Archive: Seminaries in Crisis

By Geoffrey Wainwright

Almost all seminary professors will tell you that theological education is in a crisis. Nevertheless, they will tell you that their own institution is doing a pretty good job. Therein lies the self-delusion. Chances are, those professors are themselves part of the problem. Since self-diagnosis is so difficult, some outside views may help to reveal what’s wrong. As I read the external reviewers, three critical areas appear from the outset.

First, the curriculum.

In the rather conservative Christian journal First Things (January 1992), we read the lament of Professor Robert Jenson who taught for decades at the Lutheran Seminary in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania: “Long ago, the church’s demand for various sorts of ‘practical’ and therapeutic ‘experiences’ in the seminary curriculum reduced their space for theology below the viable quantity. Biblical, historical, and systematic theology are hard disciplines, to which only the very able and well-prepared can catch on quickly. … A few years ago the situation further deteriorated as the recruitment of students changed. Seminary students now for the most part arrive with no appropriate higher education whatsoever. More disastrously yet, a decisive number seem somehow to self-select from the least catechized segments of our in-any-case secularized churches. This, of course, changed the curricular situation from calamitous to hopeless.”

More benignly put, present-day theological students need—more than ever, in the circumstances described by Jenson—a basic and thorough grounding in the classical disciplines that treat the essential identity of the church: Scriptures, tradition, and doctrine. And yet, the seminaries have added ever-new humanistic elements to the curriculum (psychology, sociology, management studies … ) without adding to the time required for training ordinands. There is now no time for acquisition of the biblical languages, and precious little time for serious instruction in the sacred texts themselves.

A church which, like the United Methodist, claims adherence to the “primacy of the Scriptures” surely needs to insist that its future ministers be better schooled in them. It can be done, if the priorities are set right. In the sixties and seventies I taught in the Protestant Faculty of Theology at Yaounde in the Cameroons. There, our African students—for whom even the medium of instruction (French) was not their mother tongue—spent much of their first year in acquiring a working knowledge of Hebrew and Greek; and for each semester of their remaining three years, they were required to take at least one course in biblical exegesis or theology that presupposed the original languages. Our purpose was to equip them, not only for the regular task of biblical preaching, but also for the work of translating and retranslating the Bible into the African languages. The Gambian theologian Lamin Sanneh has recently shown, in his book Translating the Message (1989), the powerfully renewing effect of vernacular translations of the Scriptures upon the peoples who receive them. Our own churches and cultures badly need the renewal that fresh contact with the Word of God through scripturally literate pastors and preachers can bring. How can the Word of God enliven a congregation and a people that are deprived of its exposition?

Or take the case of Christian doctrine. Even at Duke Divinity School I am allowed only one semester in which to teach the basic course in theology, covering all the major doctrines of the faith. How can contemporary theology be done without a deep awareness of the tradition to which we owe our faith? On a recent teaching exchange with the United Faculty of Theology in Melbourne, Australia, I discovered that the basic course in theology lasts for a full year, and that each student is then required to add a further major course in one of the principal doctrines of the faith—Trinity, Christology, ecclesiology, or whatever.

Second, let us move from curriculum to syllabus.

Even if the curriculum allows an appropriate proportion of time to the essential disciplines, much depends on what is actually taught in any given course. Let’s look this time at the Christian Century (February 5-12, 1992)—a generally liberal publication—where we read the observations of Jon Levenson, professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School, lamenting the “political correctness” that effectively excludes the teaching and affirmation of the historic Christian faith at a not untypical seminary: “In an institution once explicitly and formally Christian and still culturally so, largely dedicated to the education of ministers, one can deny with utter impunity that Jesus was born of a virgin or raised from the dead. But if one says that he was the Son of God the Father, one runs afoul of the institution’s deepest commitments. If the ancient Christological confession is to be retained at all—and this, presumably, is only a matter of personal preference—it must be recast in gender-neutral terms. … The older formulation may still be employed for purpose of critique—to show the alleged androcentrism of the early church, but not for purposes of affirmation, at least not without an immediate qualification to the effect that the traditional language is a historically conditioned convention and an unhappy one at that.”

So what does it profit us, then, if the curriculum allows, say, a decently modest amount of time to the study of pastoral care but the syllabus is packed with the drivel spouted by most applicants for a recently open teaching position in the subject, without any awareness of classical issues and debates in Christian anthropology and soteriology? A semester devoted to Richard Baxter’s Reformed Pastor would be far more beneficial to the future minister than scripturally uninformed, and theologically Pelagian, elucubrations on self-improvement and self-fulfillment. Thank God for the sterling efforts of Thomas C. Oden to renew pastoral theology on a scriptural and traditional basis!

What kind of a course in “Worship and Preaching” is it that is limited to the “how-to” and has no room for study of the classic Christian rites, the theology of the sacraments, the history of scriptural interpretation, and the rhetorical and oratorical masterpieces of the great preachers throughout the church’s tradition?

Third, then, the professors.

The secular journalist Paul Wilkes, in the December 1990 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, wrote about “the deeply troubled world of America’s seminaries” under the title “The Hands That Would Shape Our Souls.” The article concentrates chiefly on seminary students, but what about the professors who are forming the future pastors who are to be charged with the care of souls? Wilkes notes that some faculty members, “who were in graduate schools during the tumult of the 1960s and 1970s, tend toward an orientation that could variously be described as anti-institutional, antidogmatic, deconstructionist, ‘post-Christian,’ or Marxist. As graduate students, these faculty members were relentless in their questioning of smug sectarianism or unthinking adherence to a creed, and some would say unapologetically that the God who brought them into such studies did not make the cut as the new, lean team was chosen. … Now in their forties and fifties, they have adopted religious beliefs and values that diverge sharply from tradition.”

In other words, we are in the presence of what Roger Kimball, on the wider academic scene, calls The Tenured Radicals. What is to be done when, say, a tenured professor in a United Methodist seminary adopts a particular position in sexual politics as the criterion for taking or leaving scriptural material, and decides to add from explicitly “pagan resources” what is otherwise missing?

In my judgment, an absolutist version of “academic freedom,” imported from a secular world that is otherwise committed only to relativism, is quite misplaced in an ecclesial institution. The church believes that it has received by divine revelation certain decisive insights into truth, and the task of its preachers and teachers can only be to explicate and interpret the gospel and the faith, not to subvert them. The last thing that United Methodists need worry about is that the seminaries might fall, Southern Baptist style, into the hands of the fundamentalists. The far greater risk arises when appointed teachers sit loose to historic Christianity.

In United Methodist terms, that means that the “theological exploration” commended in the text of the 1992 Discipline should take place within the framework of official Methodist doctrine as set, not by a word-processor in Nashville, but by the Wesleyan and other historic standards. Happily (and in no small measure by virtue of A Foundation for Theological Education), there is now emerging from the 1980s a new breed of younger United Methodist scholars whose dissertations in Scripture, history, theology, and liturgy locate them firmly within the evangelical, catholic, orthodox faith. It is vital that they be appointed to teach in the seminaries.

What then is to be done?

John Henry Newman wrote a classic essay “On consulting the faithful in matters of doctrine. ” In changing times, the instinct of faith often proves more durable among “ordinary Christians” than among their intellectual leaders, for they are less subject to the flights of fashion. Still, in our day seminary teachers and students need to become more accountable both to the flock and to the chief shepherds of the flock, the bishops. For their part, the Council of Bishops in May 1991 adopted a “Statement on the Quality and Education of Ministry for the United Methodist Church.” Though formulated in less detail than it might have been, this document already sets out some appropriate demands for curricula, syllabi, and instructors to follow, and some suitable questions to be raised by all who are engaged in testing candidacies for ordination.

As we look to the future, the maintenance or restoration of the church’s health will in large part depend, humanly speaking, on the care taken in appointments to teaching positions, approval of candidates for ordination, and elections to the episcopacy. Meanwhile, professors, pastors, and bishops might well ponder the self-critical questions John Wesley framed in his “Address to the Clergy ” of 1756 (Works ed. Jackson, vol. 10, pp. 480-500)—and ask how the present generation could come closer to a satisfactory remedy, and the next generation be helped to come closer yet.

Geoffrey Wainwright is the Robert E. Cushman Professor of Christian Theology at Duke University Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina. This article originally appeared in The Challenge. It is reprinted here by permission.