Timothy Dalrymple, a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, hasa really important essay about the attitude towards sex he encountered while studying there. Basically, the unmarried seminarians were having a lot of sex, and when it became known that Dalrymple actually believed in what Christianity teaches about sexual integrity, his attitudes were called “backwards” and “judgmental.” He goes on:

[T]here are consequences to that kind of behavior.  Surely it says something that when I drove back to PTS from my chaplaincy work with the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, it felt as though I were leaving behind a place where God was real and urgent and present to a place where God was formally honored but rarely dynamically present.  And surely it says something that, when I was suddenly struck with the fear of death before a surgery, I went around to my professors, essentially begging them for assurance that there was an eternity with God to be enjoyed, and the most affirmative answer I received was: “I think there’s an eternity with God; but if not, this life has been a wild ride.”

Astonishing. More:

While my Mainline Protestant friends are not going to appreciate this, I cannot help but suspect that the unhealthy part of the culture that permeated Princeton Theological Seminary is simply a part of the culture that permeates many Mainline Protestant bodies in general.  The faith and ministry that were modeled at PTS were too much about the aesthetics, the atmospherics, the experience, the rites and rhythms of church life, and not enough about plunging ever-more deeply into (to use the dreaded evangelical language) a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, by which I mean the day-to-day and moment-to-moment yielding-to and being-with Jesus.  Matters of form prevailed over matters of substance.  And when the theological inheritance of the Christian tradition is treated so casually, then so too are the moral teachings.  Our faith does not require us to believe this, we are told; our faith does not require us to do that.  Eventually it’s not clear what our faith really is anymore.

Read the whole thing. Seriously, do. This essay is not really about sex, but about the lack of serious moral formation in that elite seminary. As Dalrymple writes, “And how are just-minted graduates going to begin their church ministries when they have just spent 3 years disobeying and straying from God?”

I would just like to point out that this is one place that fundamentalism comes from: ordinary people seeing that intellectual elites within a faith tradition have completely folded. They become frightened that all forms of intellectual inquiry inevitably lead to faithlessness. This is also where Moralistic Therapeutic Deism comes from: the idea that all God really expects of us is to be nice and non-judgmental and happy.

A Christianity that doesn’t expect basic obedience to its moral norms and the pursuit of holiness, especially in its seminarians, is a corrupt, decadent thing that deserves to die. If that’s what it’s like in the Mainline, no wonder it’s collapsing. Collapse faster, please! To be fair to the Mainliners, I once was told by a professor at a major Roman Catholic seminary that gay sex was ubiquitous among the seminarians at his institution. Same deal applies here: how can men who have spent several years acting as if normative Christian sexual morality doesn’t apply to them possibly enter into ministry that leads others to lives of Christian integrity and wholeness? If seeking holiness and submitting to God is unimportant to you, then how can you ever make it important to anybody.