Canter Bridge

Paul House’s passionately written exploration of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s practice and aspirations for the training of pastors under the gathering cloud of Nazi terror makes for refreshing reading in this era of technology-will-solve-all-our-(seminary)-problems pablum.

House finds in the German martyr’s writings and his experience—the latter as reported by Bonhoeffer’s colleagues and students—a model for the same kind of intensive, life-on-life training of Christian pastors today. Without doubt, Bonhoeffer modeled all this and more. House has done us the service of explaining just how.

I come to this book as a lifelong seminarian who has known from within various roles the joy, enrichment, and occasional terror that the seminary is wont to offer up: as student, professor, dean, and president. So  I cannot but thrill to the promise that resides in such life together, all of which House is committed to teasing out of Bonhoeffer’s experience and laying before us.

Nevertheless, it appears to this appreciative reader that the author has chosen not to address a fundamental question about access.

Let me shape my concern as a somewhat cumbersome question: If I am fulfilling my vocation as a seminary educator and mentor to emerging pastors in, say, Mexico City, I am likely to have the privilege of nourishing a small number of lives into what one hopes will be greater rather than diminished capacity as servant leaders, even as shepherds of Christ’s people. For the sake of the argument, but also because I have yet to be convinced otherwise, I will agree with House that the very best preparation of pastoral leaders occurs in this kind of intensive, daily, full-contact, and dynamic environment.

Yet spread across this city of some 25 million souls are thousands of pastors, largely without the kinds of training to which I can lean my shoulder in my fictitious seminary context. These are bivocational pastors, holding down day jobs, tending their God-given sheep, most with some level of internet access and some limited margin in their saturated lives for occasional study-centered gatherings.

Farther afield in the Mexican state to which the capital and metropolis belong lie many thousands more, most of them faithful servants with limited or nonexistent coaching and no opportunity to reflect in the company of peers and a mentor upon Scripture, theology, their own context, and the Great Tradition of Christian presence and practice.

One wonders whether Bonhoeffer, were he availed of the tools we have today, would have insisted that only life-on-life training is valid because other forms of pastoral preparation do not fully measure up to what can be offered in such an intensive context. That is, does the existence of a ‘gold standard’ eliminate the urgency of thinking about ‘silver’ and ‘bronze’ options merely because they do not sparkle like gold? Must we leave unserved those who cannot have what we consider best?

We cannot know whether the adventurous Bonhoeffer would have chosen not to serve a wider constituency of the kind I am imagining in these lines. House, it seems to me, comes perilously close to doing so.

Yet this admittedly dubious stance I have sketched for myself does not eliminate my sincere appreciation for the counter-cultural defense of a seminary that is shaped by something other than the fickle, if hurricane-strength, winds that blow against the seminary today. She makes—this venerable, limping institution of ours—a decidedly soft target. I, for one, welcome all credible defenders.

Paul House has (re-)captured in words some of the magic that happens within her walls—I use the description advisedly and in deference to House’s preferred residential model—when a learning community like Bonhoeffer’s Finkenwalde, House’s Beeson Divinity School, or any one of a thousand lean-and-mean seminaries across the globe gets it right. House finds Bonhoeffer worthy of study, in part because even in the least promising conditions he ‘believed the German church’s future rested in the quality and commitments of its pastors’. House abbreviates Bonhoeffer’s vision for the seminary as ‘a community of faith’ that ‘live(s) for Christ and for one another’, ‘offer(s) encouragement to former students who have entered the sometimes-harsh world of church ministry’, and calls without apology upon the courage of ‘teacher-pastors in seminary education’ to engage their task with ‘sacrificial’ service, ‘given the inherently personal, incarnational, and visible nature of ministerial preparation’.

To this vision—Bonhoeffer’s and House’s—this reader can only offer his ‘Amen!’ and ‘Hear, hear!’, even as he hopes that the eminent blessing that adheres in our most privileged forms does not dull our energy for widening the tent pegs to shelter others who will for reasons missional and mundane never tarry for long in the holy city itself.