This post is a response to an article that a friend referred to on Facebook. You can find the article here but it is not necessary to read it to understand this post. The article addresses weaknesses in theological education. This post is focused on critique more than my usual posts.
Problems in theological education are issues I have thought about for a long time. My summary observation is that the split between doctrine and practice that developed in the Middle Ages still has a big grip on Christian theological education (“TE”) and is crippling TE. In fact, the problem seems to be growing. The author of the article says that TE should help students become “the kind of people who are disciplined into humility” etc. so that they can love God and the world. But the reality is that theological education puts only a minor emphasis on this. Read through the textbooks and you will find very little on the theology of maturity (which should include an integration of the imperatives in Scripture.) The practice of the faith is relegated to practical theology or spiritual formation departments and in those departments practice is not based on serious exposition informed by Christian history. This only perpetuates the historical divorce between serious maturity and theology that so many historians of spirituality have pointed out.
Moreover, in what way are the curricula in general designed to produce godly people who can bring others to maturity? Some seminaries throw in a couple spiritual formation classes and think they have done their job. Other types of practical courses are offered, but the idea of a biblical theology of maturity is still foreign to the students. Of all the PhD’s I have talked to in my life not one learned any coherent theology of maturity in their program. I am not even aware that such a program is available except in Roman Catholic schools, which have their own set of systemic problems. Universalism and syncretism abounds in the Catholic and liberal Protestant spirituality academy.
Gordon Fee, Scot McKnight and others lament the lack of formation in theological education in their books.The current emphasis on European PhD’s only makes this worse. My observation is that TE promotes objectivity without subjective faith, removal of the activity of the Spirit from theological thinking and an attachment to intellectualism and scholasticism. Evangelicals are afraid to mention the work of the Spirit in their treatises for fear of sounding unscholarly. There is so much focus on debating the liberals that evangelical works end up being mostly apologetics. But we already know that liberals reject the supernatural events in the New Testament based on their a priori assumption that God would not supernaturally intervene this way in the natural world. The debates don’t accomplish much. It seems that this whole approach has been beaten to death.
Read theological works from the late 19th century and you will find that they are far less afraid to display their subjective faith. Or read Philip Schaff’s History of Christianity and you will find many more subjective evaluations, positive and negative, about various developments in Christian history. This balance of subjectivity and objectivity is mostly gone now, presumably because it wouldn’t be respected by academia at large.
Evangelical scholars want to impress the academy with their defense of the faith but where is the focus on edifying the church? Incredibly, almost no evangelical scholars have a working knowledge of the history of Christian spirituality, yet they try to teach about the Christian life? Could someone claim to be a theologian but never study historical theology?
All this focus on succeeding in the academy has left many evangelical scholars and their works mostly irrelevant to the church. Students graduate without even knowing about the great renewals throughout the history of the church and the theologies of maturity that they were based on. The author of the article sadly observes that some influential evangelical theologians are not even Trinitarian. Also, how many are universalist? I recently read an article about a survey of Theological faculty in England that showed that their lifestyles were no different from unbelievers in England. Reports from PhD’s I have talked to bear this out. These are some of the people who are supervising the PhD’s of our best evangelical minds. Is this not a waste?
I am told that evangelical seminaries lean toward hiring professors on the basis of their knowledge, especially knowledge of specialized topics. (E.g., how does ancient Canaanite culture affect the way that Israel practices sacrifices?) Serious attention to character and maturity does not happen. Not only is this unwise but it is a little hypocritical if seminaries claim to be transformative, which they all seem to do now. How can they be transformative when professors are not hired on the basis on their historical and experiential knowledge of transformation?
I don’t think that the lack of language skills which the author mentions is a root problem, although I believe in learning Greek. The reduction of the number of traditional classes such as systematic theology and church history does seem like a negative trend. But even those classes rarely integrate the theology of maturity or the history of spirituality, so they end up dry and misleading.
Look at the various New Testament Theology textbooks. I have gone through the most popular ones and not one has any significant discussion of the theology of maturity. This is unthinkable. How can one write 700 pages on the theology of the New Testament and not have in-depth discussions of the theology of maturity? For example, read the chapter on Ephesians in New Testament Theology by I. Howard Marshall, published by Intervarsity. One would hardly know that the purpose of Ephesians is maturity. One finds very little on Paul’s conception of the process of maturity even though Ephesians is unfathomably profound. It is disappointing that a reputable publisher like Intervarsity would publish this, yet it seems to be the norm. Texts by Schreiner, Beale, and even Ladd are not much better. The situation with Systematic Theology texts is even worse, with some texts having only a few pages on sanctification, which is usually focused on the judicial side of sanctification.
When we realize that our current TE has a bigger impact than anything else on the way that pastors approach their ministry, then it is no wonder that churches are designed only to bring people to “teenage” Christian maturity. Pastors just simply don’t know how to do otherwise. Will pastors be able to teach maturity if the seminaries don’t make radical changes?
It is very unlikely that problems with TE will change in the near future. The cost, time and lack of transformation will eventually render it marginally relevant to the edification of the body of Christ. Perhaps less formal, unaccredited programs that are able to verify the transformation of their students to churches and denominations will become more dominant in the future. Effective strategies for transformation can be derived from Christian history and applied to local churches if we are intentional. Unfortunately, the momentum in traditional TE is not hopeful.
