Previously, I offered a general summary of Carl Raschke’s argument for theological education here.
I want to note two things here that Raschke does not. First, part of the trajectory towards professionalization and its relationship to the irrelevance of theological education is the ongoing development of bible colleges and bible universities. Virginia Lieson Brereton notes that in the development of the bible school in the early part of the 20th century, three elements were key - brevity, practicality, and efficiency “summed up in the word ‘training’. As Brereton writes (in Making Higher Education Christian: The History and Mission of Evangelical Colleges in America),
Practicality demanded that classroom teaching concentrate on transmitting the skills and knowledge the students needed for their evangelistic work. Liberal or general education was considered an unwanted extravagance given the exigencies of the time (p. 115).
The goal was to train church leaders by giving them the skills they needed to have the most immediate impact in their respective places of call. For this the attention must be more on the skills to operate within a strategic program rather than on the “furniture of the mind” as the classical education has been described as providing.
But as John C. Sommerville argues in his book The Decline of the Secular University even as Americans continue to show that they are increasingly religious and maintain a decided religious worldview, the secular unviersity has eschewed not only ethical instruction, as Julie Reuben has demonstrated, but religious instruction as well. This has left students bereft of the ability to think through crucial problems that are contributing to the structure of the world.
Thus what Raschke is arguing her is nothing new and has been an ever-present area of contention in higher education for over 100 years now and we are now, and again, asking question about what it means and what a higehr education means.
The second area has to do with the nature of competing knowledge claims and expanded worldviews enhanced through information flows and global systems of information and communication. The piece that is missing here is the equal and opposite reaction of globalization and that is increasing tendencies toward tribalism. Benajamin Barber argues as much in his somewhat prescient book Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World. While we must agree with Raschke that we are more connecting through information flows, networking, and even transportation, we are also more fragmented and localized in our relationships with each other. This includes the relative focus of many small, and yes often dying, congregations across the U.S. landscape. So while we mist be sensitive and adaptable to the transformation and competition of oppositional worldviews, we still ahve to maintain a sense of conservative adjudication in many communities that have reacted with increased sectarian tendencies.
The danger is that we will focus our theological education on a one to one relationship between the study of theology and the Bible and the quickening pace of change in the world. There must be some effective balance struck between a church leader’s ability to craft reasoned and informed responses to the problems not only of the locality, but of how the greater concerns of the world impact that locality, and the day-to-day management of people in a non-profit corporation. It does not seem effective to pass out a bag of tools or a bag of ideas, without crafting methods to ask the pragmatic questions of: How is this plausible in our communities?, or What does this look like if we try to live it, and how do we know if we have been successful?
Pragmatism, I would argue, is the bridge between the mental discipline of learning the Word of God and feeding the people of God with it. This addresses not just the question of how we can do ministry. but establishes rational grounds for why we are doing what we are doing. Perhaps the real problem is that this connective tissue is what is missing in the grand scheme of things. We learn how to do certain things, how to think through theological issues, how to read the Bible using different hermeneutic methods, how to practice good counseling techniques, and so on. But why are we doing what we are doing? Why is this important? What is the theory and model of the church that we are going after when we approach things the way we do? What are the assumptions that are guiding our thinking and practice and are they reasonable or relevant?
A theological education should not be about furniture or learning different ways to organize that furniture. It should also entail training in the ability to judge not only the best furniture for the space, but if that space is even adequate for what God would have one do with one’s life. Assessing the process of what this means while one is practicing it is the key. It’s a meta-cognitive strategy that should render not only plausible, but palpable results.
Or, as Raschke closes his article,
As disciple-making disciples we need to be gearing our theological studies toward becoming makeover artists in redesigning our Father’s house, not plodding toward one day becoming junior partners in the management of his firm.
So what did you learn in your theological education? What would you change if you could go back and do it all over again? What advice would you give to all of those who are starting in the ministry of the church in some way or are beginning their theological studies now?
Bruce Reyes-Chow posted something that reminded me again of the mission of the church.
This paragraph in the PCUSA Book of Order sums it up brilliantly I think:
G-3.0400: “The Church is called to undertake this* mission even at the risk of losing its life, trusting in God alone as the author and giver of life, sharing the gospel, and doing those deeds in the world that point beyond themselves to the new reality in Christ.”
I hope we can all keep our focus here in order to withstand the pressures of discord that will shake our foundations a bit looser. We all must remind ourselves taht these foundations that will shake loose are those we have constructed. If what we have constructed gets shaken loose, may we, by the grace of God, build something better to mediate the Kingdom.
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* c. The Church is the body of Christ, both in its corporate life and in the lives of its individual members, and is called to give shape and substance to this truth.
a. The Church is called to tell the good news of salvation by the grace of God through faith in Jesus Christ as the only Savior and Lord, proclaiming in Word and Sacrament that
(1) the new age has dawned.
(2) God who creates life, frees those in bondage, forgives sin, reconciles brokenness, makes all things new, is still at work in the world.b. The Church is called to present the claims of Jesus Christ, leading persons to repentance, acceptance of him as Savior and Lord, and new life as his disciples.
c. The Church is called to be Christ’s faithful evangelist(1) going into the world, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all he has commanded;
(2) demonstrating by the love of its members for one another and by the quality of its common life the new reality in Christ; sharing in worship, fellowship, and nurture, practicing a deepened life of prayer and service under the guidance of the Holy Spirit;
(3) participating in God’s activity in the world through its life for others by(a) healing and reconciling and binding up wounds,
(b) ministering to the needs of the poor, the sick, the lonely, and the powerless,
(c) engaging in the struggle to free people from sin, fear, oppression, hunger, and injustice,
(d) giving itself and its substance to the service of those who suffer,
(e) sharing with Christ in the establishing of his just, peaceable, and loving rule in the world.
Mollie @ Get Religion does a fine job summarizing and discussing the relative paucity of media coverage as well as different takes on the General assembly here.
Back in early May I marveled at the general lack of coverage of the United Methodist Church convention in Ft. Worth. When the Southern Baptists met in Indianapolis in early June, there was a fair amount of coverage. But the Presbyterians’ General Assembly, the big biennial meeting of the denomination’s highest governing body, was held in San Jose and the coverage was again paltry.
I find it interesting that this story did nto sell. Perhaps it was due to the complexities of actually explaining the process or what the votes actually mean that are off-putting. Some might argue for irrelevancy of the church. Some might say that it is too small of a communion and bears too little controversy overall to merit a lot of press. We will see what happens next June 28. If the decisions of the GA are upheld, that will get media coverage for sure.
What kind of education is best for developing the human mind and soul, and what is an education for? These two questions are arguably the most contested and challenged in the context of not only the liberal arts, but in the elective university system of education that is at the center of higher education in the world today. The purpose of education has moved in a revolving door between the poles of intellectual and ethical development to professionalization, from serving the interests of political ideals of citizenship to serving the interests of economic success.
The question is where theological education fits within these very general trends in education. Is it to develop church leaders primarily or is it to develop free thinkers who are able to critically evaluate the significance of the Gospel in the every fluid structures of the world. I want to address this question in a couple of posts largely in response to Carl Raschke recent article in The Other Journal entitled “From Church to “Rhizone”: Reconfiguring Theological Education for the Postmodern Era“.
The primary problem, Raschke argues, is that theological schools are suffering from “mission creep” which is a term referring to when an institution over-reaches its own prescribed boundaries by which it identifies its very mission and purpose. Combined with this is a growing sense of irrelevancy in certain aspects of preparing church leaders and scholars in biblical studies, theology and the like. As Raschke notes:
The relevance, or irrelevance, of theological education today has less to do with what is learned, including the methodological criteria for what might be considered appropriate knowledge. More than ever it has to do with how a limitless fund of knowledge and the skills for generating that knowledge are eventually applied in a practical or professional setting, especially when that setting seems limitless and undefined.
In addition to this move professionalization, Raschke argues that the reconfiguration of knowledge claims across distributed networks of ideas and information that usurp traditional boundaries in the institutions of Christianity only complicates the matter.
The possible resolution to this situation is that theological education “has to steep itself in its own irrelevant classical particularities in such a strategic manner that it is able to engage, critique, and transform the culture in a way that is genuinely relevant.” In other words, rather than jump on the board of focusing on creating a class of church leaders who learn the ins and outs of every possible permutation of skills that are necessary to lead, dipping into the critical evaluation of what we might call the classical curriculum that you then learn to flexibly apply to your specific place of call it a more adaptable and rigorous way to educate theological students.
However, to what degree should we educate students to flexibly apply their education to the whims of the world? Is this the best strategy, and is it even a new problem? I will tackle these questions in the next post.
For those of you interested, my testimony can be found here as a guest post. I want to thank Tony Hoshaw for the opportunity.
No matter how absurd your thoughts might be, someone has already done it. I quipped in a little meme about Anne Rice and Rob Zombie collaborating on a Jesus movie (I made it up, they really have not). So Frank commented that it was real, or something like it. I was about to respond with a “ha-ha”. Then I did a Google search and found this:
I am not sure what to say about this one. Seems like a good enterprising idea for people clearly confused without their fearless leader. But it’s still as weird as this whole situation really is.
FLDS women for the first time are offering their handmade, distinctive style of children’s clothes to the public through the Web site fldsdress.com.
[...]
The initial Web site featured only photographs of clothes because the children were still in state custody. Now those are being replaced with photographs of smiling, beatific FLDS children modeling the fashions.
The sect is offering dresses, overalls, shirts, pants, nightgowns, sleepers, onesies for babies and, yes, ankle-to-wrist underwear. There are denim jeans for boys and “teen princess” dresses in plain, jacket and vest styles in pastel shades of pink, peach, yellow, green, aqua, blue, lavender and lilac. The dresses sell for $35.65. Women’s apparel could be added if demand arises.
Yes, but will it be “fashion forward”?
Read the full article here to see how the votes were actually cast and for a good summary on the actions of the Assembly.
By its actions, the assembly has initiated a new opportunity to focus ordination on primary allegiance and obedience to Jesus Christ, as well as to Scripture and the church’s confessions. The assembly places the responsibility onto sessions and presbyteries for discerning a candidate’s fitness for ordination.
In all of this, it is important to note that the assembly has not removed the church’s standard of “fidelity in marriage and chastity in singleness.” For the proposed change—making obedience to Christ the ordination standard—to become part of the Book of Order, a majority of presbyteries will need to ratify it over the next year.
However, what was called the authoritative interpretation (AI) was removed and that action was ineffect as soon as the vote was cast.
By a 53% to 47% vote, the assembly adopted a new Authoritative Interpretation (AI) on G-6.0106b: Interpretive statements concerning ordained service of homosexual church members by the 190th General Assembly (1978) of the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, and the 119th General Assembly (1979) of the Presbyterian Church in the United States and all subsequent affirmations thereof, have no further force or effect.
It is this last that has set the stage for the debate to be far more open to interpretation than in previous years.
