What is the Function of the Seminary? A Reflection on Daniel Kirk and Seminary Pedagogy

The blogosphere has been active with the news that Daniel Kirk will be leaving Fuller Theological Seminary after next year.

One issue that has arisen from this news is about how invasive should an institution of learning be with its faculty and how does this affect a professor’s freedom to develop his thoughts. Some respondents have suggested that the seminary has a distinctive function, perhaps even different than the academy. This neat compartmentalization seems difficult to negotiate and suggests to me how often the seminary suffers an identity crisis: On the one hand, being an institution of higher learning with accreditation that invites debate and intellectual stimulation while on the other hand, maintaining and safeguarding the integrity of ancient creeds and customs.

It should be noted that in many corporations, an individual can be terminated stemming from actions he or she takes outside the workplace. These scenarios usually result from criminal activity. Conversely, one’s ideological freedom is a much more tangled web.

For those who do not know the situation affecting Kirk, his ruminations on homosexual unions in the church were met with resistance from other senior faculty members of FTS who informed him that his petition for tenure would most likely be opposed as a result.  For his part, Dr. Kirk has been graceful in his handling of the situation, and has allowed many responses to develop naturally without trying to direct or steer the conversation to a plea for personal justice.

As a graduate of a seminary/university myself, I wanted to focus a little bit on how we should be considering or perhaps re-examining the function of the seminary. One respondent on Fuller Theological Seminary's facebook page suggested, somewhat derisively, that intellectuals like Kirk who perhaps cannot find gainful employment in a secular university come to the seminary hoping to walk the line between dogmatic repetition of religious education and the kind of free-thinking that stimulates debate and conversation. I think this is a little misleading as it suggests that the seminary has only ever been a place that reproduces rank-and-file dogmatists. We certainly see traditions develop and challenged from within the seminary and significant changes in the last century would not have been possible had it not been for thinkers coming out of seminary educations who thought on numerous issues thoughtfully and reflectively.

Still there is something of a problem when seminaries resort to defensive posturing against the sometimes unwelcomed influences deriving from secular culture. My own experience perhaps deserves some attention. I attended the Ecumenical Institute of Theology, a project of the Roman Catholic Church through St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, MD that derived from Vatican II polity in an attempt to open the lines of communication within the Christian church and to invite those wayward Protestants back into fellowship. In perceived progressive settings like EI, where the motto is “Faith Seeking Understanding,” it was perhaps ironic that the program attracted so many fundamentalist conservatives (such as myself at that time).  One such reason was that the EI was the only game in town, and so Christians going in had expectations that they would be fleshing out opinions they already held close with intellectual support. While there was no shortage of faith-committed professors, there were also those who challenged us to think beyond the Mass or Sunday service to find a Jesus that was much  more human. If faith was to seek understanding, there was an implicit understanding of transformation. Unfortunately, no one told you what that transformation was supposed to look like. Would I come out a super saint or a skeptic?

As intellectual transformation was left unchecked, we were moved to bear all the various kinds of information back into the mold of our faith. Having a plethora of information and not knowing what to do with it is not unique to any academic program, but I would argue it is problematic for a seminary, and perhaps even more so for those with confessional creeds. A typical example would be that one evening I could take a class on the historical Jesus and meet with a cacophony of opinions from liberal professor Z only to return the following evening to sit in on a spirituality class ministered by conservative priest X.  I regularly watched students confuse lines of information, especially given that so many came in with only a basic understanding of his or her tradition and perhaps a bachelor degree to make his or her entrance into the program possible. Leaving with a master’s in Theology, I came out harder, more skeptical, and less ready for the task of assuming a faith that was now bedridden by so many questions. When I gave my exit interview, I could tell that my truthfulness was not especially a welcomed revelation, as the administrator seemed more and more impatient with my concerns, especially the one I voiced about EI being very concerned with numbers but giving no direction beyond their own walls about what to do with one’s intellectual development. I still might have aimed a similar accusation at a secular university, but for the EI, a place so enmeshed in the faith, where talk about discipleship as a lifelong journey is rote, it seemed more critical and more imperative that I was guided in the right direction. The advice I was given concerning my own intellectual aspirations:  All the jobs are gone, the PhD programs are filled with Ivy leaguers who can’t get jobs, your chances are slim. What was the point of EI then for someone in my shoes? Certainly not to waste thousands of dollars in pursuing a PhD I would never use. I was to a head to count for so many professors who were fighting to keep their jobs amid years of under-enrollment.

What seminaries, at least my seminary, did not do very well, was to help the student make sense of all the stimuli coming at him. There is a kind of hands-off response since while the Church makes disciples, the seminary makes disciples who are supposed to think more deeply about their faith. John Calvin once wrote that "None will never be a good minister of the word of God, unless he is first of all a scholar." But I often found that scholars didn't make good ministers. This is perhaps not entirely there fault as there is a line they were most likely directed to respect - different belief systems, different students coming from a variety of different backgrounds, etc. It might have been more honest to relinquish the discipleship talk, but then I can imagine some clever deflection: "discipleship must be internalized. What it means will be different for each person."

Still, students with only four years or less under their belt, and predictably so, often bastardized the influences they are vulnerable to at a seminary. The synthesis required to compartmentalize is not so much a talent as it is an arduous task, one that requires constant refinement.  In my own experience, seminary destroyed my virginal concepts of the untouchable nature of the Christian witness and taught me to challenge everything.

Which brings me to the interesting run-in I had on the issue of homosexuality. I wrote about this in a previous blog, but I want to recontextualize the situation for the moment.  As I continued my education, now in a Master’s program in Jewish Studies, I also was busy writing papers and presenting at conferences. When I decided that I wanted to touch on homosexuality as a topic, I contacted the administrator responsible for the alumni news at the EI. In the past, they have always included my news pieces and thanked me for taking the time to include something. So when I submitted the title of the presentation on a topic I had given about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and homosexual unions as responsible marriage, I received no response. When the newsletter arrived, my news was not included.  I contacted the administrator and received a rather terse response: “Sometimes things make it in and sometimes they don’t.”  Of course, space issues couldn’t have been the concern. EI deals in an electronic format newsletter. Space restrictions are therefore relic complaints of hard copy editors. No, the reason I was being dismissed was the topic. I ran this by another professor at the EI, and he agreed. I had been discriminated against based upon what was perceived to be an affirmation of homosexuality simply by a reading of the title. Let’s not forget how I got to this point. I was strongly conservative in my reasoning before entering the EI. After spending seven years at the institution (I did not spend consecutive semesters there), I was in essence being told that despite what I got out of my classes, the conclusions I came to, and the way those classes shaped my thinking, I had gone too far. Nevermind that the EI deteriorated my once-polished faith, homosexuality was taboo and incapable of being synthesized. In effect, homosexuality was worse than skepticism and the unbelief fostered in a number of the classes I took while attending.

This is why I understand the reaction to Dr. Kirk’s own coming to terms with same-sex unions as a conversation worth having, and yet at the same time shuddered to think about what’s going on here. If a student who is a lifelong seeker of coherence is meant to pull together all the information thrown at him, why do we think the plight of the professor is any different? It would be easy to say that the student is less equipped because of the level of his education, but then how much does that underscore the fact that scholarship is an even more tangled conversation as much as it is a debate. A professor working under such constraints cannot be thought to have arrived at some mythical totem of belief. He too is also a constant seeker. Sure he has a good portion (he would think) under control, but questions breed questions -- we constantly refine and measure.

Which leads me to the same concern voiced by others:   Is seminary the proper place to receive an education if by education we posit the free-thinking atmosphere of our Western institutions? I guess the question all depends on the openness or lack of concern the seminary expresses to its faculty and students. If numbers are your main concern, the individual can easily get lost. If doctrinal conformity is your concern, perhaps you have no chance. If you put your trust in an administrator who is herself conservative in her faith commitment, is it healthy to let her run your communications office without some form of counterbalance or oversight? I decided not to bring my own concerns to the Dean of the EI, primarily because I had lost nothing and gained nothing either. But for someone like Daniel Kirk, who is at risk of losing his job, the situation is quite real. It means feeding his family, it means pulling up his roots in a community that loves and respects him. It means all the talk we here nowadays about “being Jesus” or “being the gospel” or showing love to those with whom we disagree, simply revolves us back to good ole dogmatic posturing.  When Jesus went to Matthew’s house, Matthew was being accepted into a sacred circle of trust despite his own social standing. How many of us desperately need our seminaries to take similar leads, so that we can believe that the message they are putting out there is not just rhetoric.