Beyond Profession

The Next Future of Theological Education

Daniel O. Aleshire

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781467461061
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Education

What should theological education become?

Theological education has long been successful in the United States because of its ability to engage with contemporary cultural realities. Likewise, despite the existential threats facing it today, theological education can continue to thrive if it is once again reinvented to fit with the needs of current times.

Daniel Aleshire, the longtime executive director of the Association of Theological Schools, offers a brief account of how theological education has changed in the past and how it might change going forward. He begins by reflecting on his own extensive experience with theological education and then turns to reviewing its history, dating back tothe seventeenth century.Amid this historical survey, he uncovers an older model of the field that he believes must become dominant once again—what he calls formational theological education—and explores educational practices that this model would require.

The future of theological education described here by Aleshire would return seminaries to their original role as places where a "deep, abiding, resilient, generative identity as Christian human beings" is fostered within emerging Christian leaders. This, he argues, more than professional preparation, is what theological education must be most essentially about.

1

Time and Change, Church and Theological Education

We live in time—it holds us and molds us—but I never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing—until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

—Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

The editor of a university press spoke to a group of theological educators who had won research grants in a competition sponsored by the Association of Theological Schools. He showed them a cartoon depicting a huge desk with a thick manuscript sitting on it titled A Tale of Two Cities. Behind the desk was a large man; in front of it was a diminutive man in Victorian dress. The caption read: “Mr. Dickens, it is either the best of times or the worst of times. It cannot be both.”

It is not clear to me if Dickens was right and these are indeed both the best of times and the worst of times in American theological education, nor is it clear that the editor was right that these must be either the best of times or the worst of times. What is clear is that these are complex times with an abundance of threats and opportunities that demand new forms and challenges to retain legacies, with new schools being founded as old ones are merging or closing.

These issues are not unique to theological education. Exchange “American Christianity” for “American theological education” in the paragraph above, and it would be equally true. American theological schools are intimately tied to American communities of faith. If schools have a problem finding students, the church is as much a part of the issue as the seminary recruitment office. If congregations are failing, the seminary is as much a part of the issue as the congregation’s social context or membership. It is a complex time for both American Christianity and theological education. It is the best of times for some parts of both and the worst of times for other parts.

Recently, I participated in a conference call with a consultant assessing what should influence a theological school planning for the future. Several of the participants worked primarily with pastors and congregations. They said that the future needs pastors who are more culturally and congregationally literate. The standardizing influences on congregations—like denominational patterns of work—have waned. Congregations are increasingly different from one another and thus in need of leaders who can understand this uniqueness and guide them skillfully into the future. A pastor I respect a great deal forwarded to me a copy of a letter he had recently sent to the dean of the theological school he had graduated from decades earlier. This pastor leads a congregation in a major American city that has been at the forefront on issues of racial inclusion, has cultivated a voice on social justice issues, and has developed a range of ministries for those in need. The congregation has an outsized influence in its city. This pastor expressed his gratitude to the dean for the theological education he had received, but with this concern: “there was no direct intention of instructing me on how to be a deeply centered spiritual person. How can I lead a congregation without learning the deep, spiritual practices?” What is needed in the increasing complexity of leading an American congregation—an expanded repertoire of professional skills or more intense cultivation of Christian spirituality?

It is the worst of times; it is the best of times; it is a complex time; it is a time to slow down and re-vision; it is a time to catch up to the pace of change; it is a troubling time; it is a time like every other time; it is a unique time. Time and change are woven together. A congregation that never changes has no future. A congregation that is always changing has no past. Change and time are not only institutional realities, they are also personal ones. This book constitutes what I want to say about American theological education at the conclusion of the four decades I have been involved in it. Time and change are the primary markers of these decades, and recounting these years sets the stage for thinking about what may come next. It is a future of which I am confident, even if it is one I will never see.

I entered seminary in 1969 and thought I knew what time it was. It was a socially turbulent time—civil rights struggle and the Vietnam War, strained social institutions, competing norms for sexual expression, changing gender roles, and the onslaught of the first of the boomers ready to influence society. It was a time that could be told. Religious institutions were facing changes but had robust structures to handle them. Many people were asking about the role of the church in a morally conflicted time; some were asking whether God was dead; but few were asking whether the church would die. I knew that time was moving forward, that it didn’t wait, and I thought that it was on my side. I knew things were a-changin’, and I imagined they were changing in positive ways.

A decade later, in 1979, I was completing my first year as a seminary professor. Many social structures had become less secure, or at least less sure of themselves. Churches and ecclesial structures, though still robust, were nonetheless changing, but not along the trajectories that had been presumed in earlier decades. Mainline Protestant churches were declining in membership although continuing as a social presence. The culture still paid deference to religion. The reforms of Vatican II had changed many practices of the Catholic Church—an institution that has a way of perceiving itself as outside of history and therefore outside of time. Evangelical Protestants had emerged from separatist and fundamentalist pasts and, along with new movements that had never been part of those pasts, were becoming more influential. Some evangelicals created new forms of religious expression, and others created new forces in American politics. More of the new was coming from less of the old; discontinuity was becoming the most continuous reality. It was still possible to tell the time, but while some changes were positive, others seemed foreboding.

Still another decade later, in 1989, I was appointed to the staff of the Association of Theological Schools (ATS). I began to administer its accrediting function the following year. I spent most of the next three decades working with the association and its member schools. Over these decades, theological education changed—perceptibly, even palpably—as did denominations, religious practices, and higher education. Denominations weakened as ecclesial structures and the loyalty of church attenders to their denominations weakened even more. Religious practices morphed, expanded, and took on altogether new forms. Evangelical Protestants became the dominant Protestant presence. The percentage of Americans who claimed a religious preference decreased, and “no religious preference” became the fastest-growing religious category. The Roman Catholic Church in the United States moved significantly toward becoming majority Hispanic. Higher education changed, and perhaps for the first time in American history, it began to lose its cultural luster. Student indebtedness increased, questions intensified as the economic value of college degrees became increasingly debatable, and public suspicions about the contribution of colleges and universities to a cultural good increased. Theological schools, deeply influenced both by ecclesial structures and by higher education, were rattled. The number and kinds of theological schools changed. While many new schools were founded, some old schools closed or merged with other institutions. New religious and ethnic constituencies gained numeric strength as others declined, and correspondingly, the number of students from minoritized racial and ethnic groups increased while the number of white students decreased. The enrollment in the master of divinity—the traditional degree for ordination—decreased, while enrollment in other professional master’s programs increased.

This book was finished in 2019, fifty years after I entered seminary and forty years after theological education became my life’s work. The decades have passed swiftly, and the changes have been many. Some of them have been exhilarating, others heartbreaking. I concluded my work at ATS deeply aware that the fabric of time and change can be holy and hopeful as well as dizzying and dismal.

While historians have generally been able to name broad intellectual moments, the name most often used for the current period is “postmodern,” as if the present moment, though different from the last one, does not yet have enough identity for its own distinct name. It is as if we are between the times—the name given to the series of books about theological education of which this book is a part. If we were sure about the time (even if it were the worst of times!), it might be easier to project the future, but we have the time that we have, whatever time it is. Older systems seem to be growing less useful, while the most recent inventions seem less than adequate.

This between-the-times time has generated anxiety in theological education. Money is harder to find. The kind of education that once attracted students to leave home and relocate to new intellectual worlds has less power to attract. The current moment has invented new educational strategies that make it possible for many students to stay at home, turn on their computers, and accumulate religious knowledge. Where is theological education going? What is the future of theological education? There have already been many futures, as Justo L. González has shown.¹ What will the next one be? Will the next theological education be as good for its time as previous expressions have been for theirs? It is not clear to me that what it should be is what it will be. But time has a way of pushing toward what can be and compressing it into what should be. The name of this process is hope—not because history inevitably pushes toward improvement or betterment, but because God beckons and pulls all creation in the direction of God’s own purposes.

A Personal Theological Education

In the mid-1980s I was following two soon-to-be seminary graduates on their walk to the chapel for a rehearsal for the commencement service. They were midcareer students, which was less common then than it is now. As I eavesdropped on their conversation, I heard one say to the other, “I’m going to miss this place like I miss Vietnam.” I had not had either for a course, and if I had, I am confident it would not have changed their assessment. Seminary does not work for everyone, but I think that it did work for me. Given the occasional fuzziness of my memory, it surprises me how vivid some recollections from my seminary days are.

The socially turbulent years of the civil rights struggle and the Vietnam War were an interesting time to be in seminary. Protests were increasingly intense as the nation grew ever more war weary. Following the shooting of student protestors at Kent State University, the seminary I attended designated a day of prayer. One class I had that semester was led by a professor we regarded as especially wise. He came to the lectern, and after a moment of silence said, as best I remember: “My namesake (the son of another professor) is in Sweden because he could not participate in this war. My own son is in the Mekong Delta today. You tell me how to pray.” With that, he left the room. Students sat in silence for a time, then left quietly, one by one. That moment remains profoundly powerful for me. What does it mean to pray? How do we know what our most earnest petitions should be?

I grew up in a pietistic tradition that valued the importance of devotional aspects of the Christian life but had limited perspective on the long tradition of Christian spirituality or the classic devotional literature. In a course on the classics of Christian devotion one semester, I read Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Ávila, Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day, John Woolman and Thomas Kelly, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Alfred Delp, John Bunyan and Dag Hammarskjöld, and many more. I think it was the most reading that I ever did for a single course. By the end of the semester, I had a history, a literature, and a theology that constituted a more nuanced understanding of Christian spirituality. The literature has stayed with me, and the books that I read that semester have an honored place on my bookshelves. The witness and struggles of the saints have stayed with me these ensuing decades.

Then there was a course on the teaching of Jesus. The reading list was extensive, including Rudolf Bultmann’s Jesus and the Word. The problems with Bultmann’s work have been the subject of scholarly attention since the 1970s, but passages in that book grabbed me and have not let go. “The Kingdom of God is not an ideal which realizes itself in human history; … we can say only that it draws near, it comes, it appears.”² Reading that book and paying attention to the content of that class changed how I understood the future toward which Christians are called.

These experiences became part of the lens through which I have viewed ministry. It is still not altogether clear to me why these experiences continue to be so vivid, why I remember them while many others have been forgotten, or perhaps more importantly, what the nature of theological learning really is. I earned a master of divinity—a ninety-hour postbaccalaureate degree. Roughly a third of the curriculum was devoted to Scripture and biblical languages; a third to theology, history, and ethics; and a third to courses in pastoral studies. Most MDiv degrees have fewer hours now, but the percentages across these three broad areas are likely similar. I doubt if any current reading lists for courses in ATS member schools include any of the books I read, except for some of the classic devotional and theological texts. While there are differences today, there is enough continuity that my memories inform what is of value in today’s theological education, and, having observed a career’s worth of changes, I have some hunches about theological education in the coming decades.

Learning in the Christian Tradition

My first idea about theological education formed long before I ever took a seminary class. It came from the inscription in the flyleaf of the Bible my parents gave me as a Christmas present when I was in the fifth or sixth grade. It was a study Bible; my parents had determined that I needed to move from a Bible with pictures to one with notes and cross-references. The inscription in my father’s hand referred to 2 Timothy 2:15, “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (KJV). I read this Bible all the way through during my high school years. I now have contrary positions to almost all its notes and interpretations, as well as its dating of events. I have a different idea of who may have written 2 Timothy and what it means to “rightly divide” the word. The importance of study, however, remains unshakable.

The Christian tradition gives study a prominent place. Maybe it is because Jesus was a teacher, maybe it is because of the often indirect way that Jesus taught with parables, maybe it is because Christianity emerged from Judaism with its highly cultivated role for teaching, maybe it is because of the intellectual capacity of Paul as Christianity’s earliest interpreter, maybe it is because of the function of religion that makes meaning and interprets reality—whatever the reason is, study has been central to Christian practices. Learning informs and, in its most successful moments, transforms. If theological education were eliminated before anyone reads this book, it would reemerge quickly because learning is intrinsic to the Christian faith. Learning, however, is not without its problems. It raises as many questions as it provides answers.

One of the problems is embedded in what I think my father meant by learning as an act of faith. On the one hand, he prompted me to attend to the importance of study, but on the other, he had a qualified perception of the value of learning: a certain kind of learning was good, but another kind was suspect. Learning that justified what one’s group believed was good, but learning that challenged faith was questionable. That was not just his idea: never during my years as a seminary professor was there a time when some students did not tell me they had been cautioned that seminary could ruin their faith. One is “approved unto God” by study that “rightly divides the word,” and for some people the only way the word is “rightly divided” is when it confirms what they already believe. By this perspective, the wrong kind of learning can be as detrimental to faith as the right kind can be beneficial.

Learning, especially its most advanced forms, generates complexity. When Paul makes his famous statement of faith to King Agrippa, Festus exclaims: “You are out of your mind, Paul! Too much learning is driving you insane!” (Acts 26:24).³ Festus was not right about Paul’s sanity, but he was right about a consequence of learning: it problematizes; it confuses. Learning invites the examination of an issue from many sides. The accrual of reliable information often points toward multiple interpretations rather than clarifying a single point of view. It is, for example, easier to believe one concept of creation when one is not confronted with two accounts in Genesis that have a certain tension between them. It is easier to have one view of marriage from the creation account if one does not study carefully other patterns of marriage that go without condemnation in the Scripture—from Solomon’s practice of polygamy to Paul’s advocacy of celibacy. Learning complicates believing, and if the greatest Christian virtue is to be “absolutely sure” of something, then learning is not necessarily a friend of faith. The preacher of Ecclesiastes is right:

For in much wisdom is much vexation,

and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.

(Eccles. 1:18)

It is one thing to be cautious about learning, it is another to oppose it altogether. Some Christians have argued that, while learning is a human activity that may benefit some areas of human engagement, it is of limited consequence to the life of faith. The Spirit will give the gifts necessary to accomplish God’s goals for creation and redemption, they say. Learning, in this view of God’s action, is an act of unfaith, not a discipline of faith. For people to do a great thing without learning is a sign of God’s blessing. To sing beautifully without training and to preach movingly without education are signs that God, and not human effort, is the author of the singing and preaching. From this perspective, knowledge without learning affirms that God is above all and gives the gifts necessary to accomplish God’s purposes. The Jews, who are never treated pleasantly in John’s Gospel, are astonished by Jesus’s demonstrated knowledge and ask: “How does this man have such learning, when he has never been taught?” (John 7:15). Jewish traditions have not diminished the importance of learning as some Christians have, but the astonishment in this text is precisely the point some Christians want to make—that knowing religious truth does not necessarily come from human kn...