I have been a seminary professor for over a decade now. Each semester we are in conversations about our programs and what blind spots we might have in our curriculum. One thing comes up continually for me that I want to name here.
It is not surprising, of course, that I am thinking about this even more these days given my new role as the Director of our Institute for Spiritual Formation and our Marriage and Family Therapy degrees. I’ve been sitting with the developmental arc of our curriculum and am seeking for ways to attend to what could become a problem.
What is this potential problem?
In a seminary context, the potential problem is that our various academic guilds vie for our attention and can take our eyes off of the true and proper call to love God and love our neighbor as ourselves. Our guilds can easily carve out paths of achievement that become worldly ways to determine success and measure our growth. Our guilds can often take our eyes off of the church, and replace proper ends with false ones.
That final piece becomes particularly tempting in a seminary context.
The reason this becomes so dangerous is that a student ends up taking a series of classes from many different professors who can struggle to detach themselves from the specific ends and values of their guild over and against that of the church. In certain seminaries, no doubt, students experience each professor in service to their specific guilds, such that the education becomes incoherent methodologically. You could be learning an entirely different methodology in each class without anyone even knowing that this is happening. Students would leave bewildered, or else just embracing the method of whichever course was taught by their favorite professor.
Instead, we need to remember that we are not in service to academic guilds, however much we should use these spheres for accountability. Christian professors - especially seminary professors - need to be in service to the church (in this regard, you cannot truly serve two masters, even if you can work within two spheres). If we fail to do this, students will end up feeling an incoherent tension in methodologies, content, and goals of their education.
For instance, they might leave a theology class conversant in the present discourses of dogmatics, but not understand how to think Christianly about their lives.
They might ace hermeneutics and know all of the best commentaries to use and have no idea how to meditate on scripture.
They might leave homiletics with a form of preaching but not realize that they can “empty the cross of its power” when they preach (1 Cor. 1:17).
Now, I should say, that when I talk to students I’m encouraged at the kinds of things they say about their experience at Talbot School of Theology. But we can never grow complacent in the temptations of a professor to serve their guild instead of the church. Too many seminarians have learned how to write a great exegetical paper but, at the same time, watched their prayer-lives fade away. Too many have learned how to preach a sermon through their natural abilities rather than in dependence upon their Lord. Too often students leave with a heightened sense of their own skill rather than the fact that, as Jesus asserts, “without me, you can do nothing” (John 15:5).
The missing piece in all of this, I think, is that it is not enough to say these things. That is the fantasy actually. The fantasy is that you can just lecture about these things and then send them off to do papers, thinking that they won’t do these in their flesh. Professors too often fail to recognize how their assignments are engraining either a methodology of the flesh or of the Spirit. If we are not bringing in prayer, meditation, and an honest wrestling with the Word communally, into the class and into our assignments, students will learn how to write sermons in the flesh, exegete scripture in God’s absence rather than his presence, and will leave seminary filled with theological content but no idea how to navigate their lives with the Lord.
If you are in seminary, or if you know someone in seminary, don’t hesitate to ask the practical question about life with God. How is your new knowledge helping you pray? What are you learning that has opened your heart more deeply to the Lord? How is your education leading you to love God with your whole heart, and to love your neighbor as yourself?
For my paid subscribers, here are some added thoughts about the task of study in general, and how we are called to navigate a genuine depth of insight with an increasing spiritual depth.