes. So hermeneutics, exegesis (same thing really) and Bible classes should teach from the Scripture readings each day. Instead of a class on “Pauline Theology,” or “Pauline Letters” or “The Synoptics,” a seminary could have a “Bible” track that spans the whole of the education which covers the same material that such a class would have, but is done in a wholistic manner.
Many of the classes could be taught this way. After learning the grammar, such a class could serve “double duty” as a “Greek Reading” class. A teacher could take the NT passage and teach how to grammatically structure that passage. Etc…to infinity. It seems to me that the connection between the Office and the classes could be made in any number of creative ways.
One weakness is obviously the current Lectionary. Anglican liturgical expert and spectacular blogger Derek Olsen says that the point of the Daily Office Lectionary, as compared to the Lectionary for use at the Mass, is to read and learn the Bible, not to be mystagogical. There is of course a place for that but not here. I still dig a two-year structure but it could stand to be more consistent in how it proceeds through books. The entire OT and Deutero-canon every two years, NT about once a year, and the Psalms once a month or month and a half seems both substantial and doable. The books should be read from beginning to end with no cutting out the non-liberal-protestant parts as it does now.
I am assuming that doing the dishes, cleaning the bathrooms and feeding the poor also fit into the general life of the Seminary but those are less “educational” in the same sense that I am talking about here.
A recent internet acquaintance of mine has some opinions of his own as to how “theologically open” a seminary or Christian university ought to be. Everything sounds good on the surface of his post but I must admit that I disagree with almost all of it.
There seems to be undergirding the entire post a vision of the Church or “Christianity” as a unified body. Now on a dogmatic, especially a pneumatological level, this is true in some sense (this would of course be contested by the Eastern and Roman Catholic Churches) but in our lived lives it is quite simply false: We are divided by a myriad of issues from confessions to political bodies – (I am here endorsing wholeheartedly Ephraim Radner’s understanding of Christian division).
Thus it is difficult to conceive in any meaningful sense what a “merely” “Christian” seminary or university would look like. The Nicene Creed can function as a solid enough base to flesh out a basic confessional unity in most Christian contexts but when considering seminary especially, it becomes far more complicated as to whether or not such a base is truly sufficient to serve the needs of our unique churches. What hath Geneva to do with Canterbury?
The complex Christian cocktail that has resulted from the “Ecumenical Movement” as well as the utter failure of western protestantism to sustain anything like a distinct Christian confessional unity becomes clear in conversations like this. This confusion has several strains currently expressing themselves in our churches, I’ll mention four: 1) Most evangelical don’t have much in the way of any theological identity. They don’t know or recite the creeds, they don’t catechize and they don’t like homosexuals. So long as they sing modern worship choruses and preach 45 minute sermons they feel that they get along fine. 2) Many older churches such as the Mainline still maintain a sense of their historic identity but there is a significant toleration of theological diversity such that there is a widely acknowledged reality of the dissolution of a coherent evangel. 3) Also within the Mainline but also in many Emergent and certain evangelical churches there is a repudiation of confessional unity and a glorification of diversity. 4) There are the hold-the-line or buckle-down-and-fight groups.
I admit this is reductive but on a generic level I think it holds. Within churches we are bound to find any of several of these so I don’t pretend that they are watertight between groups.
I am of the opinion that theological identity is essential to evangelism, discipleship and unity. It follows, as I’ve mentioned before, that I think you should teach what you believe. This of course sounds ridiculous coming from an Episcopalian 
Now… All this and yet I agree that closing off creative and inquisitive theology can be utterly destructive. Honestly, at this point, I’m absolutely clueless as to how to hold these two things together in a balance, historic theological identity and faithful theological response. Or rather I have an idea of how it can work in churches structured according to historic catholic order but no idea how it can work between churches. Whatever the case, Methodists should pump out Methodist pastors and Lutherans Lutherans, anything else just creates a muddle.
Seminary V Pt.I
March 13, 2010
“Habits create necessities through which imagination is required to do something different than you thought you were doing in the past. The developments of the virtues, and the discovery of virtues that we didn’t know we had, are a real resource for development of institutions that hopefully have promise for the future. Universities, for example, are constantly recreating themselves through basic habits”. – Stanley Hauerwas
How many years should a seminary training be? And what, again, are we trying to do by sending families and individuals off to seminary? What kind of people are we attempting to create?
Because it is a myth that schools and institutions and social webs of relations can rise above the reality that we are always being shaped; for better and worse; by subtle and not so subtle ways; by our practices and interactions with our environments. I recently had a disagreement with a professor who denied that the public university system had an goal of shaping people the way that say a private Christian school does. I take this opinion to be understandable but wrong in a terrible way and it’s naivity to demonstrate that we aren’t often aware of the way that exchanges of power work.
Just as the public university acts to enhance and sustain the American narrative, the Seminary should act to enhance and sustain the Christian narrative. The advantage of admitting this telos is that the Seminary need not hide the reality that it is trying to make people other than they are. It is trying to prepare priests and pastors to serve the Church according the tasks and skills the Spirit has given them. It also ought to train people in the Tradition that they represent.
The idea of forming people into something other than they are grates against our public understandings of what a person is and what education should do. “The rights-bearing-cogito/individual has intrinsic qualities that it is born with. These qualities need only freedom to become more fully itself. “Democracy” and the “free market” are aids in making room for this individual to come into being.”
That quite frankly is not what a Christian believes about what a human being is or is meant to be(come).
But as the modern seminary has based itself largely on the secular university system, it should be of little wonder that many seminarians come out looking not unlike a student of a public university,
only instead of knowing a little bit about a lot of natural science, math, history, etc…., the seminary grad knows a little bit about a lot of theology.
Seminary IV
March 2, 2010
There seems to be a growing interest in several internet circles with discussing the ills currently besetting the place of the Humanities in the University (not even to mention the ills in those). For my part I’ll continue my theoretical and hopefully “unsettling” proposals concerning seminaries.
I think that most seminaries could and should go without accreditation.
This by no means, again, that we will be giving half-assed educations to clergy. The goal should be affordable education, but certainly not poor education; these are proposals to enable us to do both.
Towards a Teleological Theological Seminary III
February 26, 2010
A long time ago I “started” one of the likely millions of neglected blog series in which I was hoping to address theological education: It’s needs, it’s shortcomings, it’s potential and future(s). Being inspired by several posts of late I wanted to take this series up again. The possibility of re-configuring theological education is something that I take rather seriously and am passionate enough about to consider strongly participating in in my future.
A quick review:
- In one post I said that so-called “ecumenical” seminaries are overrated. If your priesthood is concerned with apostolic succession and sacramentology then it makes no sense to take the majority of your education in a Baptist school, though for “us” the “Anglican Year” is a brilliant stroke that lessens the ambiguity of ‘ecumenical’ schooling. School for your denomination and theology is what I say.
- In another, in answer to the musings (I and II) of Pastor Carol Merritt I replied that, No, we cannot afford educated clergy, but neither can we afford uneducated clergy; so we’ve got to find a way to do both.
Having laid a framework with these two statements I would like to build on it. Having said what I think about “ecumenical” seminaries, from this point forward I speak as an Episcopalian to Episcopalians but I would hope that what I write would not be relegated relevant to Episcopalians only. In fact I think that much of it could be highly relevant for most fellowships as most are facing financial setbacks and serious issues of a lack of Christian identity.
There is a place, a VERY important place, for “research” institutions in the Church, but I’m not convinced that every seminary should be such an institution, or at the very least, we should not be expecting all or even most of our seminary professors to be on the forefront of modern academic theology; writing articles for “Modern Theology” and composing exhaustive tomes of critical work. It seems to me that there is a near anti-christian pace of academic-theological anxiety: “Publish, Publish, Publish!”
For most seminaries, the training of priests should be the single most important task to which everything else is secondary.
I would greatly appreciate any and all input especially for those who have been through seminary, are in it now, are teaching for one or who are soon to attend.
Toward a Teleological Theological Seminary
June 4, 2009
Again returning to Pastor Carol Merrit’s post, and the many thoughtful responses, in reflecting on the possibilites and necessities of pastoral education in the future we are at once confronted with the Protestant conundrum.
Who is this seminary for? Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Episcopalians . . . ?
Each have their own theologies of ministry. Perhaps pastors/priests are seen as sacramental; perhaps there is not much if any a line between clergy and laity except on has different responsibilities. Traditionally, how educated have the clergy been expected to be? There are many other presenting issues.
This ‘age’ has been called ‘post-denominational,’ and, if we are aiming to include a loosely defined “emerging” movement in these posts then in which there is a general ethos of distrust (perhaps disdain) for authority. For instance Tony Jones in his book “The New Christians” argues there is no line whatesoever between clergy and laity, and he loves it. Or, it is often the case that one need not explicitly confess a denomination’s distinctives to be a minister.
How can we do theological education in this kind of atmosphere? Well, it has been noted persistently through ecumenical dialogues that for two groups to start to come together and have meaningful relationships, what is not the best foot forward is to merely agree to the lowest common denominator. Quickly the rich heritage of each fellowship becomes blurred and is made to seem an addendum; a not-necessary part of our Christian identity, and so it must be downplayed and not made to be ‘divisive’ since it is not the ‘core.’ This seems to me to be unfortunate.
I want to be on record as saying that until we are able to learn how to unify despite diversity, and discern what diversity is acceptable and what is too far, I think that denominations should put a large stress on denominational distinctives. I have a friend, an Episcopalian, studying to become a priest. He is attending a Lutheran seminary, an excellent Lutheran seminary, but he has often found himself frustrated with the persistant Lutheranism that pervades the school. Since he is going to be an Anglican priest, he does not feel that he is always learning what he should be learning to help him be faithful in the future.
Now Episcopalians have a practice, and it seems to me to be brilliant, that if one attends a non-episcopalian seminary that is fine, but they will have to take what is called an “Anglican Year” where they spend two semesters specifically studying Anglican history, theology, distinctives and all that. Add to that that one does not even need an MDiv but merely has to pass the “General Ordination Examinations” (which include proficiency in biblical languages, church history, theology and liturgy) and I think, perhaps with a bit of a bias, that The Episcopal Church is on to something. The point is not a degree, the point is profiency to perform what has been the ‘job’ of the Anglican priest.
So, amongst many other things – I still have like 10 posts in my head – I think that until denominations are dead (if they ever will be) then it is imperitive that we maintain identity in our traditions, and do it well. This is not to say that one tradition is “better” than another; but that ‘lowest-common-denominator’ Christianity makes for thin pastors and theology.
Tony Hunt
jstambaugh
Shawn Wamsley
