Doug Sweeney started a warm discussion about the current seminary model with a piece for the Co-Allies that echoes points John Frame made about the limitations of the seminary model. Sweeney’s larger point concerns the growing distance between the academy and church, and the way the seminary may be tilting toward academics away from pastoral ministry:
American Protestants have only had such schools for a couple hundred years. They are relatively new. And, in the main, the theological life of our churches has declined during the years they’ve been around. I suggest we move toward a seminary model in which thoughtful, seasoned pastors play a greater role on campus (not just in preaching and polity classes) and, correlatively, that seminary professors play a greater role in the educational ministries of their region’s congregations.
Bill Evans jumped on board and praised Sweeney for questioning the seminary model:
. . . the theological seminary has been perhaps the most important engine in the “professionalization” of the clergy–the notion that the Christian ministry is another of the “helping professions” in which ministers are to conform to humanly generated standards of professional “best practices” as established by guardians of the guild (such as the Association of Theological Schools).
Finally, Carl Trueman responds responded with a good point:
Here is my question: could it be that the indifference to and ignorance of the basic elements of the Christian faith are themselves functions of a widespread belief that these things are not important? And if they are not deemed important by Christians, then we must ask ourselves why they are not deemed important. Could it be because the church and her preachers and teachers are not stressing the reasons why these things, these basic elements of faith are important — that human beings are dead in sin, possess no righteousness in themselves and live in imminent danger of falling into the hands of a God who is a consuming fire?
It has always struck me as fascinating that we today lament the biblical ignorance of people in the pews while at the same time we behave in ways likely to exacerbate rather than ameliorate the problem. We reduce the number of Sunday services from two to one, thus halving the amount of preaching people hear; we look to stand-up comics as providing the key to successful communication of a serious message; we warble on endlessly about cultural transformation and about what the world will and will not find plausible in our confession; and, most crucial of all, we soft-pedal on preaching for conviction of sin.
Conciliator that I am known to be, I wonder if all of the pieces are making the same point — namely, that seminaries need to be closer to the church, professors need to be pastors who are called to the work of ministry, and the institutions themselves need to stress the skills necessary for working in congregations and discipling God’s people.
In which case, the culprit here may not be accreditors or the universities that credential seminary faculty but the seminary administrators themselves. In the 1970s conservative Protestant seminaries received a massive infusion of students who were not planning on going into the ministry (I was one of them). Masters degrees other than the M.Div. proliferated, seminary budgets expanded, and academic deans conducted searches for faculty to keep up with all the new students. All of a sudden, the seminary became the place other than the local pastor to receive instruction in the basics of the Christian faith and then go with a Christian W-W into a number of other different occupations — most often graduate school for a Ph.D. in a subject that would position someone to teach at a seminary. In turn, seminaries became used to the revenue stream and now have trouble going back simply to programs designed for prospective ministers.
The seminaries’ production of Christian or biblical counselors only underscores this shift. Rather than looking for counsel from a pastor and a set of elders (not to mention parents and grandparents), believers now look for seminaries to send out a set of credentialed and licenses “professionals” who are redundant to the work of pastors. These counselors (as far as I know) even charge their clients for their services. Can you imagine your pastor or elders passing along a bill to you after a family visit?
In which case, the real problem with seminaries is the crisis of special office more generally. Do Protestants believe that pastors do anything holy or sacred when every Tom, Dick, or Sally has his or her own “kingdom work” or when I, for instance, have a writing “ministry”? Instead of defending the unique work of pastors and the holy ordinances they administer, seminaries welcomed all the hoi polloi (myself included), expanded their programs, and watered down the specialty of special office. One way to restore the seminary’s wits is to go back to training pastors exclusively. But which school will survive in that great day?
Old Life 
Really good thoughts Darryl, sincerely. I’d be interested in any follow-up thoughts on particular ways to navigate through the current situation you describe.
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Would you care to comment on Machen’s views regarding seminary professors and ordination? Requiring ordination certainly wouldn’t solve these particular problems, but it is one possible way to address them. As far as I understand, Machen did not want to make ordination a requirement for professors at Westminster in Philadelphia precisely because of the events leading up to its founding. But on the other hand, when professors are not ordained, it can be much more difficult to take action against aberrant theology.
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Minus the gratuitous potshots at “worldview” and “kingdom work” this post is exactly right.
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I’m right with Trueman there. It seems that, while some seminaries certainly have moved away from the church, the church has also moved away from the seminary in its neglect of doctrine and emphasis on Christian experience. It’s not exactly a new movement, but in broad evangelicalism more and more pastors don’t go to seminaries (but rather to some sort of “bible college”), don’t learn the original languages, and don’t care about church history unless it provides a vivid sermon illustration, nor doctrine unless it can be made distilled to three bullet points and an application. Segments of Reformed Protestantism seem to be following in the same trajectory and in doing so are themselves driving a wedge between the church and seminary.
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Interesting. Myself owning a Biblical Studies degree from the self-proclaimed W-W center-of-the-world, Biola, the school touts themselves on the fact that their students leaving the university (required 30 bible units for all students) will be more knowledgeable in Scripture than 99% of the world.
Granted, this is a blessing and cannot in itself be shunned, but why do So. Cal parents need to send their kids to an expensive private school in order to be schooled in the bible? Maybe if churches were doing there job (as you suggest) I wouldn’t have had to listen to all my former professors lament (justifiably so) the fact that students continually are performing worse and worse on bible-knowledge entrance exams.
I think it’s a trickle down (or gushing down?) effect of the failure to train pastors that schools like Biola have, unconsciously, created a self-sustaining environment. Stop training pastors and now the youth need to go somewhere else to get doctrinal/theological bible teaching… at your local evangelical university. So, at least what I’m seeing, it doesn’t look like the evangelical model you try to combat is going anywhere for a while.
Should Christian schools simply jettison bible classes all together and tell their students to go to church?
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Camden, I wasn’t aware that Machen had any fears or problems with faculty being ordained. I don’t know that anyone prior to the 1980s would have considered lay faculty at a seminary. What am I missing?
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Ben, it was a shot (or a couple) but nothing gratuitous about them.
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Nate,
It’s almost as if we were raised in the same home – but MBI was way more hardcore than the Bible Institute of LA that Torrey founded once he realized the weather was better in CA than it was on the mean streets of Chicago.
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Ben,
DGH is wont to take some pot shots at the sacred cow of W-V-, but as far as I understand Old Princeton did not have an emphasis on worldview formation. I am less hostile to the idea that there is some vague sense of a Christian Worldview (the question is of what sort), but is training in W-V- so critical to the training of ministers – how about the rigors of Greek, Hebrew, Doctrine, etc.? Wouldn’t our Reformed churches be better off if they simply “majored in the majors”, such as Word, Sacrament and catechesis? If DGH reacts in one direction toward W-V-, could it be because the concept itself has overstepped it’s usefulness? Wouldn’t we rather have solid doctrinal moorings within the umbrella of a historically Reformed praxis than a well orbed W-V- ? Maybe the two aren’t totally mutually exclusive, but until we gain some traction in what has historically constituted Reformed Christianity, I think DGH’s pot-shots at W-V- are a rather reasonable critique.
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seminaries became used to the revenue stream – this is a very interesting statement maybe additional thought on this is necessary – perhaps it is as simple as follow the money – oh my am I bad!
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I can’t recall the source of this Machen info, but I know I’ve had a conversation with Dr. Gaffin on the subject. I believe the fact that a denomination could shift from orthodoxy was always in the back of Machen’s mind. Given the state of the mainline, and seeing that the OPC had not yet been formed, it became somewhat prudent to relax the ordination requirement. In my understanding, Machen structured Westminster in a way that protected from denominations gone wild. But recent events show what can happen when ordination requirements are not in place and professors go wild.
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To toss in another thought. Now we have the proliferation of DMins with pastors wanting to be called Dr. At the same time, what has happened to ThDs? Now there was a real doctorate! I agree that our current seminary practice has problems, but how many pastors are capable of training men for the ministry?
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Bruce Prentice: To toss in another thought. Now we have the proliferation of DMins with pastors wanting to be called Dr.
RS: Thus feeding the pride of some minsters (not all) while increasing the revenue of seminaries and the salary of ministers.
Bruce Prentice: At the same time, what has happened to ThDs? Now there was a real doctorate!
RS: Not enough revenue and too much work, not to mention that it is not thought to be practical enough for ministry.
Bruce Prentice: I agree that our current seminary practice has problems, but how many pastors are capable of training men for the ministry?
RS: A real problem in our day. We have become so dependent on the seminaries who have watered things down for various reasons and now we don’t have minsters who are capable of training minsters. But maybe the real issue is that God has sent a judgement upon us in the form of a spiritual famine.
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Richard Smith – I could not have said it any better myself. I totally agree with all you have said.
Especially and most importantly “God has sent a judgement upon us in the form of a spiritual famine.”
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VJ and Richard, you guys should get out more. Here in Hillsdale the saints are well fed – lots of manna to go round.
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Just as a question, since I’m finding it quite hard to think outside the box on this one, what did the church do before the rise of the seminary? I’d always assumed that from some point in the middle ages the clergy were trained at the universities and the seminaries came about as the universities secularised or at least lost their confessional basis. But if that’s the case, was that really much different from seminary?
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Ed, before the seminary Protestants in N. America used pastors. Young men would do an apprenticeship with a senior pastor.
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D. G. Hart: VJ and Richard, you guys should get out more. Here in Hillsdale the saints are well fed – lots of manna to go round.
RS: I take it that you have lots of church dinners.
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DG, isn’t the apprenticeship model a rather non-oldlife response, not to mention a relative innovation, historically speaking? I understood that the Puritans founded Harvard pretty quickly to train their clergy, founding new institutions every time the old one went liberal. As I understand it (and I could be completely wrong) the idea of apprenticeships, which no one in the old country (Scotland) would ever have countenanced, went along with the 18th/19th century pietist idea that the Colleges were responsible for turning out dead orthodox ministers and in times of revival new methods were needed to produce the number and kind of ministers required to meet the needs of frontier society and compete with the Baptists and Methodists. Even today you are surely far more likely to find enthusiasm for apprenticeships among transformationalists (think Tim Keller & the Bayly brothers) than among confirmed old-lifers.
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I wonder if seminaries are a bit confused over which kingdom they should be a part of? Or is it possible that the common kingdom is encroaching upon the sacred kingdom by?
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Iain, I didn’t know the post was advocating an apprenticeship model. I was simply indicating the way that seminaries admitted schlubs like me. I don’t think any school can prepare a pastor in practical areas. That’s why most churches make internships available. In fact, graduates of Harvard and Yale would still do an apprenticeship with guys like Edwards.
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