There's A Real Question at The End

I have hit the point where I recognize that I am going to have undo and then redo my seminary education. What happened is this: last night, I finished reading Shane Claiborne’s Jesus for President. I found, as has been brewing in my mind, that too much of my seminary education either leads to his conclusions or is the groundwork for his book, and I don’t like that.

I am appalled—no, that’s not right. I am… what? Frustrated? That my seminary education, Master of DIVINITY, for crying out loud, could be so contextualized.

Of course, some of you who know me well are thinking, “Well, Aaron, you are the very person who has been saying you don’t read much written after the fourth century. So you should not be surprised at this turn of events. It’s not Shane Claiborne’s fault. He’s just the guy who pushed you over the edge.” And that’s right. I respect his book and like a lot of it. It’s tropes are what bother me, too much to go into because they’re not the point.

I have been watching for a while, I guess. I sense that theologians understand their irrelevance. They do not drive discourse in ethics or philosophy the way they once did. In fact, theologians are derivative nowadays—they glom off the trends of secular academia. Feminism, queer theory, whatever is hot in academia will be hot in seminaries ten years later, complete with the rock star profs.

In 1989, I took a class at little ole Southern Miss, “Post-Modernism and Political Theory.” Even we were a little late getting to Foucault and Derrida, Habermas and Fish. So when I see religious books trying to explain post-modernism, I think back to some words spoken by a literary theorist to me in 1995, “Post-modernism has ceased to be instructive. We’re moving on.”

I went to Asbury. And really, what I am talking about here—a seminary education based on fads-- is the bigger problem at Asbury, not the cabal to oust Jeff Greenway and the faculty blood-letting that followed, or the cult of personality around former President Maxie Dunnam. It’s so Soviet at the seminary that about all you can hope for is that there will be a 20^th Party Congress to denounce the excesses of the past, and some of the exiles can come home.

When I was in seminary, “Servant Leadership” was all the rage. The idea of servant leadership summed up all of ministry, theory and practice. Our core courses were “Servant as Liturgist” or “Servant as Liberator,” and other such high-sounding names. Now it seems to focus on “community.” No one knows what “community” is, but if you say the word, especially in a breathy way, and add the adjective “beloved,” everyone will swoon and attest to the truth of anything you say after that. In a year or two, there will be a new theme that sums up all of ministry and if your lay people will just drink the kool-aid, churches will grow and the kingdom will come.

So how can we resist? How do we undo and then redo? Part of the problem lies within academia and an academic model for seminaries. To make it in the academic world, you have to publish, and to publish you have to have something new to say. And the problem there is that when you are talking about orthodoxy, there is nothing new to say. Nothing. The prime value in seminary is on having something new, different. What if it is heretical? You’ll never know until many years later, perhaps not even in your lifetime. But there is so much insistence to jump on some new thing, some cool thing. Do you know where it leads? What it’s logical conclusions and/or practical outworkings are?

I suppose that many of you know that I do not hold on to things just cuz.

We have become prosperous and self-absorbed. When the ancient church speaks to us, we get edgy. We’ll take their mojo but not their substance. Candles and incense, cool. Fasting and study of doctrine, not so much. We think Third World Christians are on fire. Quaint, but on fire. If we could just get them over here, teach them some Form Criticism and get them to back off condemning abortion and homosexuality, we could harness their fire.

I don’t have anything more to say at least not that will make sense on this topic (and I have not made much of that here). So how do we rebuild our seminary, our theological, education?