The seminary or theological college finds itself today under more fervent attack than perhaps at any time since the modern seminary became a fixture in Christian circles.

Its critics are many, articulate, and sometimes scathing. Let me enumerate three principal criticisms to which seminary staff and leadership must respond if they are to remain viable.

First, the seminary’s critics allege that the seminary has uncritically adopted a university model that privileges academic pursuits over training for ministry. Second, the seminary’s traditional focus on biblical studies, systematic theology, and ministry skills such as counseling and preaching comes under criticism as irrelevant to modern ministry and incapable of training adept servants for the modern or post-modern church and world. Third, seminarians are told that their institution has become inaccessible to most trainees for Christian service and—not an entirely separate concern—slave to an economic model that is no longer viable.

If these allegations are sustainable, then it appears that the seminary—and its younger brother, the Bible institute or Bible college—is doomed either to decline or collapse. (more…)

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Mrs. Banuo Z. Jamir, Addl. Chief Secretary & Commissioner Nagaland; members of the board of Clark Theological College; Rev’d Dr. Takatemjen, principal of the College; Faculty and Staff, Graduands and Students; Family and Friends of the Graduands; Supporters and Well-wishers of the College:

A strong rain hurled its refreshing liquid onto the roof of my guesthouse room last night, as it did upon the roofs of your homes and hostels. After a day rich with conversation, good food, music, prayers, comedy, parody, story, and laughter, it sounded like a symphony. (more…)

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On an Indianapolis afternoon when it seems as though Spring my have decisively wrenched the world from Winter’s icy grip, human need runs deep in the streets. As in this poor man’s heart.

iTunes, as is parroted in the way that becomes truisms with their undeniable kernel of truth, has changed the way we listen to music. And talk and sermons.

So does this battered survivor’s heart find itself caressed this afternoon by the alleged randomness of iTunes as it works its way via its own inscrutable logic through my embarrassingly bulging iTunes library. (more…)

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As we speak, my oldest son beavers away at a history degree at a fine university in this country’s Pacific Northwest. Our telephone conversations and Spring Break bike rides on Indy’s wonderful Monon Trail are punctuated by discussions of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the continuing relevance of Plato’s Republic as well as the merits of road over mountain bikes and the fitness benefits of pushing along really fat tires.

Why history? Because First Son’s strong but uneven education at the British School of Costa Rica brought him into contact with the curmudgeonly but brilliant and engaged ‘Mr Wolf’, an historian with a stubborn and inelegant fixation on making history relevant for high school students in what others of his ilk might have dismissed as an intellectual and cultural backwater. (more…)

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In his fine essay in the March 2010 number of Christianity Today, Darren C. Marks (‘The Mind Under Grace. Why theology is an essential nutrient for spiritual growth’) articulates an assumption that both modernist and post-modernist ‘true believers’ might well find startling: ‘Scripture interrogates the community’.

Marks pens his essay a defense of ‘dry’ theology against that contemporary hubris that insists we honor Relevance above all other gods.

Living with the penetrating, unsettling interrogatives of Scripture strikes me as an almost sufficient abbreviation of Christian faith and practice. If the elevation of the subject is our generation’s besetting sin, then the ‘satanic’ (as in ‘questioning’, ‘probing’, ‘skeptical’, even ‘accusing’) voice of Scripture may be the salvation we most desperately require.

Not that portion of Scripture that we find reducible to articulation in the too often caricatured bumper sticker or painted artfully into Tim Tebo’s eye black, but that comprehensive encounter with Scripture that requires us to submit to Leviticus’ apparent tedium, Samuel’s heroics, the gospels’ unsophisticated presentation of history’s most sophisticated figure, and Paul’s agonizing against Israel’s experience in Romans 9-11.

In short, the whole body of Scripture must interrogate us.

We might imagine that inspiration and anecdote can inspire us sufficiently to escape that sucking swamp that has us, up to the thighs, in its grasp.

That would be a tragic underestimation of our condition.

Only by embracing Scriptures comprehensive, unending, humiliating, empowering interrogation can we have any hope of escaping ourselves, of finding salvation from ourselves, of breaking free from the hubris that enslaves us while we piously quote our favorite parts.

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