Truth in Learning: A Matter of Degrees?

In hearings before a commission of the Association of Theological Schools, Harvard dean Krister Stendahl once proposed, no doubt with tongue in cheek, that all seminaries should immediately confer doctorates on everyone. This ought effectively to eliminate intellectual pride in degrees and put an end to the senseless pursuit of academic degrees for the sake of the degrees. Pastors and scholars would then be motivated to pursue their studies solely for the sake of what they would learn. Schools and churches in turn would evaluate candidates not on the false basis of degrees but on their ability to function effectively as pastor or teacher or scholar.

This poses the question of why we have degrees anyway. Do they really serve any good and useful purpose—particularly in the ministry where the call of God, moral commitment, and the enablement of the Holy Spirit are infinitely more valuable to the practice of Christian ministry than a diploma? After all, a diploma may only prove that a student sat in class for 15 hours every week over three years, listening to lectures by someone who was never called to be a pastor, had no gifts or experience as a pastor, and may not even have gifts to teach.

The offering of degrees for academic work has deep roots in Western culture. The University of Bologna began the practice, and early in the thirteenth century the University of Paris bestowed the first bachelor’s degree. Oxford University chose to confer the degree at the end of the course of study, and the American colonies adopted this English practice with Harvard granting its first degree in 1642. Special degrees for seminary or divinity school graduates developed much later and did not become common practice until the nineteenth century. The Master of Divinity has now all but universally supplanted the older B.D. or Th.B. as the standard degree following a three-year (postcollege) program of professional education for the ministry.

Across the years, the seminary curriculum has slowly evolved from a rigidly structured concentration in Greek and Hebrew exegesis, biblical studies, church history, systematic theology, denominational distinctives, and pastoral duties to a wide open curriculum with liberal slices of English Bible, Christian education, counseling, sociology of religion, inner-city studies, and church worship. Most conservative seminaries require both Greek and Hebrew; most liberal schools do not. Previous to this century, the older practice of an additional year of internship brought the student into prolonged exposure to local church practice. Largely for financial reasons, internship is now provided during the three-year course.

What a degree means is a hotly debated issue both on and off the seminary campus. Still, in spite of occasional misgivings, the demand for degrees by both ministers and church congregations has wide support. Degrees continue to meet a felt need of the religious and Christian community. Very simply, degrees arose because people desired some certification by a responsible body that indicated ministers possessed certain skills useful for the successful pursuit of their profession, and which ordinary people felt inadequate to evaluate.

In spite of wide variations in standards, the ministerial degree came to mean at least this: the candidate had satisfied a group of intelligent, trusted individuals (the theological faculty) that he possessed the rudiments of a broad cultural education (his A.B. prerequisite for admission to seminary), had mastered a basic body of theological knowledge, understood the doctrines of Christian faith and of his own denomination, and knew something not only of the principles of preaching, but also of the duties of a pastor.

A theological degree, therefore, stands generally for a specific kind of training at the graduate level of study. This is why it is wrong for an institution to set its own standards for a degree or to grant degrees for lesser amounts or a significantly lower quality of training. In such cases, to award a degree is an act of flagrant deception. No institution of integrity will grant such dishonest degrees, and no person of moral integrity will have anything to do with an institution that stoops to such immoral practices.

No doubt seminaries ought constantly to reexamine their curriculum to make sure it is meeting the true needs of its graduates. When some liberal schools offer the standard professional degree for the ministry on the basis of a heavy load of sociology, psychology, philosophy, and religion, that is dishonest. But when a conservative school certifies that a student has completed a standard course for the ministry while filling his schedule with Greek, Hebrew, church history, and theology, and little or nothing on the practice of ministry, that too is dishonest. All too frequently we hear the story of seminary graduates who don’t know the first thing about how to preach or how to carry on the day-to-day ministries required of a pastor.

Seminaries must take seriously their responsibility for the degrees they offer. When an evangelical seminary awards a ministerial degree, it certifies that an individual has completed the standard academic preparation for the pastorate or for ordination to the Christian ministry. Surely we have a right to expect seminaries training young people for Christian ministry to tell the truth.

Late last year the government-sponsored Patriotic Three-Self Movement in the People’s Republic of China printed 85,000 Bibles and 50,000 New Testaments. The printing of the edition was exhausted by March. Further, we hear that the demand for Bibles in China today is almost insatiable. During the bleak years of the cultural revolution, Bibles were systematically destroyed. Hard-pressed Christians treasured their few available Bibles and wore them to shreds by constant use. To preserve the written Word of God, faithful servants laboriously copied by hand long pages of the text—even whole books. Even now religion is merely tolerated, and the official position is that religion will eventually fade away of its own accord when the communistic society comes to its own.

The value their Chinese brothers and sisters set upon the Holy Scriptures should come as no surprise to Western Christians. At the beginning of our Christian era, did not the apostle Paul tell us that Holy Scripture is God’s instrument “to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:15)?

Karl Barth was once asked: “Could you state what your Christianity is all about in a few simple words?”

He replied: “It can all be summed up in the simple words of the child’s hymn: ‘Jesus loves me! this I know, For the Bible tells me so; / Little ones to him belong; They are weak, but he is strong.’ ” The Bible introduces us to Jesus Christ, and to know Jesus Christ is to know God.

But in that same passage, the apostle adds a second purpose of the Bible: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16–17, NIV). The Bible is God’s instruction book to guide the thought and life of the believer. By it the faithful disciple of Christ may grow to full Christian maturity and live an obedient and useful life in this world.

No wonder Chinese Christians treasure their Bibles and desperately yearn for more!

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.