Theological education is currently at a crossroads: it is fighting for both a secure role in the Academy and relevancy in the Church. The most recent edition of The Christian Century (Feb 26, 2008) attends to this issue, exploring current developments and dilemmas among seminaries and divinity schools. For instance, a published interview with Nick Carter, president of Andover Newton Theological School, outlines the difficulties many theological schools face. According to Carter, over half of M.Div students in the United States attend only a dozen schools. Seminary relationships with denominations, if they even exist, are weaker than ever, and alternative ordination routes threaten to render theological schools irrelevant among many ecclesiastical movements. Such realities have dire funding implications for freestanding seminaries. In fact, some experts predict that up to 20 seminaries could close their doors over the next decade for lack of funding. While the struggles and challenges vary from campus to campus, many agree that the underlying causes of these problems are twofold: one has to do with the institutional matrices where theological education takes place, and the other with the ecclesiastical climate in which ministers are called to serve.
For starters, the professionalization of the academic enterprise has disconnected seminary and divinity school professors from the life of the Christian church by conforming the standards of merit rewards and acclaim to those of the secular university. Rather than viewing one’s vocation as that of co-collaborator with clergy in the kingdom of God, many of us are trained in doctoral programs in the direction of rabid careerism and hyper-professionalism in the service of the Academy—vocation and profession are not reducible to one another. We become committed disciples in our varying scholarly guilds as opposed to the Christian church. And the “publish or perish” admonition faced by most academics is not just a command for the believing theologian, but an ethical quandary reformulated as “publish or parish.” To be fair, what choice does the theologian have? There do not seem to be many viable options for Christian theologians who want to work in the academy, earn tenure, and not take a vow of poverty. On many seminary and divinity school campuses, research demands are real and ever-present. And for professors teaching with university religion departments or within university-affiliated seminaries and divinity schools, scholars feel the pinch to be ever-the-more academically vigilant and downplay one’s faith commitments due to the secular superciliousness that saturates the Academy.
However, blame for this divide should not simply be placed outside the closed door of the busy research-oriented professor. Students and the church must confront their own identity crisis. Congregations, like all social institutions and individuals, are informed by larger cultural trends. And the corporate-driven sensibilities of an unbridled capitalist society coupled with the rejection of delayed-gratification resultant of an instant-messaging age have impacted ecclesial life.
Among many thriving congregations, Christian ministry is indistinguishable from consumer-oriented mass marketing. Moreover, deep theological investigation and interpretation have been supplanted by affective, “feel-good” sensory fulfillment and entertaining yet empty sermonic sound-bites in powerpoint fashion. In such an ecclesial climate, we should not be surprised that many aspiring Christian ministers and seminarians are finding theological curriculum to be pragmatically vacuous and irrelevant. In their eyes, there is little need to employ the kinds of cognitive creativity and intellectual vigor needed to make the writings of Augustine, Aquinas, Reinhold Niebuhr, or Emilie Townes relevant in the church context. They would argue that they can be more “successful” by simply creating a ministry MySpace page to virally link with other “spiritual seekers.”
Clearly, all of these trends taken together present a huge problem. And as an academic neophyte, I have neither the expertise nor experience to offer an effective solution to this growing dilemma. Professors Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore and Ted A. Smith of Vanderbilt Divinity School, in their article “Scholars for the Church,” reference a Lilly-funded initiative at their institution (the Program in Theology and Practice) that may have promise. The program objective includes: bringing local ministers, faculty and doctoral students together to consider best practices for ministry preparation; an integrative teaching fellowship that places doctoral candidates as teaching fellows in divinity courses; and encouraging reflective conversation among doctoral candidates with faculty mentors on seminary and divinity school campuses concerning the vocation of lived ministry.
These are all insightful and instructive in their own way. Yet it seems to me that the burden of overcoming the crisis in theological education should not just be placed on the shoulders of faculty and graduate students. Institutions have a greater role to play in re-imagining themselves and their criteria. Seminary professors must live with the “double-consciousness” of being a theologian and a Christian disciple, just as institutions must find a more appropriate system of merit to reward its faculty. I would argue, as an example, that university-based publishing houses should not be fetishized as more “scholarly” than ecclesial-based publishers. In terms of merit and promotion, maybe Sunday morning sermons should be valued as are professional guild lectures. And maybe theological institutions should rethink the disproportionate weight that is assigned to publishing in peer-reviewed academic journals. Would it not make more sense to value publishing in an outlet that Christian ministers and laypersons actually read?
But, then again, these are probably just pipe dreams of a non-tenured faculty member who is unashamedly a scholar and unapologetically a Christian. Alas, I must come back to reality. The tenure clock is ticking and I have already wasted too much time reading The Christian Century and writing this blog—I need to get back to work. I may have faith, but I am no fool!
