Previously, I offered a general summary of Carl Raschke's argument for theological education here.
I want to note two things here that Raschke does not. First, part of the trajectory towards professionalization and its relationship to the irrelevance of theological education is the ongoing development of bible colleges and bible universities. Virginia Lieson Brereton notes that in the development of the bible school in the early part of the 20th century, three elements were key – brevity, practicality, and efficiency "summed up in the word 'training'. As Brereton writes (in Making Higher Education Christian: The History and Mission of Evangelical Colleges in America),
Practicality demanded that classroom teaching concentrate on transmitting the skills and knowledge the students needed for their evangelistic work. Liberal or general education was considered an unwanted extravagance given the exigencies of the time (p. 115).
The goal was to train church leaders by giving them the skills they needed to have the most immediate impact in their respective places of call. For this the attention must be more on the skills to operate within a strategic program rather than on the "furniture of the mind" as the classical education has been described as providing.
But as John C. Sommerville argues in his book The Decline of the Secular University even as Americans continue to show that they are increasingly religious and maintain a decided religious worldview, the secular unviersity has eschewed not only ethical instruction, as Julie Reuben has demonstrated, but religious instruction as well. This has left students bereft of the ability to think through crucial problems that are contributing to the structure of the world.
Thus what Raschke is arguing her is nothing new and has been an ever-present area of contention in higher education for over 100 years now and we are now, and again, asking question about what it means and what a higehr education means.
The second area has to do with the nature of competing knowledge claims and expanded worldviews enhanced through information flows and global systems of information and communication. The piece that is missing here is the equal and opposite reaction of globalization and that is increasing tendencies toward tribalism. Benajamin Barber argues as much in his somewhat prescient book Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World. While we must agree with Raschke that we are more connecting through information flows, networking, and even transportation, we are also more fragmented and localized in our relationships with each other. This includes the relative focus of many small, and yes often dying, congregations across the U.S. landscape. So while we mist be sensitive and adaptable to the transformation and competition of oppositional worldviews, we still ahve to maintain a sense of conservative adjudication in many communities that have reacted with increased sectarian tendencies.
The danger is that we will focus our theological education on a one to one relationship between the study of theology and the Bible and the quickening pace of change in the world. There must be some effective balance struck between a church leader's ability to craft reasoned and informed responses to the problems not only of the locality, but of how the greater concerns of the world impact that locality, and the day-to-day management of people in a non-profit corporation. It does not seem effective to pass out a bag of tools or a bag of ideas, without crafting methods to ask the pragmatic questions of: How is this plausible in our communities?, or What does this look like if we try to live it, and how do we know if we have been successful?
Pragmatism, I would argue, is the bridge between the mental discipline of learning the Word of God and feeding the people of God with it. This addresses not just the question of how we can do ministry. but establishes rational grounds for why we are doing what we are doing. Perhaps the real problem is that this connective tissue is what is missing in the grand scheme of things. We learn how to do certain things, how to think through theological issues, how to read the Bible using different hermeneutic methods, how to practice good counseling techniques, and so on. But why are we doing what we are doing? Why is this important? What is the theory and model of the church that we are going after when we approach things the way we do? What are the assumptions that are guiding our thinking and practice and are they reasonable or relevant?
A theological education should not be about furniture or learning different ways to organize that furniture. It should also entail training in the ability to judge not only the best furniture for the space, but if that space is even adequate for what God would have one do with one's life. Assessing the process of what this means while one is practicing it is the key. It's a meta-cognitive strategy that should render not only plausible, but palpable results.
Or, as Raschke closes his article,
As disciple-making disciples we need to be gearing our theological studies toward becoming makeover artists in redesigning our Father’s house, not plodding toward one day becoming junior partners in the management of his firm.
So what did you learn in your theological education? What would you change if you could go back and do it all over again? What advice would you give to all of those who are starting in the ministry of the church in some way or are beginning their theological studies now?
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