Confessions of a Grieving Seminary Professor

By Thomas C. Oden

January/February 1994

Lay persons are increasingly demanding the right to know why their parish pastors are so often going astray like lost sheep – with political indiscretions, sexual escapades, and ideological binges. I hate to be the bearer of rotten news, but after a lifetime of teaching in a tradition-deprived seminary ethos, I am nearly convinced that its present system is practically irreformable.

My hypothesis is: That form of education for ministry which has attached itself like a leech to modernity is dying as modernity dies. The seminary that weds itself to modernity is already a widow as we enter the era of post-modernity. Here is the dreary list of characteristic symptoms of rapid depreciation:

1. The tenure principle which was designed to protect academic freedom has become so exploited that it now protects academic license, absenteeism, incompetence, and at times moral turpitude. Once tenure is offered, it is virtually impossible to dismiss a professor. It requires many strata of grievance procedures before the tenured professor can even begin to be challenged, regardless of the offense.

Whenever the seminary faculty feels or imagines that it is being subjected to review by anyone, the battle-cry goes out: Safeguard academic freedom! Yes, the seminary has a duty to defend its faculty from unjust challenges that would inordinately invade the sanctuary of the classroom and dictate to faculty what they are to teach. I do not want the KKK or the neo-Nazi party to tell me what I should be teaching and the textbooks I should be using. But neither do I want liberal dogmatists or ideological advocates of someone’s ideas of political correctness to be dictating what textbooks I should be using.

It simply will no longer do for seminaries to continue avoiding dialogue with church constituencies by claiming that professors have the freedom to teach whatever they please. If they teach apostasy, the believing church has no moral obligation to give them support or to bless their follies.

When academic freedom becomes a strategy by which the seminary sidesteps every critic, then academic freedom itself has been prostituted. When the Wesleyan tradition and doctrinal standards – standards clearly defined in every Book of Discipline since Wesley – can no longer be implement in the seminaries, then the United Methodist governing bodies do not have a responsibility to protect the freedom of a faculty to disavow that solemnly pledged doctrinal tradition.

2. Once a tradition-deprived faculty has been fully tenured, its members have the unique privilege of cloning themselves with look-alike colleagues in the future. The tenured f acuity has learned well the fine art of cloning itself politically, repeating ever anew its own ideological biases, making sure that no one comes in who might upset the prevailing ideological momentum.
3. The wall-to-wall redefinition of an entire field of study and its subsequent renovation is the fervent dream of many tenured radicals, whose chief peer group is the professional society that meets once a year in an elegant hotel to talk about oppression.
4. It is a common practice to offer teaching appointments in counter-traditional seminaries without reference to any experience whatever in the actual practice of ministry. If those who had extensive church experience applied, it might even tend to be a negative factor in their selection. Candidates are preferred who have not been contaminated by a strong church tradition. This is analogous to someone who had never drawn up a contract for a client teaching about contracts in a law school.
5. Seminarians ordinarily do not become angry until their last year, as they belatedly realize that they are leaving seminary with heavy debts; yet may not be deemed by their annual conferences as ready to preach, administer sacraments, or take on actual tasks of pastoral care. When they are appointed to a parish, they recognize how little of their theological education they can use, and how much of it they must hide.
6. The disciplines of the seminary have become a playground of competing methodologies thar bicker constantly for recognition, sanction, and approval, especially through scientific methods of inquiry. It is as if the disciplines were constantly combatting for higher status in a rigid pecking order. In the evaluation-methods employed at the higher end of the pecking order, there is little or no room to accept Scripture as the Word of God or divine revelation as a serious intellectual premise.
7. Each discipline of theological education, now awash in antisupernatural assumptions, finds itself desperately seeking an alternative to the premises of orthodox Christian reasoning: incarnation, resurrection, and scriptural revelation. Each discipline feels compelled to legitimize its teaching by some form of empirical data-gathering that would only grudgingly be acceptable in a chemistry laboratory. The so-called scientific study of religion has gradually flooded the seminary.
8. Under these conditions, theological inquiry may pretend to proceed, but almost entirely without reference to the worshipping community, its laity, its historic apostolic mission, its classical texts. The critics who mean most to modern scholars are only those who have written during the last 20 years, or 50 at most. They often do not include the theologians of the previous 1900 years. The serious study of Christian thought is assumed to begin with Paul Tillich or, at the earliest, with Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of theological liberalism. It is easy to see how this premise affects the study of classical Christi.an texts. Its modem chauvinism constitutes an attack on premodern wisdom.
9. The fact that their theology has no grass roots support or lies with a worshipping community is considered a badge of honor.

Now you see why I have trouble even accurately describing the depth of the problems of the liberated seminary. My leading hypothesis: Modernity has belatedly triumphed in the seminary just as it was dying out in the real world. The triumph of modernity is most decisively felt in the special hothouse arena of a fully tenured and fully liberated seminary faculty.

 

The Consequent Moral Dilemma

This problem presents me with serious moral difficulties: Should I even remain in a seminary system that I think has gone so far toward corruption? The major reason for staying is: if I leave, along with others who are like me, doesn’t that simply risk abandoning the seminary tradition into the hands of its most creative deconstructers and articulate detractors?

My personal dilemma: If I stay, I cooperate with a corrupted and corrupting system. Yet, if the few remaining classic Christians in leadership positions leave the present seminary system, they leave behind the legacy, the bequests, the institutions, the resources that have been many generations in the building. Walking away may have stickier moral impediments than hanging in.

I am pouring out my heart about a broken love affair. This is so difficult because, on the one hand, I love the people who suffer in the institutions served by prodigal theological education, and in many ways I love the institutions – like loving the feel of an old shoe. This, after all, is where I have spent my life. Modern theological education has given me a home, defended my right to teach according to my conscience, paid me well for my labors, given me enviable job security, protected me against critics who would limit my range of operation, given me guarantees that my life and livelihood would not be threatened by capricious charges – how could I now be so irascibly ungrateful as to bring the troubles of telling the truth to my own community?

I have been a serious defender of the tenure principle during most of my adult life, on the grounds that this is the best way to underwrite academic freedom has been challenged, the system shielded me. But now I wonder if I can in good conscience accept any longer its safety, defense and smug invulnerability.

It seems absurd for me to probe the vulnerabilities of an institution – one that I love – that has put bread on my table, a university with an enviable reputation and colleagues with whom I have worked amiably for many years. I do not want to be read as implying that there is nothing good left in liberated theological education. But there remains a question of proportionality. Do its present corruptions outweigh its potential promise?

The Temptation to Jump Ship

So what is ahead for the next generation of seminarians? Is the seminary as it now stands virtually irreformable? Probably.

Should we then abandon the present seminary structure? I doubt it, even though that may seem inconsistent with the premise of irreformability. Why not vacate the premises, concede defeat, and capitulate to inevitability?

It seems unthinkable to abandon, without further prayers for special grace, an institution to which so many of the faithful have both committed themselves and provided support from their personal and often sparse resources over so long a time. The libraries and endowments and alumni cannot simply be abdicated. But can the institution be significantly reshaped? Not without an elementary reversal of tenure abuses. I see no way both to continue the present tenure system and reform the tradition-impaired seminary. And there is virtually no hope for reforming the tenure system. I wish it were otherwise. The dilemma: A clean sweep seems both necessary and impossible.

But can the tenure system be even slightly or moderately or gradually amended? Realistically, it cannot be abruptly abandoned; except by a strongly organized and intentional laity who, with astute leadership, enters directly into and dismantles the present abuses with determination. Might tenure be incrementally redefined? In a reasonable world that is what one might think ought to happen, but during the course of a multi-decade attempt at the gradual amendment of tenure policies, what would be happening to the suffering church? Who, but the laity, would have to abide faithful during those slow decades – the laity who have trusted the clergy for the transmission of the apostolic tradition and for sufficient remedies when that does not occur. A cruel hand as been dealt the long-suffering laity.

Those who love the church, but have endured its undennining by permissiveness, would like to see some reform in their institutions before the millennium ends. If you approach the reform of seminary education by the  slight or incremental modification of tenure, then you are talking about the hundred years that it might take the present institutions to die, and the  present theological faculties to redesign themselves into an academic society which would, in turn, study the collapse of Christianity. This is why the prognosis is dismal.

 

The Lust for Academic Takeovers

Well-educated, innovation-addicted young Ph.D.s lust after fiscally healthy institutions to swarm and take over, because they offer job security, even if they do not have Princeton-like prestige. This is why relatively well-funded United Methodist institutions of higher education have been special targets of shrewd, liberated Machiavellians who couldn’t make it at Harvard or Yale. Since these United Methodist institutions were desperately seeking upward academic mobility and lusting to join the Ivy-League look-alike elite, they have been willing to pay for academic stars, and have suffered most from the academic version of statutory rape.

Where tenured faculties have been formed so as to systematically block out ancient ecumenical teaching, they cannot expect evangelical or moderate support. Funds may need to be withdrawn if the pattern persists. That may be the only available mechanism by which defiant faculties can be taught that they must become accountable to their actual constituencies and to the apostolic faith.

 

The Complete Absence of Heresy

It seems worth noting that the modern seminary has finally achieved a condition that has never before prevailed in Christian history: heresy simply does not exist. Church teaching, after long centuries of struggle against heresy, has finally found a way of overcoming heterodoxy altogether, by banishing it as a concept legitimately taught within the walls of the institution.

Doing entirely away with the concepts of apostasy and infidelity is a triumphal achievement of latitudinarianism, a term Wesley used to describe those who were so broad-minded that they lacked a firm commitment to Christian essentials. This is an unexcelled accomplishment in all the annals of Christian history. It seems to give final expression  to the quest for the flawless community.

No heresy of any kind exists any longer. You cannot find one anywhere in the liberated  seminary – unless, perhaps, you might consider offenses against inclusiveness. There can be absolutely no corruption of Christian teaching because, under the present rules, all notions of corruption are radically relativized. There is  not only no concept of heresy, but also no way to raise the question of boundaries for legitimate or correct Christian belief where absolute relativism holds sway.

The very thought of asking about heresy has itself become the new arch-heresy. The arch-heretic is the one who hints that some distinction is required between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, good and evil. Such a person, if untenured, is subject to suspicion and abrupt termination by a cloned faculty-majority magnanimously composed of both absolute relativists and relative relativists.

And yes, all this was accomplished by modernity. But what an untimely event it is; because modernity is dead, and now they have post-modernity to deal with.

Surely I must be exaggerating! But if you doubt my accuracy, ask any recent seminary graduate who still defiantly holds on to belief in the incarnation and resurrection. Far from exaggerating, I have been holding back my fire concerning certain vulnerabilities that are even more difficult to talk about publicly – especially sexual experimentation and ideological harassment.

How do institutional processes guarantee that the next generation will not systematically destroy everything they have fought and worked for? That is precisely the dilemma of apostolic Christians. That is the reason why a serious view of the transmission of the apostolic tradition has always been a prime concern of the church and its laity-and an unresolved problem for Protestant liberalism.

Author’s note: This article, which is a brief abstract of a portion from a book-length argument, is not rightly interpreted if directed to my own Seminary or its leadership. It is directed rather to the problems of seminary education generally, of which my institution is only an incidental example, and by no means the worst.