I was chatting with a friend recently about ministerial and theological training, and I had a couple of thoughts about some of the ways in which the whole experience can go awry.
It strikes me that one of the problems that sometimes arises when people go to seminary or theological college is that they are frankly a little suspicious of their lecturers (whom they don’t know very well, after all), and about the books they’re asked to read (many of which are written by people they’re never heard of), and they therefore approach their studies with an attitude of rather unconstructive criticism. They adopt a “personal theological position” on a whole range of matters about which they profess sufficient knowledge to make pretty final-sounding judgments, and then proceed to assess what they read and hear on the basis of whether it agrees with what they already think they know.
As a result, their theological training is characterised by two major disappointments. First, they experience only the slightest incremental growth in theological understanding during their training, because they have innoculated themselves anything new, and it’s quite hard to have your world rocked by someone who is saying stuff that’s basically pretty familiar. Second, on the (rare?) occasions that they happen to encounter something genuinely new (perhaps by accident, or perhaps because it’s forced upon them), they respond with an unhealthy dose of critical-spirited-ness, because, after all, this stuff contradicts my “personal theological position.” It’s all pretty sad.
At the risk of causing offence – a risk worth taking in this instance – I’ll be blunt.
It never ceases to astonish me to hear theological students dismiss with such a cavalier wave of the hand entire theological traditions about which it is painfully obvious that they know next to nothing at all. I want to bang the desk with something pretty hard (like their heads, for example), and remind them that you don’t go to theological college to find out whether you agree or disagree with the current crop of lecturers. You go there for the most intense period of theological reflection and growth in your life – growth which can only arise from a prayer-filled, Spirit-saturated, fellowship-rich engagement with an almost overwhelming tempest of theological insight that lies so far beyond our competence to “assess” that it just ain’t funny to hear folks try.
You don’t read Calvin on Baptism or Aquinas on the divine attributes or Athanasius on the incarnation or Tom Weinandy on divine impassibility or Richard Hays on NT hermeneutics or James Smith on culture and liturgy in order to “assess” them. That’s like taking six-week Carribean cruise just to check whether the water out there has the same chemical formula as the paddling pool in your back garden.
