A theologically conservative reader writes this remarkable letter about the “Seminary Confidential” post:

As a graduate of [a major Protestant seminary, I have read your recent pieces on seminary education with great interest.  I do think that the issue is somewhat more nuanced and difficult than a simple binary between orthodoxy and post-modern Marxist critical theory.  There are a number of currents that undermine the education of seminarians, even at academically well regarded and relatively conservative schools like [mine]. Here are three:

The bias toward “vocational” training: What is the role of any seminary?  To train pastors to administer churches, do pastoral care, oversee outreach programs and the like?  Are we preparing them to do a job?  Are they technocrats of the church?  Or are they being spiritually formed, led to take the first steps in the path of wisdom, to delve the depths of scripture, to think theologically such that they can bring the wisdom and learning of the past to form the present, to instruct the people in the ways of God, what we might broadly call orthodox teaching, to pray, and to guide their congregations to authentic Christian action?  If most seminaries are like [mine], the bias is increasingly toward vocation.  Even when it was not, the bias was toward learning and instruction with little in the way of active “formation.”  Often, pastors would come to churches full of knowledge and idea about how to make the church “vibrant” but spiritually stunted.  This weakness makes them vulnerable.

Further, they are less spiritual leaders than they are technocrats.  They read the scripture methodologically and technocratically and write sermons the same way, with top methods and techniques for public speaking.  They run churches programmatically and administratively using all the best tools of management science.  Even when orthodox, how many of our clerics are truly “spiritual” leaders?  Many are good people, generally orthodox, but work to build churches with the “yeast of the Pharisees and the Sadducees” than they do with the power that was at work in the feeding of the 5,000 and the 4,000.  If there is a lacunae in our churches today it is in the area of “formation.”  We no longer disciple each other.  This is in many ways what I see as the core message of the Benedict Option: a call to the task of discipling.

The belief that the people in the pews can’t handle the kind of academic questions the professors wrestle with: In seminary, you are taught to read the scriptures using “literary criticism” and a host of other “criticisms.”  These are meant to help uncover the true and intended meaning of the text.  It is the old issue of hermeneutics.  For all the good things that critical methods have brought to scripture, they inevitably lead to a posture where the “critic” stands over and in judgement of the text.  It is taken apart and analyzed.  You don’t have to believe anything to approach the scriptures “critically.”

I will say, that like your seminarian who went to a liberal seminary to be challenged, I value many of my liberal commentaries because they make me think about the text.  But it is always playing with fire and one has to know the truth firmly to take away any “treasures of the Egyptians” from liberal commentaries and liberal theologians.  In my younger years I liked the feeling of being one of the smart set asking the “real” questions.  Now, I see the danger, and am glad I survived with my faith in tact.  Many do not.  Many pastors are working in congregational ministry saying the right things but you know they really don’t believe any of it.  And the sad truth is that many lost their faith in seminary.  I know them.  They are friends and former colleagues.

But the danger of this approach is to separate the seminarian from the congregant.  We are taught that we get past simple readings of the scripture to really understand what the text is saying.  The same in terms of theology.  We use the methods and ask the questions that the congregants are afraid to use and to ask.  They just want a simple faith.  We have been tasked with asking the deeper questions.  Far too many pastors carry around this attitude, that we understand the deeper truths that congregants, bless their hearts, just are not ready to confront.  It is a short journey it is from a posture of “asking difficult questions” to one of “wokeness.”  You become one of the “few” who truly have seen the light and understand the true intent of the gospel.  The price you pay for your “superiority” is that you carry around of bucket of corrosive, faith destroying questions for which you have no answers.

The Scriptures themselves: Even 20 years ago when I went through seminary, it was an already old and established notion that the unique message of the Gospel of Luke, for example, was to highlight Jesus’ concern for the poor and to underscore their special status in God’s eyes.   The Song of Mary is but one of hundreds of passages in which God is described at thwarting the aspirations of the “proud” or the “rich” and lifting up and healing the “poor”, “lowly,” “oppressed,” and “broken-hearted.”  Then there is the foundational story of the Exodus, God’s people being led out of Egypt.  There is no getting around these texts in confronting social-critical theory.

Unfortunately, the western church’s attachment to the social attitudes of bourgeois capitalism, its devotion to the free-market (the notion that millions of people making millions of choices have to be trusted to make choices unrestrained by any government interference because the highest moral value is the “freedom of choice”, never mind that the people making those choices are sinful and in need of redemption), and its devotion to the bootstrap “pull up your socks” “rags to riches” foundation myths of the whole western project have seriously undermined it moral credibility, even when you take into account the generous giving of western Christians.

Because we have not done the work of engaging our consumerist, market based society with the truths of scripture, we have left the door open for the whole biblical message of “compassion” and “justice” to be stolen from us from within by those wielding social critical theory as their weapon.  It is not hard to read scripture selectively and then ignore, downplay or rationalize passages that undermine the message.  Christians have been doing that for 2000 years to justify this or that movement.  Now traditional orthodox Christians, discovering that the mantle of “compassion” has been stolen from them from within, can be characterized as hateful bigots, uncaring and lacking in compassion.  Combined with a leadership that believes itself as superior to the laity in that they ask the “tough questions” it seems only natural for them to see it as their task to liberate and free the laity from their ignorant hatred and bigotry and teach them the “true” compassion and love of Jesus.

If there is an area of urgent need in our churches, it is that we must recover the mantle of orthodox “compassion.”  We need to fight the fight to show the errors of social critical theory, to get in and take back these scriptures and frame in thought, feeling and practice what true Christ-like compassion is, what it truly means to free the oppressed and to stand with the poor and the marginalized.  We need to get out of our bourgeois living rooms and get our hands dirty and not hide our “talent” in the ground, but put it at risk.  Otherwise we might find that even what we have will be taken from us.