A Training in Wisdom and in Love
In the wake of recent dust-ups in higher ed, from the closure of Trinity in Deerfield, to the struggles of Fuller, and to folks like James K.A. Smith seeking to untether Calvin from its church roots (and Christian values), it is a weird time to be in higher ed.
I don’t want to speak into these situations specifically (I honestly don’t know enough about them to speak meaningfully into them). But I do want to begin by talking about my experience as a student at Trinity.
Many people don’t know this, but I spent a year as a seminary student at Trinity. It was right after I finished my first MA from Talbot, when I moved back home to Illinois to start going to Trinity. It was a hard season for me personally for a variety of reasons, but it was even harder at Trinity.
What I didn’t know at the time was how odd my experience of seminary had been at Talbot. I chose Talbot, not because I knew anything about it (I didn’t), but because I read J.P. Moreland’s book Love God With All Your Mind. I wanted to study philosophy, and I wanted to do that with someone who had a vision for serving God by loving him with my mind.
What I experienced at Talbot was the unique virtues of a faculty who reiterated the importance of taking their calling seriously but not themselves. This meant that seminary was the place where I called J.P. Moreland just, “J.P.” or even just “J.” It was normal to be dialoguing about the nature of metaphysics in one moment, and then shift somehow naturally to talking about his marriage.
Much of that time in seminary for me was learning about marriage, ministry, and faithfulness in faculty homes, out for lunch, or in walks on campus. Before I went I didn’t anticipate, but I came to love, how faculty and students would regularly be laughing hysterically with each other, and the kind of bond we would have as students as we shared our anxieties, worries, and fears. But more so, I didn’t realize how different that was from other seminary experiences.
What seminary was for me was a place of integration. It was a place where the Trinity was not a speculative doctrine but the context of prayer. It was the place where I caught a vision for abandoning my life to God. It was a place that I began to see how deep my depravity ran while simultaneously basking in the glory that grace ran deeper still.
For me personally, seminary became a place where I came to understand my academic calling in the way I have. My calling is not academic for the academy, but an intellectual calling for the sake of the church. We were learning Bible, philosophy, and theology, not to “lord it over” the average person in the church, but to encourage them in the truth that their knowledge and faith was not second class or somehow not faithful. We were learning as a mode of loving our neighbor as ourselves.
After leaving Talbot and either going to, or teaching in, other seminaries, what strikes me about them was that there was never a core spiritual vision that held the place together. Instead, there were ad hoc impulses - often contradictory - that were never brought together into a cohesive spiritual theology.
As we see the fracturing of the seminary in America, in light of this, I can’t help but wonder if the core problem we have faced is that seminaries often have no obvious spiritual vision.
If our leading focus is not on a spiritual vision for the seminary then what in the world are we doing? [For some thoughts on the spiritual vision of a seminary through the lens of B.B. Warfield, here is an article I wrote.]
I cannot speak to Trinity as a seminary because I know that many folks had a very different experience than I did when I was there for that year (and it was only one year). But one conversation from that time summed up my experience well.
Every student had to sit with a person from the counseling department to go over a psych-profile that all students had to take. It turned out that a good friend of mine was one of the people sitting with MDiv students. At one of her breaks she met me for a bite to eat and she collapsed into a chair across from me looking totally dejected. She simply said, “Kyle, I can’t help these people. They have no idea who they are in Jesus.”
In my experience, Trinity had developed into a place that was a profound theological education. But the assumption seemed to be that all that was needed to train people for ministry was a theological education. The assumption was that these people are spiritually and emotionally healthy individuals who need knowledge and skill.
The whole time I was at Trinity I heard stories - oral traditions - that floated down through the student body. One common one was of a former PhD student who came back to his apartment for lunch to find that his wife left him, and left a note on a pile of books on his bed that said something like, “Here is your mistress, you can finally have all your time with her.”
In place of a robust spiritual theology, I heard a lot of fear-inspiring stories with little or no direction of how that was supposed to integrate into my life, other than, “Don’t let this happen.”
My year at Trinity was a one-year blip in its existence. I have no idea if my experience relates to the institution as a whole, or even other people’s experience. But what I am sure of is that no seminary can survive thinking that it is a mere graduate school. It might be a graduate school, but that does not get to the heart of what a seminary truly is.
A seminary is a place to grow in wisdom and in love.
A seminary is a place to bask in the glory of God and to fall deeper in love with God’s Word, his people, and life in his presence.
A seminary will always be a place for knowledge and skill, and it should be, but it can never be reduced to that.
If a seminary loses its spiritual integration, and its whole-life spirituality, and trades that for academic credentials and sophistication, what we’ll find in its place is an institution with the appearance of godliness but will be void of its power.
If it is true that God’s power is made perfect in our weakness, then seminary education will be a place where we are led into our weaknesses to discover the power of God. We will all be tempted to trade that for something easier, something more sophisticated, and something more sterile. We will be tempted to make seminary education into a mere graduate education, where we confer degrees but do not embody the call to love God with our whole hearts, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
If we go to seminary and can engage in witty banter about Barth, but have not love, we are a noisy gong and a clanging cymbal.
If we go to seminary and come out with degrees and articles published, but don’t know how to pray, we have gained nothing.
If we go to seminary with the sophisticated rhetoric of the contemporary academic guilds, but do not cry from our hearts, “Lord Jesus, without you, I can do nothing,” then we have traded our regenerate rationality for for worldly intellection.
Go to seminary to grow in faith, hope, and love, but remember that the greatest of these is love. Go to seminary as a way to love your neighbor as yourself. Importantly, even for those of you who will never go to seminary, remember to support them. Pray that we would be a people of love, training in wisdom and in love, to bring glory to God.