Where Are the Seminaries Going?

Many ministerial students suffer from a non-faith syndrome

Theological education is harried in an age of doctrinal instability and social change. Uncertainty and tension grip the classroom, and many seminarians are inevitably bewildered by it all. Their opinions are molded by the attitudes of their institutions. Yet many seminaries communicate no answers. Some repudiate the absolute authority of Scripture and openly denigrate the value of theological systems. Many of the seminaries find it hard to challenge students and increasingly fail to win them for productive ministries within the Church.

Informed observers are struck by the failure of the seminaries to attract the best minds. Dean Peck of Andover Newton is rightly alarmed by what he terms the “brain drain” among university students. The brightest collegians are not drawn to the ministry, he notes. They are attracted to the professions that offer superior financial inducements; or, if they are idealistic, the Peace Corps draws them like a magnet. The churches, often mute or mouthing current trivia, do not impress these students. Nor do they normally confront them with the challenge of the ministry or articulate the nature of the divine call.

God does not always choose the smartest men to do Christian work, but church history shows that the greatest leaders have been endued with high intellectual gifts. Today the seminaries tend to recruit more second- and third-rate minds than ever before. And still they cannot enlist enough men to keep pace with the expanding population.

All too often those who are attracted to the ministry suffer from a marked uncertainty about their “call” to service, and many a seminarian goes into his first year of study uncommitted. He attends the institution on an exploratory basis to discover whether he really wants to be a clergyman. Many of those who are uncertain drop out before the year is over and are lost to the Church as full-time workers. Sometimes they are disillusioned when seminary faculty members fail to manifest a firm commitment, a sense of call, and unflagging zeal for Christ.

As if this were not enough, seminary fledglings often suffer from a non-faith syndrome. They do not know what they believe or whether they believe at all. The first year of study becomes a quest for faith. Though acutely aware that something is lacking, they are not sure what it is or what they are seeking. If they find no answers in this quest, they return to secular pursuits. Some seminaries serve their students a theological smörgasbord, offering many choices but failing to set forth an integrated world-and-life view. When institutions teach their students everything without being sure of anything, the students many times withdraw, disillusioned and unsatisfied, convinced that the ministry is not for them. They have no faith, and they have found no message.

The commitment and idealism of the hardiest specimens is tested by financial problems and by the jockeying for places of influence and prestige. Both seminarians and graduates suffer from an inferiority complex. They are aware that others who spend the same number of years in study—physicians and dentists, for example—have a distinct edge over them, with doctor’s degrees and the accompanying status; and they are seemingly immune to the biblical truth that the work of the Church does not stand or fall on the degrees conferred on the clergy. They want to be called “Doctor,” thinking that this will give them more visibility and a better image at a time when the role of the clergy in American life is diminishing.

Moreover, the salary situation strikes many as desperately unfair. In an inflationary society where plumbers and electricians fare much better than clergymen, the pay check becomes a major factor in parish placement. The old saying that the minister “does not work in order to be paid but is paid in order that he may work” is no longer true. Struggling to raise and educate his children, to buy a car, and to clothe his family, the minister is inordinately tempted to scramble the dollar sign and the Cross. For the Cross to triumph over the dollar sign is a much greater victory than most lay people imagine, especially those who pray for their minister: “Lord, you keep him humble; we’ll keep him poor.” Because smaller parishes pay smaller salaries, many a minister is tempted to keep his trunks packed, anxiously awaiting a call to a larger church and a bigger stipend.

Perhaps seminarians suffer their most acute confusion as a result of developments within the seminaries themselves. They listen to professors propagate divergent views, realizing vaguely that to embrace one is to exclude the other. They read about the end of the institutional church and wonder why they should spend time preparing to serve an institution that is said to be already passé. They sense that the secularization of Christianity means the end of Christianity and a dead-end street for the clergy. Called upon to influence the power structures and to alter the social milieu, they suffer from feelings of guilt as they try to fit this pattern into the traditional role of the clergy as soul-winners. Under these circumstances, no one can blame the seminarians if they forsake the ministry, misunderstand its primary purposes, or land on the psychiatrist’s couch with schizoid symptoms. Who wouldn’t?

With seminaries in tension, students in confusion, and the Church in the doldrums, is there no hope, no way out? This we must not suppose. The Church, the clergy, and the seminarians have endured darker days. They have gone through long and difficult periods of doubt and unbelief. The sovereign God of the Bible has quickened and renewed his people from age to age, and he can do it again.

There must be a return to biblical supernaturalism. There must be a recovery of the Gospel, the unadorned Gospel of a gracious God meeting man’s need—by the death of his Son and by the realities of a divine fellowship in the Holy Spirit. There must be a reordering of the ethical and moral life according to the sanctions of the Word. And there must be a new and reverent scholarship based upon a hearty allegiance to Scripture, an allegiance that crowds out doubt and releases the light of Scripture to shine through the gloom of an anxious and disoriented age.

Seminarians, seminaries, and the Church must recapture the vision of what God intends his Church and his ministers to be. And then they must become that, quickly and conscientiously, before it is too late.

A Fight Church Officials May Regret

Denominational officials are rendering a great disservice to the cause of Christ and the betterment of the Negro’s status in American life by supporting the Saul Alinsky FIGHT organization in its calculated controversy with the Eastman Kodak Company.

The disruptive behavior and irrational demands of FIGHT representatives at Kodak’s annual stockholders’ meeting April 25 clearly show not only that this militant organization is undeserving of support by the Christian Church but also that its bellicose tactics may cause antagonism that could undo recent gains in race relations. Conversely, Kodak’s record of social responsibility and continuing efforts to aid Negroes mark it as an enterprise making a significant contribution to society at large. If FIGHT’s declared “war on Kodak,” which its militant leaders claim may include a “candlelight service” in Rochester, leads to violence and bloodshed, church leaders backing FIGHT will be accessories to the fact.

At the outset of the stockholders’ meeting, FIGHT’s spokesman, United Church of Christ minister Franklin Florence, contemptuously delivered an ultimatum to Kodak officials: “We will give you until two o’clock to honor the [December 20] agreement,” a statement calling for FIGHT’s exclusive control of recruitment and counseling of 600 Negroes that Kodak would be obliged to train and hire within eighteen months. Then Florence and twenty-five followers stalked angrily from the hall to join Alinsky and 700 demonstrators assembled outside. Ninety minutes later they returned to hear the expected reply—that Kodak could not honor an agreement that was unauthorized, illegal, and immoral. This set off a stream of such epithets as “white hypocrites,” “you big liar,” “white arrogance.” Abusive remarks were especially directed at Kodak chairman W. S. Vaughn (who also serves as board chairman of Colgate Rochester Divinity School): “You can’t talk straight because you’re lying”; “He goes to church, too.” The militants then again strode out without making the slightest attempt at rationally resolving the dispute with the conciliatory officials of Kodak.

Vaughn’s report on his company’s programs to hire and train Negro employees received hearty applause from the one thousand stockholders present. He referred to Kodak’s non-discriminatory hiring policy, which extends to 100,000 people in 115 countries. Kodak’s commitment to this policy led it to become in 1962 one of the first companies to enlist voluntarily in President Kennedy’s equal-opportunity employment program, Plans for Progress. Since 1964, Kodak has initiated five special programs to help undereducated and unskilled Negroes qualify for jobs by providing vocational and remedial training. In 1966 some 600 Negroes, who made up 11.4 per cent of all new Kodak employees, were hired at the Rochester plant. During the present year Kodak has joined with other community organizations to create a new non-profit corporation, Rochester Jobs, Inc., which guarantees 1,500 jobs for hard-core unemployed Negroes. Kodak in recent months sought the help of FIGHT and ten other local organizations in filling 228 openings.

In reply to FIGHT’s claim of a contract with Kodak, Vaughn said that the December 20 statement, signed by assistant vice-president John Mulder, did not constitute a valid contract because Mulder had no authority to commit Kodak to any hiring agreement. Furthermore, he said, the agreement itself rested on the illegal and immoral principle of racial discrimination in employment practices.

In its zeal to aid the Negro, the Church must exercise care that it does not promote organizations that sow disruption and seek political power while professing to help the less fortunate. On the basis of its tactics against Kodak, FIGHT (Freedom, Integrity, God, Honor—Today) appears to be such a group. We believe churches that now back the militant Alinsky forces will one day regret their precipitous action. FIGHT’s national civil-rights strategy conference, which Alinsky and Florence are planning for July 24 in Rochester, will provide further evidence of the group’s true character.

A half-century ago Walter Rauschenbusch of Colgate Rochester helped launch the social-gospel movement. He stressed the need for both personal conversion and Christian involvement in socio-economic affairs. Today’s theological descendants of Rauschenbusch—who have disregarded his emphasis on conversion but retain his social-gospel teachings—now ironically are vigorous opponents of Kodak’s W. S. Vaughn, current chairman of the board of Colgate Rochester. Perhaps it is a case of a seminary sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind.

The Loss Of Two Leaders

The past fortnight brought death to two leading contributors to evangelical Christian thought, Edward John Carnell and J. Theodore Mueller, the former at 47 and the latter at 82.

A stalwart in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, Dr. Mueller began a distinguished teaching career at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, in 1920 and served on its faculty for some forty-five years. He was a contributing editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY from its beginnings. In February, 1966, a severe stroke paralyzed his body and left its mark upon mind and speech; death came as a merciful deliverance. His role as contributing editor is to be filled by a colleague, Dr. Robert Preus, Concordia’s systematic theologian.

Dr. Carnell was one of evangelical Protestantism’s most gifted younger minds. Although he served for a time as president of Fuller Theological Seminary, his greatest service to the Christian community lay in perceptive writing. One of the few scholars with two earned doctorates, he was abreast both of the history of thought and of recent modern theology. His books have long been a bulwark of evangelical Christian faith. Not only did he unmask weaknesses of liberal and neo-orthodox views, but he also effectively displayed the power and relevance of evangelical orthodoxy. He acknowledged Reinhold Niebuhr’s brilliant insights but reduced his views to theoretical subjectivism because Niebuhr’s denial of the sinlessness of Christ and of the inerrancy of Scripture undermined religious authority.

Among Dr. Carnell’s numerous contributions to CHRISTIANITY TODAY was an essay replying to the cliché that liberalism mirrors love while fundamentalism is loveless. Although he unsparingly denounced the loveless temperament in some fundamentalist circles, he wholly repudiated the notion that a mature expression of Christian love requires a kindly reception of liberal presuppositions, and stressed that modernism’s deletion of the evangel was actually a supreme act of lovelessness.

Carnell was one of a panel of theologians who appeared at the University of Chicago in public dialogue with Karl Barth. At the time of his death, he was preparing to speak on “Conservative Protestantism” to an interfaith workshop hosted by the Roman Catholic diocese of Oakland, California. He had never fully recovered from a breakdown during administrative burdens at Fuller Seminary but had remained one of evangelical Protestantism’s ablest apologists.

In a climate unsure of a fully authoritative Bible, Carnell recently wrote: “With the mounting confusion within evangelicalism about the nature of biblical authority, I feel an increasing burden to stand up and be counted.” “In my heart,” he affirmed, “I am unconditionally committed to the inerrancy of the Bible.”

Dr. Mueller and Dr. Carnell shared Emil Brunner’s conviction that “the fate of the Bible” is in the long run “the fate of Christianity.” But they worked out this conviction with greater compulsion than the dialectical theology, which has fallen on hard times. By them, the self-revealing God and his verbal revelation are correlated rather than contrasted—and this correlation enjoys the support both of Christ and of the Bible.

Silence Or A Shrunken Evangel?

Can Christians ever rightly refuse to preach the Gospel? Suppose the Gospel can be preached only at a price that precludes its proclamation to all men as universal good news or that denies the universal dignity of all men as those for whom Christ died?

Officials of the Southern Baptist Convention faced this dilemma last month, and, with their ardor for soul-winning, their decision must have been an agonizing one. Baptists in South Africa had asked for a team of 100 evangelists to visit this fall. But the South African government required that the Americans make no mention of race relations. The restrictions would have meant a compression and distortation of the implications of the Christian Gospel. A final irritant was that the preachers could not even be greeted officially at the airport because their group would include Negroes as well as whites.

Explaining the cancelation by the SBC Home Mission Board, evangelism director C. E. Autrey said, “It is not enough to preach Jesus as Saviour; we must preach him as Lord and Saviour.… I refuse to substitute social actions for the Gospel of redemption, but neither would I stop short of teaching new converts their obligations and relations as Christians. We must practice our Gospel as well as preach it.”

This stand is courageous and correct.

A Heart Longing To Be Free

Svetlana Alliluyeva has burst upon the United States after a diplomatic pause in Switzerland, and another phase of her dramatic modern odyssey is behind her. By her own confession, the move was prompted by revolt against the lack of self-expression she felt in contemporary Russia and by her own personal awareness of the existence of God. She believes that religion is incompatible with the Communist philosophy.

Svetlana’s decision dramatizes the unquenchable spiritual longing of the human heart. To exalt man by excluding God, as the Communist philosophy has done, is actually to make man less than he should be. Man is not only body. He is also soul and spirit. And because he is body, soul, and spirit, in each man the longing to find himself and the longing to find the Creator are related. “Our hearts are restless,” said Augustine, “until they rest in Thee.”

Stalin’s daughter has taken a great step toward freedom. Hopefully it is also a step toward the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is ironic that in a day when Americans appear less interested in God than ever before and some deny his existence, striking evidence of a renewed spiritual longing in atheistic Russia arises to confound us.

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