Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of training Evangelical Scholars in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
The more I have thought about this subject, Training the Next Generation of Evangelical Scholars, the more I have realized I am probably not the person to address it. I teach in a limited part of the theological spectrum. It has been more than two decades since I served an institution as academic dean, and on the whole, the best of the academic deans are probably better positioned to say something useful on this subject than I am, since they’re paid to think about it and I’m not.
Inevitably, all of us turn it over in our minds from time to time, but I profess no special expertise. What I am offering you, I suppose, is the sort of rambling comment that almost any one of us could have come up with in a few minutes with a keyboard, but because very few of us actually reserve those few minutes in our very busy lives to reflect hard on these questions, perhaps my few prosaic observations may be justified as a way of fostering some discussion among ourselves.
It is important to acknowledge that measured on certain scales we have made some considerable gains. When this society was founded, one of the reasons why the ThM was made the minimal degree for membership, according to Kenneth Kantzer, and not the PhD was that there were so few inerrantist evangelical PhDs around. That is not the case today. We are a dime a dozen. I’m referring to the quantity, not necessarily the quality.
When one stops to reflect on which seminaries have been created since World War II and how many students they train compared with numbers in most mainline seminaries, when one reflects on the extraordinary growth of the graduate student fellowship in InterVarsity and somewhat similar links in Campus Crusade circles, when one attempts to chart the influence of evangelical scholarship in the production of scholarly books, as opposed to the almost exclusively devotional books written 60 years ago, there is plenty for which to give thanks to God.
We sometimes fail to appreciate this growth because it has been played out against a backdrop of drift away from a widespread Judeo-Christian bias in the culture at large, but even if there are many dangers and uncertainties, evangelical fragmentation, retreat from engaging the culture, many and diverse uncertainties, there are reasons for thankfulness, which thankfulness we owe to God.
Having said that, the impending turn of the millennium offers us an opportunity to assess where we are and reflect on where we should be as we seek to chart a course into the first decades of the turn of the calendar now a bare 13 months away. Before embarking on some observations and reflections, it may be helpful to identify five elements within the topic assigned to me that I find make my task impossibly difficult.
First, it is no longer entirely clear what evangelical scholar refers to. Evangelical and its cognate evangelicalism are implicitly understood in three quite different ways. The term may: A) be defined doctrinally, referring to a corpus of agreed truths or to a movement that is linked by shared truths; B) be defined sociologically, referring to all those people and movements who call themselves evangelicals, regardless of what they believe; and C) be understood to refer to the locus of the redeemed, the converted, the justified, the saved, the regenerate, whatever the category.
This latter usage has come about because the first usage, tying together evangelicalism and saving truth, gradually became a test of who is and who is not saved. To say someone is not an evangelical, therefore, came to carry the overtone in some circles of saying that he or she is not converted. Such linkage inevitably has the effect of creating pressure to include as many people as possible.
People, after all, can hold all kinds of contradictory or failed or inconsistent positions, and this, on the long haul, exerts a backward pressure on the doctrinal meaning of evangelicalism to keep enlarging its doctrinal borders. Many pundits have observed that there are today many self-confessed evangelicals who no evangelical of 50 years ago would have recognized as such. A few have opined that the term itself may become so useless in a few decades it will fall into desuetude.
On such points I cannot predict the future. I merely insist that here, for me, evangelical refers to a doctrinal position, and that is all. Elsewhere I have outlined the challenge of defining evangelicalism and its cognates in the book Evangelical Affirmations and need not repeat myself here. In my usage today, when I speak of training evangelical scholars, I’m talking about training scholars with a certain doctrinal stance, which I have outlined and defended elsewhere.
Second, it is not entirely clear what is meant by evangelical scholars. There are at least two ambiguities. Are these evangelical scholars systematicians or experts in Old and New Testament, students of historical theology, and the like, or do they include scholars in almost any discipline who are doctrinally committed evangelicals?
The question is not frivolous, for how one might go about training the next generation depends entirely on which of these two groups one has in mind. How to go about training the next generation of advanced microbiologists also to be evangelicals is not quite the same thing as training the next generation of New Testament scholars, although there are some huge overlaps. So what I shall do is straddle the fence and make a few comments about both groups and satisfy no one.
Next, are these evangelical scholars not pastors? Do we really mean evangelical academics? I assume that pastors are not in use, since John Piper follows me with an address on the training of evangelical pastors, but he and I share a passion to see more scholars in the pulpit. Is John himself not an evangelical scholar because he left the seminary world to become a pastor? The mind boggles. Of course, intuitively, we recognize that the average training of a seminary professor or university professor is greater than that of the average pastor.
So perhaps we are talking about the top end academically, whatever the top end is, but it is worth exposing the assumptions on the topic, not least because at the earliest stages of their formation, evangelical, biblical, and theological scholars regularly receive much of the same training as pastors and missionaries and may have once served as pastors and missionaries themselves. Conversely, they may abandon the formal halls of academic life to serve as pastors, as does John. Or they may be scholar missionaries, scholars teaching and training others in a cross-cultural context.
By having two separate addresses on training leaders for the future, are we unwittingly slighting the desirability of training theologian pastors, scholar practitioners? I wish I could explore these matters at length, but confident that John Piper will clean up my mess, I shall largely restrict myself to the training of evangelical scholars who serve in more formal academic settings, though not a little that I say will apply to pastors as well.
Third, my task is to talk about the training of the next generation of evangelical scholars. Of course, we have to plan ahead, yet we need to remind ourselves of James’ exhortation. Most predictions about the future, a largely disreputable business, are based on nothing more than extrapolations of current trends, which often change. How many of us in the early 50s accurately foresaw what the late 60s and early 70s would be like?
In the Eisenhower years, did we really anticipate Vietnam, punk rock, and that sort of thing? How many of us in the closing Nixon years accurately predicted the Reagan years? How many of us in 1970 or 1975 thoroughly appreciated how postmodern in epistemology our culture and especially our universities would be in 1995?
How many predicted the extraordinary cultural diversity that large scale and fresh immigration patterns would bring us, strengthened by a host of other developments? So who am I to make confident predictions about the shape of society in another quarter century? Can we rule out global economic collapse, another massive war, sustained revival? So we ought to talk softly. We need to plan but talk softly.
Fourth, when we reflect on the training of the next generation of evangelical scholars, whoever they are, we are immediately called to reflect on the next generation of institutions that shape them. If we are thinking of the training of evangelical biblical and theological scholars, we are really talking about seminaries and graduate university programs, but we’re also talking about the interplay of those institutions with the local church and with families and a whole host of other things too.
We are also talking about the ways in which scholars in the broader fields are being shaped by churches or modular courses in Cincinnati from a seminary in California or whatever. The issues become very complex at the institutional level.
Fifth, I cannot forbear to mention that the title for these ETS meetings, “Teaching Them All Things,” is an expression picked out of the Matthean report of Jesus’ Great Commission. Is there perhaps a danger that we begin to think of scholarship as an end in itself, even an end that somehow acknowledges God’s sovereignty and that all truth is God’s truth, yet somehow breeds a culture of triumphalism and arrogance and not a spirit of evangelism? Knowledge puffs up; love builds up.
Do not misunderstand me. I am the last person who wants to retreat to a huddle of ignorance, to inferior scholarship, to a suspicion of rigorous thought, but let us be frank. We must repudiate the vulgar anti-intellectual traditions in more than a little evangelicalism that refuse to love God with the mind while we learn to fear the love of eminence and prestige and power that can come with great learning.
One of the most formidable devices for protecting ourselves is the recognition that our scholarship must serve the gospel. Do not tell me only of your second doctoral dissertation. Tell me to whom you have been explaining the gospel. Show me how your increasing grasp of biblical and theological truth is making disciples of Jesus Christ and winning lost people to the Savior.
1. Some rather mechanical predictions.
I now indulge in this disreputable business of predicting. I’m going to speak a little more informally.
A. Numbers of seminaries.
They’re probably heading for an increase. Several Bible colleges are starting graduate schools. The latest one is Moody, which started a graduate school a few years ago and now is starting an MDiv program, and there are others behind them. There are some megachurches that are increasingly heading in that direction. The latest one, as far as I know, is Jack Hayford.
Unless total numbers of students increase, that means numbers in other seminaries must decrease. It’s called mathematics. Probably some schools will fail. It’s very important to see that there are entailments in these sorts of decisions. There are good and bad things in all of this, but we need to see what the entailments are.
B.Numbers of students.
Everybody is aware that many evangelical seminaries went through phenomenal growth from the 60s through to about the middle of the 70s, and then they all started having problems with enrollment, more or less. What was not always perceived was that the pool of students between the ages of 18 to 22 studying in colleges peaked because of the post-World War II baby boom which came to an end.
From about 1970 to 1990, that group of students dropped almost 20 percent, and all of our seminary students, without exception, come from that pool. So even if the percentage of evangelical students remained the same during that time, and the percentage that went on to seminary remained the same, we were going to take a 20 percent hit.
Sometimes the issues are not primarily bound up with, “Am I winning or losing? Am I attracting enough people? Am I on the upcurve of God’s blessing?” Sometimes it’s demographics under the sovereignty of God, and there may be a prophetic call, then, on some occasions to cut back, not because we’re being unfaithful or lack vision but because we read the demographics. Instead, what we did, by and large, was multiply programs, which then changes the nature of the institutions for good and ill again.
Moreover, in this business of students, the ages of students has changed. The incoming age at Trinity now is about 32 or 33, still rising slightly. Eventually, that’s going to crest and it’s going to start to fall. What will that mean? We have rising numbers of students now who are doing education in modular units or in block scheduling or in distance-learning situations. What does that mean for education?
C. Numbers of dollars.
The best evangelical seminaries in the country (I speak out of the seminary context rather than the college context because that’s where I live) are ridiculously expensive. They have to be expensive in some ways to pay their bills. On the other hand, when somebody comes out of Trinity, he or she does not go and get a job as a lawyer or a neurosurgeon. He or she wants to become a missionary in Pago Pago and can’t go with $20,000 or $30,000 worth of education debt.
Now that is going to change, whether we like it or not. It is going to change in part because of what has happened at Gordon-Conwell. They’ve set down a flag. It’s going to change in part with a new school like Moody coming on board, which has sufficient income that it has virtually no tuition fees. It’s going to change. There are dynamics afoot.
Moreover, with the change in the Southern Baptist Convention, it may well be that two or three of their major seminaries, such as Southern and Southeastern, will gradually position themselves with the taking in of faculty from the outside of SBC circles and position themselves in the larger market to attract more students into those seminaries from outside SBC circles, and all of the dynamics are going to change. Not all bad. I’d love to see a lot more people graduating without debt, but that means we have to give some serious thinking to fundraising, endowments, subsidizing education.
Do you know what Princeton Seminary’s endowments are? Last I read, three years ago, it was $600 million. There are no tuition fees at Princeton. I don’t know what percentage of the ingoing students to Princeton Seminary are evangelical but very high. Do you know why they go there and not to Gordon-Conwell or Trinity or Dallas or whatever? It’s free. We’re going to have to think about these things, brothers and sisters in Christ.
D. Numbers of potential professors.
A bare 30 years ago, you’d scramble to find one decent PhD in New Testament who could fill a slot in your department, and then you’d settle again and again for people who are on the way. It’ll only take them about 15 years to finish their PhD the way we make them work. That’s gradually changing. There are still some who get slots even after they’ve finished their comprehensives but have not yet submitted, but it’s changing.
If we look for someone in New Testament, we’ll look through a list of 30 to 50 people. That’s not all bad. It means there is some pick and choose. It also means we are going to break down, thank God, this dichotomy assumed in the evangelical movement that says if you have an MDiv you become a pastor or missionary; if you have a PhD you become a professor.
One of the things I’ve tried to do for years with students who wanted to go on to Cambridge or Oxford for PhDs was to send them to Cambridge, not just because I’m from there but because Cambridge has Roy Clements. I knew that if they went to Cambridge and went to that church for a few years they would get stamped with a vision of competent, theological, powerful preaching ministry that would send many of them back into the pulpit, and that’s what has happened. The Mark Devers and Bill Kynes of this world. We need more John Pipers and Jim Boices as well.
It is not all bad, therefore, to have more and more PhDs who will not think that PhD means passport to teaching in a seminary. Seminary is, at one level, quartermaster’s job. The front line is the local church. At another level, we are engaged in all kinds of struggles and temptations and fights ourselves, and we feed the whole stream. I know that’s another image as well. Yet it is desperately important not to think that PhD somehow is a ticket out of ministry in the local church. But that’s going to change our vision on some of these things.
E. Numbers of programs.
Introduced, in the first instance, to keep up a lot of FTEs. One particular school, for example, moved into the position where more than 50 percent of its students at the master’s level were in psychology. What that meant was that in many of the shared classes, the shaping of what is taught is different than if 90 percent of the students are being trained for ministry. Teachers start responding to who their students are.
In another school that was known for strong languages, eventually they had about 50 percent of their students coming in on a two-year master’s degree without any language requirements at all. That shifted the nature of a lot of the instruction going on in that institution. Now both of those institutions have turned those patterns around, but it is important to see that there are pressures that are intertwined.
Curriculum gets tied to the number of programs you have, which gets tied to who your students are, which gets tied to whether or not there are language requirements, which gets tied to … and so on. So then you ask me to say something intelligent about training the next generation of theological scholars, and I want to go home and have a good cry.
2. What I would like to see in seminary priorities, especially curriculum.
A. The primacy of learning the content of the Bible well.
Different schools handle this in different ways. One of the ways we have of handling it is this: The vast majority of students who came into seminary 30 years ago had not only read the Bible through but had been weaned on the Bible and were brought up with a lot of Bible knowledge, Bible stories, and this sort of thing. Many of them were themselves children of the manse.
Today, that’s far less likely. We have far more incoming students who didn’t get converted until the age of 22 or come from dysfunctional homes without any Bible background at all. If you have enough of them and put them immediately into your core courses, the effect is to dilute all your core courses. What we do is insist that they pass a certain kind of Bible content test the first week in, and if they don’t achieve a certain grade they have to chew up elective hours taking remedial courses before they can get into our core.
That’s only one way of doing it, but you have to do something. Otherwise, the dumbing down of our culture, especially in the historical/biblical/theological arena is going to mean the dumbing down of our courses. This business of the primacy of learning the content of the Bible well can be tied to many things. I shall mention three.
The first is the rising level of biblical illiteracy in the culture. We all have our stories. One of my students a few weeks back was walking in Chicago with his fiancÈe, and she had a wooden cross dangling from a chain around her neck. A teenager stopped her in the street and said, “What do you have a plus sign around your neck for?” That’s not even exceptional anymore, and this is in the Midwest, you must understand. This is not in the God-forsaken Pacific Northwest or those New England states … what do you expect? This is in the conservative Midwest.
I’ve been doing university missions now for 25 years. When I do university missions nowadays, I assume that the non-Christians who are present don’t know the Bible has two Testaments. They’ve never heard of David or Solomon. If they’ve heard of Moses, they’re likely to have confused him with Charlton Heston. They don’t know anything.
That means, therefore, that some of our students come in with remarkably little grounding as well. Our students come in from a subculture like that. So we have to compensate in this regard. There are huge questions here not only for learning data but for worldview formation. I’ll come back to that issue. That’s the heart of so much of what I want to say.
Secondly, it is partly a question of hermeneutical control. It is very difficult to be shrewd in exegesis of the particular until you have a lot of pretty good grasp of the whole. Some of you have probably downloaded this from the Internet yourselves. I’d give credit, but I wasn’t able to find out the name of the author.
Top 15 Biblical Ways to Acquire a Wife
- Find an attractive prisoner of war, bring her home, shave her head, trim her nails, give her new clothes; then she’s yours. (Deuteronomy 21)
- Find a prostitute and marry her. (Hosea 1)
- Find a man with seven daughters and impress him by watering his flock. (Moses)
- Purchase a piece of property and get a woman as part of the deal. (Boaz)
- Go to a party and hide. When the women come out to dance, grab one and carry her off to be your wife. (Benjaminites)
- Have God create a wife for you while you sleep. Note: this is going to cost you. (Adam)
- Agree to work seven years in exchange for a woman’s hand in marriage. Get tricked into marrying the wrong woman. Then work another seven years for the woman you wanted to marry in the first place. That’s right. Fourteen years of toil for a wife. (Jacob)
- Cut 200 foreskins off your future father-in-law’s enemies and get his daughter for a wife. (David)
- Even if no one is out there, just wander around a bit and you’ll definitely find someone; it’s all relative, of course. (Cain)
- Become the emperor of a huge nation and hold a beauty contest. (Ahasuerus or Xerxes)
What’s the point of going on with this? Do you see, though? It would be possible to draw those sorts of conclusions from each one of those passages. What stops us from doing that? It’s because the interpretation of those passages has to be fit into the literary genre of each book and into the biblical theological matrix, the whole storyline not only of the book and the corpus but of the whole, and we’re losing that.
There are some seminaries that will have you teaching the epistle to the Hebrews three times a year for 40 years and just about nothing else. Well, I’m sure you become an expert in Hebrews. At least I hope so. But if you become an expert in Hebrews and not the rest of the New Testament or not the Old Testament, not the whole of the Bible, sooner or later it distorts your whole vision of what Christianity is. So there are hermeneutical issues at stake.
Moreover, it’s important to keep teaching the whole Bible in order to embed the Bible’s categories. A recent report on MDiv formulation (not from Trinity, and from which school I will not say in order to protect the guilty) projects that the MDiv is orientated toward providing “ministerial leadership.” Well, I agree with that. What does this mean? This means three curricular components: spiritual formation, ministerial leadership, and supervised experience in ministry.
I can interpret every one of those in a kind of biblical theological matrix where I can live with it. Spiritual formation. I mean, who doesn’t want that? Ministerial leadership. Well, first of all, ministerial leadership is the ministry of the Word in prayer. You can reinterpret all those nicely, but do you know what troubles me about it? All of the categories are out of the social science framework. They’re not coming out of a biblical theological matrix.
So unwittingly, what happens is these categories become the governing things, and the biblical theological ones are brought underneath to sort of be the presupposition, but they’re no longer the driving force. They’re no longer the hermeneutical grid. They’re no longer the control. It’s impossible to critique this sort of structure.
B. The need for whole-Bible biblical theology.
The expression biblical theology, so far as the written record goes, was first coined in 1607 in a book called Teutsche biblische Theologie. It was nothing more than lists of proof texts to prove various doctrinal structures. In due course, biblical theology came to be associated with other things. One of the crucial turning points was Gabler’s famous inaugural address when he was appointed professor at University of Altdorf.
I completely misunderstood Gabler until I read him. In other words, I read all the reports on what Gabler had said, and then I read Gabler and discovered he didn’t say anything of the sort. What Gabler said was that he wanted more inductive study out of the texts themselves where he thought it would be possible to get a whole lot more agreement amongst scholars, because the systematicians, he said, were so busy fighting amongst themselves they weren’t really wrestling with the text.
Then after you have a lot of agreement on inductive study from the text, then you can get more systematic theology. It’s a pipe dream, and Gabler had his own problems in other ways, but there is one point here that is surely correct. If you hold a high view of Scripture, you start from the inductive study of the text. In due course, biblical theology was set over against systematic theology not only by inductive study of the text but by watching the timeline, watching the presentation, watching the storyline.
Systematic theology was increasingly understood to be atemporal. It asked and answered questions like, “What is God? What is sin? What is a human being?” and so forth, whereas biblical theology increasingly asked, “What is the contribution of Isaiah to the Canon? How do you trace the rise of temporal theology across the canonical structure?” So you’re always asking these time-related questions in biblical theology, and in due course, that then broke biblical theology into Old Testament theology and New Testament theology.
By the nineteenth century, that bifurcation was well established. By the end of the century and into this century, we then broke up, for example, New Testament theology into Synoptic theology, Matthew/Mark/Luke theology, Johannine theology, Luke/Acts theology, Pauline theology, then primary Pauline and deutero-Pauline theology, and smaller and smaller pieces until finally you don’t have a biblical theology at all.
The Germans refer to the big picture as eine gesamt biblische Theologie, a whole-Bible biblical theology. It’s gone. That is what we have to restore. That is worldview shaping. That is worldview transforming. That establishes the big anchors on which you structure all of the frame of reference by which you think.
It is important to do inductive work, for example, in John, “Many are called, but few are chosen.” The call language in Paul is effective. Those who are called are in, by definition. You cannot do accurate biblical theology without making those distinctions in corpus.
But one must still ask the big synthetic question about how it all fits together, for that is where worldview formation comes in, and that, I suggest to you, we are not doing well in most of our schools. We’ve gotten away without trying very hard in this area precisely because most people had a kind of whole Bible put together before they got here 20 or 30 years ago.
It might have been within a certain Reformed grid or dispensational grid or whatever, but there was a grid that put the whole thing together. Increasingly now, dealing with increasing numbers of students who are postmodern and bitty and eclectic, that’s not there. Unless we then take steps to overcome these bifurcations our students are not really putting it together until years and years after they get out of the seminary.
Now within this framework in our teaching and preaching, if I were teaching, let’s say, Ezekiel, in an older paradigm I would say things merely about how the glory of God departs (I’m dealing now with the temple theme) from the temple, and thus Jerusalem and the temple are no longer under the protection of God.
Their curse fits into a broader pattern in the book of Ezekiel in which the locus of the remnant turns out to be not the Jerusalem crowd left behind (they’re under the curse of God) but the exilic community way off in the boonies, 700 miles away from Jerusalem, and it’s that exilic community that will be brought back by God. Then at the end there’s a vision of a new temple, and that’s all you say.
But if you’re thinking in terms of a whole-Bible biblical theology, do you not have to start farther back and say something about the intimacy that human beings had in the garden with God before sin when you didn’t need any mediating structures? Then the introduction of sacrifice and the whole tabernacle structure and what it meant, a priesthood, high feast days, Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, and so on, until finally you come to Jesus, who insists that his own death is the destruction of the ultimate temple.
The ultimate antitype of the temple (John 1:14) is Jesus himself until you finally come to a number of typologies that work out either Jesus is the temple or the whole church is the temple or the individual Christian is the temple. Then you come to the Apocalypse, and the final vision of the new heaven and the new earth has no temple at all.
Amongst the things that are missing in the new heaven and the new earth is the temple. “I saw no temple in the city,” John writes, “for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.” What does that mean? We don’t need mediated structures anymore. Meanwhile, the Holy City itself is built like a cube. The only cube in all of Scripture is the Most Holy Place. We are forever and always in the Most Holy Place. That’s what the New Jerusalem is.
These temple structures then bring symbol-laden power so that wherever you hit this line of thought in the Canon you have means of working intercanonically to build out an entire structure of thought that pulls the whole Bible together. Above all, it is essential to tie so much of what we say to the huge turning points of redemptive history. Let me mention just one of them: the fall and sin.
The hardest thing I have to do in university evangelism nowadays is not talk about the Trinity. I can say esoteric things about the Trinity, and people swallow them. They don’t see any intellectual problems. They don’t see any theological problems. No problems. That’s what you believe. That’s okay. The hardest thing to talk about in university evangelism today is sin. Sin is now a snicker word.
In Trinity College, which is across the street from where I work, part of the university structure, one of the teachers was telling me the other day.… This is Trinity College. This is a conservative place. One of the teachers was telling me the other day that she was trying to explain different models of leadership to these students. There are leaders who are very authoritarian. There are leaders who model things. There are leaders who work by a kind of persuasiveness.
Do you know which one was most offensive to the students? Persuasiveness, because in a postmodern generation, to persuade somebody means you’re implying that they’re wrong, and the one thing you can’t say anymore is that somebody else is wrong. Mercifully, she was shrewd enough to think that one through and to answer wisely. What does that say, then, about our evangelism? “Knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade men.”
Within this framework, then.… I’m reluctant to tell too many of these stories, but part of our preparation is bound up with preparing people to address a new generation that has lost these mooring points. If you go evangelizing in Thailand in a Buddhist framework, where sin is not the issue but karma is, before you can present Jesus you have to get back to creation, fall, and what sin is.
You have to build that structure in place before you can introduce who Jesus is. Paul understands that in Acts 17. You have to build a frame of reference before you introduce Jesus. So not only must we build a whole biblical structure, we must do so in such a way that it then engages with the larger structures of thought around us so that we can confute and evangelize and interact with and bear witness to.
Four weeks ago I was in Auschwitz. I was giving some lectures in Poland and dropped down to see the place. I’d read enough about it that I didn’t really see anything I hadn’t read about, but I walked through the gas chambers. There’s still one oven left in Auschwitz. In Auschwitz II and Birkenau, the big ones, the four of them were all blown up by the Nazis in their retreat.
You can still see the piles of hair that were waiting to be shipped out in bags to make fabric back in Germany. You can still see the torture chambers, the little cell where somebody has scratched an image of Christ with his fingernail on the wall. The more I think about that place, the thing that shocks me most is that in this bloody century it’s not exceptional.
We think it’s exceptional because the Germans kept so many records that they didn’t have time to burn them all, and we have all the documentary evidence. They were jolly efficient. We’re aware of it because the few survivors are articulate and have written a lot of books. But in this bloody century, we’ve also managed to kill one-third of the population of Cambodia, something like 20 million Ukrainians, 50 million Chinese, and I don’t know how many in Biafra and Rwanda and the Balkans. It’s the bloodiest century in history.
We come to the end of the century and conclude there is no such thing as evil. How do we get across those structures and nail them down to the huge biblical theological turning points in redemptive history so that we can engage the world around us? Because unless we agree on what the problem is, we sure can’t agree on what the solution is. If we don’t see where sin fits in all of this, we have no place for the cross and the gospel.
One of the problems in a lot of evangelicalism (and not only in evangelicalism) is an attempt to build a kind of theology of this and a theology of that and a theology of something else by simply doing some proof texts on a number of words or themes without tying it into the Bible’s storyline, without seeing it in the hierarchical structure of how it fits into all of what the Bible says.
C. The urgent need for more integrated curriculum.
Like much learning in the West, we have tended toward specialization, so we have experts in education, experts in psychology, experts in worship, experts in mission, experts in … you name it; we have them. That’s not bad in itself. Don’t misunderstand me. What can we do to bring these things together? What can we do to integrate? The ways toward a more integrated curriculum are basically two.
First, design integrated courses with two or more professors from different disciplines to teach the course. The strength is that you’re bringing experts in these various places, and if they are there in the classroom.… Not the first professor teaches their part and then leaves and then the next professor comes in and teaches their part and then leaves.
But if they pull together and argue things out in front of the students, you’ll get more integration. On the other hand, that costs twice as many faculty for the same number of hours, and that means dollars, and that means our administrators don’t like it.
Secondly, beginning with some experimental courses, ultimately revamp the entire curriculum to reflect such commitment toward integration. That’s far more difficult, far more complex, and it’s very difficult to do politically, because most of us are so committed to our turf we don’t want things rearranged. It takes a tremendous amount of collegiality and common vision.
Would it be possible to work out courses that run exegesis through homiletics, except accidentally, exegesis through biblical theology, systematic theology, all the way to counseling? Exegesis that works all the way through biblical theology, systematic theology, historical theology, all the way toward a vision of educationally getting across that in the local church and bringing us up? I don’t know. It’s not done, by and large.
Besides, most of us are daunted by these sorts of things because, “It’s not my field. I’m a New Testament scholar. That’s all I am. I’m not supposed to know anything about homiletics. I’m not supposed to know anything about education.” Yet we’re training leaders and pastors who are supposed to go and know it all and integrate it all, and by and large we don’t show them how.
I think we are seriously in need of giving some fundamental thought to these sorts of issues while maintaining certain tracks for specialization, especially at graduate and postgraduate levels. We are also in need of developing planned, thought through, experimental at first, integration that transcends some of these barriers. Part of the problem is that all of them cost money, and most of our schools don’t have much of it. They all are labor intensive.
There’s a third component in integration: mentoring. This is becoming more important also with the breakdown of the family, fewer good models in the home, the pace of life, and all of the rest. There are some experiments. Denver is developing a certain plan along these lines. Trinity has a fledgling program. We call it TPAP, Trinity Pastoral Apprenticeship Program for post-MDivs, but it’s fledgling. All of them cost money as well. That’s one of the biggest barriers.
They’re all tied in some ways to local churches, which means getting on-board local churches, churches that will take on people coming out of the seminary and mentor them. Part of the problem is that in the past we have often presented ourselves as, for example, pastor- or scholar-producing institutions. “Give me your student; I will produce a scholar or pastor or whatever.”
But you don’t produce a pastor in a seminary. There are parts of the whole curriculum that are better learned in a seminary than anywhere else on God’s green earth, but there are parts of it that are only learned on the street. There are parts of it that are only learned in the local church. In the past, we got away with it because so many people came in to us having been reared in the local church and they picked these things up by osmosis.
Now we have increasing numbers of students who have gotten converted at the age of 26 after being in some sort of drug rehabilitation program, and then they come to Trinity three years later. They may not have even read the Bible right through, and after 100 weeks we stick them out to become a pastor in the boondocks of Nevada or someplace, and we wonder why we have problems. It is very important to try to build up again a notion of interrelationship between church and seminary on this front, build up the relationships and the money to do it.
Although I hesitate to enter a related field of enormous complexity in this matter of integration, I think I’d better say something about spiritual formation. Spiritual formation has the same sort of positive overtone today that motherhood and apple pie did in the Eisenhower years. You weren’t allowed to criticize. The trouble is that spirituality and spiritual formation are now so vague they are profoundly troubling.
I don’t know how many times … 200 or 300 … I have read the statement, “Of course evangelicals have no tradition of spiritual formation and spirituality. You have to go to the Catholics for that.” Well, I’m not going to knock Catholics, but I want to come to some fundamental definitions here. Is spirituality merely a matter of technique that makes you feel a mystical connection or is spiritual formation profoundly tied to the gospel?
In the best sense of evangelical, I would say that the only venue for spiritual formation is where there’s a lot of evangel. It’s a gospel thing. The giving of the Spirit is bound up with the gospel. It transforms people so that they know the living God. No doubt a great deal of sociological evangelicalism has been far too committed to mere rationalism. No doubt we have not fostered enough praying.
On the other hand, you cannot suddenly become spiritual by writing a journal. It may prove helpful, but it’s proving helpful because it is getting you to think about the Word. It is getting you to think about the truth. It is getting you to confess your sins. It is getting you to do all the kinds of things the Bible says we should have been doing all along and haven’t been, not because it’s a technique that you picked up from an esoteric tradition that you may incorporate at your leisure or no.
Again, our vision of mentoring spirituality, spiritual formation, must be gospel related, Bible related, and transforming. Our student/teacher ratio at Trinity (I won’t tell you what it is, but it’s jolly high; it’s too high) means that I don’t do the mentoring I ought to do. I have open door to my students, but I can’t do the mentoring.
I remember again and again how when I was a young man, a fellow took me aside one summer, and every Monday night he taught me to pray. We’d pray for an hour, two hours, three hours, four hours, five hours. He taught me to pray. He taught me to pray using Scripture. He taught me how to intercede. He showed me, and we prayed. I can name on the fingers of two hands the numbers of students at Trinity whom I have taken aside individually and given the same hour a week.
It’s not because I don’t care. I don’t have time. I have my advisee group, and we have them out to our home, and we sometimes have prayer evenings, and there are prayer days at Trinity. I can’t do the individual one-on-one mentoring at Trinity. We don’t have time. What are we going to do about it? It’s becoming urgent in this matter of integration. There, too, is a question of money, because it involves more resources, connection with churches that have a common vision in an area.
D. We need to express in curricular fashion updated priorities with respect to a number of cultural developments.
Far more diversity in the culture, far more cross-cultural challenges in inner city, changes in epistemology, globalization, evangelism in different contexts. This will mean that we have to drop some stuff in favor of adding other stuff. You can’t keep adding and adding to the curriculum.
For those evangelical schools with bona fide doctoral programs, we desperately need adequate staffing, funding for the right kinds of study, research, and publication. Every once in a while, John Woodbridge and I sit down and have a brainstorming session. If we had half a million dollars to put into research people for publication and study, for books that would make a difference, what would we write? What would we do?
In other words, instead of just doing things in our own discipline because we do things in our own discipline (which is part of being in the discipline; we all have to do some of them), what would make a difference for the kingdom? How would we go about it? Who would be best at it? How would you fund him or her? How would you structure this?
Out of the various projects we’ve thought up over the years, we’ve done four. That’s it. We have a list as long as your arm. I’m sure many of you do as well. You sit down with other faculty members and think, “What could be done? What should be done? What needs to be done?” I’ve sat in the sessions today and yesterday. I’ve heard people saying some things that should be done.
If we’re going to train the next generation, we must not only work as Lone Rangers. Some of us need to put our heads together and think through how we’re going to collect funds for certain projects, for certain strategic things, for certain strategic study subjects that would make a huge difference in the whole realm of ideas in which teachers inevitably work.
In this connection, then, in the words of last year’s president, MoisÈs Silva, it is extraordinarily important to foster honest and open scholarship while insisting on a truly confessional scholarship at the same time. Finally, regarding MDiv and MA students and preparing them for doctoral study elsewhere in a non-confessional framework, my observation over the years is that the students most likely to flunk out spiritually, theologically, when they go on to doctoral programs in a non-confessional university tend to belong to one of two or three types.
They tend to come out of extremely conservative frames of reference where liberals are presented with such horns that when they get there and discover that somebody is pious and polite, even though a liberal, they have no category for them and they capsize. Second, people with inferior training and access to sources so they tend to be gullible. They believe what they’re given. They’re not taught to think critically.
Now I insist there is no way of guaranteeing outcomes. You start pumping people through PhD programs and you’re going to lose a certain percentage of them, but there are some things that can be done to make this as stable as possible, and some of them come out and are extremely powerful in apologetics and interaction and confessional commitment and so forth.
3. What I would like to see with respect to helping a broader range of scholars who are evangelicals in the matter of worldview formation.
There are really three venues for this engagement: within Christian universities, within the larger world of scholars in secular universities in all kinds of posts, and within the still larger world of engagement with the culture and thought. In all of these areas, Christians must be involved.
We are often reminded that university after university in this country … not all, but a very significant number of them … began with Christian foundations and subsequently capsized. There are books that study how this capsize came about.
In connection with Trinity, which is now integrated with the school across the street, in Florida and elsewhere, and is a fledgling university, I’ve been forced to think through some of these things and recently wrote an article, “Can There Be a Christian University?” in which I tried to do some research on the whole idea of a university.
Probably the work that people refer to the most is that of John Henry Newman and his idea of a Catholic university in the nineteenth century. Two of his three main points you wouldn’t agree with. The point that is cited the most frequently is the importance of a kind of liberal arts training in a university to teach people to be, in his words, good gentlemen, good citizens.
When universities were founded in Paris and Oxford and Cambridge, all of this presupposed initially that this was a uni-versity, and initially they were Christian institutions with a God-centered frame of reference that held the whole thing together. The move into late-Enlightenment universities held things together not by a common vision of reality quite so much (except that rising naturalism gradually displaced it) but by a shared process, namely the epistemological structures of late modernity.
Nowadays, in an increasing postmodern world, I’m not even sure you can have university. You can only have a multi-versity, because there are no shared processes, no shared visions, no shared vision of reality. The only thing that’s shared anymore is the vision that there’s no such thing as a shared vision, just as the only heresy that’s left is there’s such a thing as a view that there’s such a thing as heresy.
If you look at other books there is a kind of a post-Kantian idea of what holds the whole thing together, but you move out of that heritage into postmodernism, and people are looking around for a unified worldview. I suggest to you that Christians have at least some opportunity of setting a standard in this area if we go about things the right way.
Within the larger world of scholarship, we need to start networking with scholars in these various domains. Both within a Christian university, I would want to argue, and in this larger world, it is becoming important to put biblical scholars together with philosophers, together with geologists, together with literary critics, in small groups that will argue out common themes.
I would love at Trinity in a few years.… We don’t have the faculty for it. We’re too busy. But if we get our ducks lined up, I would love in a few years to put a Genesis scholar with a biblical theologian, with a geologist, with a physicist, with a philosopher, all from our campus, and think through some fundamental questions of origins, argue them out.
What do I mean? Am I trying to domesticate the Bible by philosophy or geology? No. The people who teach at Trinity want to submit to the Bible, but we talk to each other so seldom that what happens is in most of our disciplines we know so little about larger structures of thought that eventually we can foster a breakdown of biblical orthodoxy for want of communication and integration. Similar things can be done nowadays through the Net and through GSF and things like that that we need to get involved in.
I would love to say some things about building scholars for a larger world. I will pass by and end on this note. None of what I have said dare be an end in itself. Regardless of which of the Niebuhr patterns we accept.… Christ above culture, Christ against culture … we all recognize this world is not our home; we’re just a-passing through. If we make scholarship or evangelical triumphalism our aim, we deserve to be written off in the dust of history. God will judge us. Our aim in all of this must always be soli Deo gloria in anticipation of the glory yet to come. Amen.
