Most Christians today suspect that both the life and the thought of the institutional church are running at a low ebb. Instead of forming or transforming Western culture, the Church is often reduced to defensive reaction and isolation, or else to mindless echoing of the world’s naturalistic humanism.

The misfunctioning of the seminary stands out as one of the major sources of this decline. The seminaries affect all the lifeblood of the Church, by sending out its pastors and administrators, and weakness or infection there will hurt every part. But it follows also that healing and strengthening the seminaries will have a powerful restorative effect on the whole body. The thrust of this essay is that while our seminaries have been seriously involved in the Church’s deterioration in the past century, they are also a probable source of its renewal today.

The ambivalent potential of the Protestant seminary is rooted in the origins of reformed Christianity. The Reformation grew out of a delicate interaction between biblical scholarship and a form of Renaissance humanism. The Reformers promoted a Christianity that emphasized a balance of scriptural doctrine, depth of piety, and breadth of learning. This integration of goals, however, was difficult to maintain for long, especially in the academic heart of the Church. In 1678, in his Pia Desideria, Philip Jacob Spener complained:

Although by God’s grace we still have pure doctrine derived from the Word of God, we cannot deny that much that is alien, useless, and reminiscent of the world’s wisdom has here and there been introduced gradually into theology.… Compare the writings of our dear Luther, in which he expounds the Word of God or treats articles of the Christian faith … with a majority of the books being published today. To speak candidly, in the former one will assuredly encounter and experience great spiritual power, together with wisdom presented with the utmost simplicity, while the latter will seem to be quite empty in contrast [Fortress, 1964, p. 51].

As Spener saw it, the training given to pastors and teachers was not geared to prepare them for the practical demands they would meet in seeking to edify the body of Christ, because it was designed mainly to delight the imagination and advance the reputations of the teachers. It may have been orthodox, but it was spiritually fruitless.

This kind of training can lead in one generation to a second stage: heterodoxy divorced from the biblical base. Piety is lost; the real biblical essence is lost, nothing remains but scholarship. The beginnings of this process can be seen in a powerless but intellectually contentious orthodoxy that delights in doctrinal oneupmanship. Spener continues:

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They succeed in giving those of their hearers who have ready minds a fair knowledge of religious controversies, and these hearers regard it as the greatest honor to dispute with others.… The consequence is that true theologia practica (that is, the teaching of faith, love, and hope) is relegated to a secondary place, and the way is again paved for a theologia spinosa (that is, a prickly, thorny teaching) which scratches and irritates hearts and souls, as used to happen before Luther’s time [pp. 56, 53].

But it is obvious from history that an unbalanced stress on piety and practicality can break up the Reformation synthesis and empty seminary training of biblical focus and theological depth. This is clearly visible in the later, much less balanced critique of seminary education given by Charles Finney, the nineteenth-century American evangelist. Finney’s principal objection to the ministerial education of his time was that it did not prepare men to speak the Word of God plainly to men in terms relevant to their situation. It prepared men to be orators, or showmen, or scholars, but not to be prophets, keenly in touch with the Word of God and aware of its application to the world of men.

Education ought to be such, as to prepare young men for the peculiar work to which they are destined. But instead of this, they are educated for anything else.… I have known young men come out after what they call “a thorough course,” who were not fit to take charge of a prayer meeting … so as to make it profitable or interesting [Lectures on Revivals of Religion, Revell, 1868, p. 178].

Many an intelligent pastor can be heard today echoing Finney’s complaint that seminary graduates must thaw out for five years before they are any earthly good. Why, they ask, must the schools be spiritual refrigerators, intellectual cloud-chambers?

Finney’s antidote for bad seminary education is blunt and simple:

Ministers should be educated to know what the Bible is, and what the human mind is, and know how to bring one to bear on the other. They should be brought into contact with mind, and made familiar with all the aspects of society. They should have the Bible in one hand, and the map of the human mind in the other, and know how to use the truth for the salvation of men [ibid.].
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Piety, for Finney, is a function of relevance. The seminary is an instrument for disseminating truth: but if that truth is not focused and applied to the real conditions in men and society, its scriptural and scholarly virtues will not prevent it from ringing false.

Clearly Finney’s pietism, unlike Spener’s, is attached to a dangerous pragmatism, the partial root of the activist, anti-intellectual bent that has crippled American evangelicalism since his time. But the remarkable thing is that, despite his weaknesses, God made use of this man in reaching thousands during the middle period of his century. And it may be no accident that the other great American evangelist in the nineteenth century, D. L. Moody, whose formative stamp is still visible in every quarter of the evangelical community, was also an untrained layman. It almost seems that God risked a detour of the seminaries in using these men, in order to correct an imbalance that the schools had created. Today, however, in a century when education and information have exploded, and when even a comedian must have a college diploma, there is a pressing need for seminaries to stand once more at the center of God’s renewing action, to balance the defects of a century of lay evangelicalism.

But can the seminary function as a source of spiritual renewal? Is this even part of its intended task? It might be argued that the seminary is simply an institution for enlarging the Church’s theoretical understanding of theological matters, with little regard for their practical application. But the New Testament indicates that the gifts of teachers, along with all other gifts within the church, are “for the equipment of the saints, for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood” (Eph. 4:12, 13). It could be urged that some organs within the body might specialize in the theoretical, in a kind of intellectual comprehension divorced from practice and from spiritual life, but the metaphors in this passage are much too vitalistic for this interpretation to stand. Knowledge, in biblical parlance, is always too deeply implicated in religious experience to be confused with mere comprehension. Paul’s vision of that education which can make us “no longer … children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine,” is rooted in total spiritual growth, in which, “speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Eph. 4:15, 16).

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This is not to deny that much in genuine Christian higher learning must forever remain impractical in that it will not directly aid in stimulating the student toward mission. But even this will be oriented toward leading the student to worship God with his mind. There will be nothing in it unrelated to that most practical of all Christian concerns: knowing—and equipping others to know—the mind of Christ in all things.

Therefore we must not regret the development that fused the better elements of rabbinical and pagan academic training with biblical scholarship to form the modern seminary pattern. There is no reason to prescribe a return to the undeveloped academic situation in the first century. History has left us examples of Christian academies that served as tremendous sources for spiritual renewal. To cite a few examples since the Reformation: what else was Luther’s Wittenberg? And Calvin’s “perfect school of Christ” in Geneva? Emmanuel College in Cambridge seeded England with Puritan spirituality in the early eighteenth century. Francke’s Halle, with its balance of academic purism and spiritual aspiration, transformed great areas within German Lutheranism and left an amazing heritage of social and missionary achievement. The best example on the American scene is the Log College of William Tennent, which forged the foundations of Presbyterianism in America with a training that combined academic rigor, spiritual depth, and practical relevance, and was the vehicle for awakening in all the middle colonies.

If institutions like these have been sources of renewal in past centuries, there is no reason to doubt that the Church could be renewed again from its teaching centers today. But what kind of seminary can fulfill this role?

Above all, such a seminary must recapture the balance of Reformation humanism. The vital amalgam of scholarship, piety, and biblical faith, which so easily breaks down, must be recreated.

The Reformers valued humanistic learning as a great gift of God to the human spirit. For them, there was no antithesis between simple Christian faith and the full use of the powers of the mind. Academic excellence was simply a mandate of Christian stewardship. Today’s renovating seminary must overcome the American antithesis between anti-intellectual pietism on the one hand and sophisticated heterodoxy on the other. The next generation of seminary students must be led to recognize that there is another alternative besides pious innocence and learned heresy. Their instructors must therefore have a penetrating comprehension of modern culture, including the social crises that are shaking our times. The seminary must approach the disciplines of secular learning carefully, recognizing the distortions these can introduce through the operation of fallen human reason, but with confidence that there is gold in this ore, discovered truth that can be correlated with revealed truth and made to yield tribute to the redeemed mind. It must recognize the validity of what Machen said:

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We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.… Instead of stifling the pleasures afforded by the acquisition of knowledge or by the appreciation of what is beautiful, let us accept these pleasures as the gifts of a heavenly Father. Instead of obliterating the distinction between the Kingdom and the world, or on the other hand withdrawing from the world into a sort of modernized intellectual monasticism, let us go forth joyfully, enthusiastically, to make the world subject to God [quoted by N. B. Stonehouse in J. Gresham Machen, Eerdmans, 1954, p. 187].

The new seminary must regain something else that the Reformers clearly had: a vision of the primacy of spiritual growth in the learning process. It has become an unconscious assumption in nearly all circles of Christian higher education that theological understanding and piety are separable, that somehow one can “know” religious truth through a kind of technical skill, and that afterwards “devotion” can be sprayed on or frosted over the personality of the student on his own initiative.

This conception of spirituality as an add-on attribute is at variance with the whole treatment of religious knowledge in the Bible, from the Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament to the Pauline contrast between the world’s wisdom and that hidden wisdom which can be taught only by the Spirit. Academicism identifies spirituality with emotional tone or intensity of feeling—something that at best only supplies motivational force to correct convictions, and at worst gets in the way of objectivity. Biblical spirituality, however, is not primarily concerned with emotions at all: it is a by-product of the operation of the Holy Spirit, applying truth to men’s hearts. It results from the transformation of the human personality in the process of sanctification, in which the remnants of sin are gradually put away, and Christ’s dominion in the life is progressively strengthened.

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Although much of the practice of seminary teaching, if not its theory, proceeds on the assumption that theological learning is unrelated to spiritual growth in teacher and student, Scripture shows that the effectiveness of the whole teaching process pivots upon sanctification. To be properly prepared for his ministry, the student must be open to radical transformation in the teaching process, as well as the reception of information. The teacher, on the other hand, must have digested his material spiritually and intellectually and be able to see its application; he must understand its relevance to the glory of God and the edification of the body of Christ; and he should project it in a form that is intended to edify the student and, through him, the whole of Christ’s Church.

Ideally, then, the seminary that is to be a source of renewal must exercise a pastoral function over the student. The Seminary is not a “church,” in the sense of a local congregation; but it is an organ within the Church, an organ charged with equipping pastors and teachers to edify the body of Christ. Since it is impossible to carry on genuinely Christian education without effecting spiritual transformation, the seminary’s work will either supplement the pastoral labors of local churches or make up for their lack of adequate pastoral supervision. A seminary that is to be a primary means of renewing local congregations surely cannot be satisfied with handing over the total pastoral responsibility to those same congregations. This practice is enough to explain the state of spiritual shock in which many seminary graduates issue from the institutions that have supposedly prepared them for ministry. A college, John Ciardi has said, becomes a university when its faculty ceases to care for its students. The prevalence of this condition in secular circles is bringing large sectors of American education to a grinding halt today. Its existence in Christian circles is hard to understand. Often the seminary bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the multiversity described by Clark Kerr as an aggregation of faculty soloists united by a common need for parking space.

It is too much to expect that all seminary teachers are called to be pastors. But they are all called to be saints. If they have given attention to the dynamics of growth in their own lives, they will be able to contribute as effective amateurs to the spiritual life of students. In addition, some of the members of the seminary community should be called and experienced pastors. The cycle of specialization that frequently prevails in seminary circles, in which the sons of the sons of professors enter the teaching vocation with no pastoral experience, is not necessarily destructive of the vitality of an institution; but it must not be allowed to prevail entirely. And yet the heredity of a teacher is less important than his motives. To the degree to which his real (if unconscious) goal is to achieve an academic career rather than to fulfill a ministry in building up the body of Christ, he will be unable to project life into the seminary community.

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The main attribute of any seminary that is to be a center of renewal in the Church is, of course, fidelity to biblical truth. This is assumed. Our point here is simply to insist that adherence to Scripture must mean more in the seminary’s life than commitment to a doctrine of inspiration, or even a whole complex of doctrines carefully derived from Scripture. It should not mean less. But the seminary that is to be a catalyst for renewal must be biblical in the sense that it is committed to the transformation of its whole inner life and outer life until these approximate scriptural standards. If the full force of the whole counsel of God is focused upon the minds and lives of teachers and students, upon cultural views and social outlook as well as doctrinal understanding, upon the secret places of the heart as well as matters that are open for common discussion, the impact upon Church and world cannot help being profound and, surprisingly, utterly new.

Richard Lovelace is associate professor of church history at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, South Hamilton, Massachusetts. He has the B.A. from Yale, B.D. from Westminster Seminary, and Th.D. from Princeton Seminary.

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