Whither the Seminary Model?

My good friend Doug Sweeney at TEDS has just posted a very
thoughtful piece
about the future of seminary education on The Gospel Coalition website.  Sweeney makes some points that are consistent
with observations that I offered
on this site awhile back.  We agree that
the church is facing a crisis of basic Christian education, as the biblical and
theological knowledge taken for granted several generations back is
increasingly rare.  Furthermore, we both
recognize that the seminary model of education is of recent vintage (barely two
centuries old), and that there may be other ways to skin the ministerial-education cat. 

According to the “seminary model,” prospective Christian
ministers complete a four-year bachelor’s degree before going on for three to
four years of more specialized academic and practical-ministry training at a
theological seminary.  But there are some
problems here, one of which is related to the fact that the theological
seminary has been perhaps the most important engine in the
“professionalization” of the clergy–the notion that the Christian ministry is
another of the “helping professions” in which ministers are to conform to
humanly generated standards of professional “best practices” as established by
guardians of the guild (such as the Association of Theological Schools).  Of course, the intent of all this was to
raise the status of the ministry in the broader culture.  Ironically, the reverse has happened, and
this is probably testimony to the fact that a grand confusion of categories has
been at work.  Properly understood, the
gospel ministry is simply not a “profession” (like medicine or law) in the
secular sense of that term (for a critique of this trend, see John Piper’s Brothers, We Are Not Professionals
[2002]). 

Another problem is the cost of the seminary model–both in
money and time.  In today’s academic
economy, many students graduate from college with tens of thousands of dollars
of debt.  Then they are expected to
undertake another three or four years of seminary study, incurring still more
debt along the way.  And all toward the
goal of a calling that, on average, does not pay all that well! 

There is also the issue of educational quality.  Several generations back, Presbyterian seminaries
assumed that their students would come directly from liberal arts colleges,
where they would have learned classical languages and the western literary and
intellectual tradition.  That pattern
simply is no longer the case, though the seminary I attended in the 1980s still
paid lip service to the ancien regime
by regarding a working knowledge of Greek as propaedeutic to the seminary
curriculum.  Now, however, there are many
more seminaries competing for a much more diverse and less well-prepared
student clientele.  The tuition-driven
character of many schools has necessitated de
facto open admissions policies which then welcome students to a mix of
traditional and distance-education courses. 
The net result of all this, at least in some cases, is that many
seminary courses are taught on the undergraduate, bachelors-degree level at
best. 

Finally, there is the problem of potential redundancy.  Students from Bible colleges or Christian
liberal arts colleges who major in Bible or religious studies may well find
that part of their seminary curriculum is a rehash of what they already learned
on the undergraduate level.  I have heard
such comments more than once from graduates of the school where I currently
teach as they reflect on their seminary experiences.  Indeed, some of the seminary courses they
take may be less academically rigorous than what they encountered in college!

Dr. Sweeney in his article issued a salutary call for
discussion.  “The time is ripe,” he says,
“for dialogue, even charitable debate, regarding the best way forward.”  But getting this necessary discussion started
has been difficult.  Many Christian
leaders with something important to say on the topic are themselves heavily
invested in the seminary model (as seminary teachers, administrators, or
pastors who serve on a seminary board of trustees).  In addition, the path to ministerial
ordination in many American denominations is transcript-based and thus tied to
the seminary model.  My own denomination,
for example, requires that prospective ministers “present evidence of having
obtained a baccalaureate degree, or its equivalent, from an accredited
four-year college or university, as well as evidence of a theological education
embracing three years of satisfactory work in the seminary of this denomination
or in a seminary approved by the Presbytery.” 
The net result of this is that there are, at least for American Reformed
Christians, few viable alternatives to the seminary model at this time, and the
M.Div. degree is the de facto union
card for entry into the ministry. 

Nevertheless, the times they are a-changing.  The solution to the current crisis will
doubtless not involve a wholesale replacement of the seminary model.  It continues to work well for some students,
and I, for one, am extraordinarily grateful for the seminary education I
received back in the day.  The question
is rather, what new models of ministerial education will emerge alongside the
seminary model, and how open will churches be to embracing these
alternatives?