SEMINARY IN DISGUISE AT ABILENE

Years ago I heard the president of Dallas Theological Seminary make the remark that someday the Church of Christ would have seminaries of its own. At that time I was both orthodox and naive enough to say, “Ole boy, you just don’t know the Church of Christ, for we’ll never have a seminary.” The president and I were both right, however, though in different respects. He realized that the Church of Christ, like all religious denominations, would eventually cultivate those institutions and programs that would promote its own peculiar interests, and that this would call for all sorts of co operative agencies and such educational facilities as colleges and seminaries. This invariably happens to churches as they grow older. The Quakers are an exception, the reason being that they have no clergy.

But I was right too, or at least I think I was, for it is unlikely that the Church of Christ will ever organize an institution that will be called a seminary. “Pepperdine’ Divinity School” or “Abilene Theological Seminary” are highly unlikely possibilities. Bur this does not mean that our people cannot and do not have seminaries — in disguise perhaps. This may be more cowardly and inconsistent than the way our brethren in the Christian Church do it. They have seminaries, of course, and designate them as such. The time was when we listed these pastoral-training institutions as digressive, along with organs and missionary societies.

The truth is our people already have many of the things that we once branded as digressive, and as we get older we will probably have even more of them, including instrumental music and missionary societies. The organ is already in the chapel of some of the larger churches, and missionary societies exist at least in their embryonic stage in the form of college lectureships and in such centralized programs as Herald of Truth. Such items as carpeting, tinted windows, elaborate pulpit furnishings, tall steeples with a cross, luxurious edifices (instead of meeting houses), resident ministers, kitchen facilities, recreation halls, educational plants, and even “the sanctuary” have long been accepted. And there is more to come. As to whether this is good or bad is not the point of this editorial. Maybe these changes are good for us, and maybe not. My point is to remind ourselves of what is happening and to issue a plea for integrity. It is childish to want to eat the cake and have it too. We have had a way of conforming to the denominations around us, and yet insisting that we are not a denomination. While we issue the claim of being the true New Testament church, we are constantly at work cultivating all the trappings of the modern religious world, clandestinely sometimes.

If we are going to have seminaries and missionary societies, let us go ahead and recognize them for what” they are, and quit trying to kid ourselves that we are “loyal” because we don’t have these marks of the beast like “the sects” have. Shakespeare spoke wisely in reminding us that “A rose called by another name is just as sweet.” Or to put it another way in view of what is going on Out in Abilene: “A seminary secretly contrived is nonetheless realized.”

Abilene Christian College has announced plans for an S. T. B. degree, a program of three years of graduate study for ministers of the gospel. The curriculum will compare with those in the seminaries across the country. While the ACC program will be within the framework of the Graduate School, it will for all intents and purposes be a seminary. Even the S. T. B. degree is typical of the one offered by some eminent seminaries and schools of divinity.

There is something a bit amusing about the name of the degree, however, though I do not intend to be poking fun. I just want us to be honest with ourselves. While the S. T. B. is standard nomenclature for such a seminary program (Harvard, for instance, offers the S. T. B. for the three years of study in its Divinity School), it stands for Bachelor of Sacred Theology. Most seminaries call their degree the B. D., standing for Bachelor of Divinity.

If ACC is going to offer the usual seminary degree (and that is what they are going to do), can they afford to call it what the denominations call theirs? Imagine a Church of Christ college offering a degree in theology or divinity! The task at ACC is to do the same thing, but to call it something that will not cause the brotherhood to come tumbling down upon them. And yet the degree should be so designated that those who receive it would not always be having to explain it. If it could have the very same initials as other seminary degrees (S. T. B. or B. D.), and yet not have those awful terms theology and divinity, they would then have it made.

I commend my ACC brethren for their ingenuity if not for their candor. The S. T. B. degree they will offer means Bachelor of Sacred Knowledge. But why would this not be called S. K. B., and whoever heard of a divinity degree with such crazy letters? Ah, here comes the genius of the ACC faculty (they didn’t go to the big divinity schools for nothing!): in the Latin term Scientiae Theologicae Baccalaureus they get their S. T. B., which they can translate as Bachelor of Sacred Knowledge. The Latin really has our word theology in it, but let us not mar ACC’s clever maneuver with such a trifle. I figure they will barely squeak by with that word sacred, which really isn’t one of our terms. For the present they might get by with teaching sacred knowledge. In another generation they might go on and call it theology.

Since the days of Campbell our people have been uncomfortable with such terms as divinity and theology. Campbell wrote it into the charter of Bethany College that theology could never be taught. So Bethany College doesn’t teach theology, but Christian Doctrine instead! ACC wants to offer a divinity degree, the regular S. T. B. program, preferably using the very same initials for the degree, but they dare not call it theology or divinity. So they come up with Scientiae Theologicae Baccalaureus, a new thing under the sun in the world of divinity. By putting such a program in their Graduate School they have what is in essence a theological seminary without really having one!

I hold my hat in hand in the presence of this kind of prudence. I have a new respect for their wit. Like the Sophists of old the ACC brethren prove themselves worthy of their craft -priesthood I suppose we’ll have to say now that they are in the S. T. B. business.

A point of interest in all this is that former Dean Douglas Horton of Harvard Divinity School was invited to the campus by the ACC officials to advise them on this new program. The dean is quoted as saying: “The time is coming when the pews of the churches will demand for their pulpits the best education possible.” It strikes me as most consistent that the Church of Christ have its own seminaries if it is going to have pews and pulpits and clergy and laity. One principle that initiated the Restoration Movement was the priesthood of all believers — that all were to be trained as ministers of Christ. If we have reached that place where some of us belong in the pew while only the professional ministers belongs at the sacred desk, let us have divinity schools too.

Cut the pie as you will, surely a new day has dawned when a Church of Christ college will call in a dean of a theological seminary to advise them in setting up a program for the training of gospel preachers. Even with my strong vision of things to come I would never have dreamed that such a thing would have happened in my day. What would old J. D. Tant say about this if he would look at a kitchen in the church and cry, “Brethren, we are drifting!”?

Knowing Dean Horton as I do, I cannot help but wonder what he thinks of a college that makes it a policy to employ no one to the faculty except those of its own religious persuasion. Every faculty member at ACC is a member of the Church of Christ — the right Church of Christ at that. Even a mathematician or a foreign language teacher has to belong to the right church in order to be on the faculty of this liberal arts college. And now with a seminary program underway the 23 men that make up the Bible faculty will all be Church of Christ preachers themselves. Dean Horton knows that he would hardly find the like to this anywhere in the world, unless perhaps at a Roman Catholic seminary or a Missouri Synod Lutheran theological institution.

ACC needs to realize that they will not impress the learned world with such parochialism. Something is wrong with an institution that would have to fire a dedicated faculty member who happened to decide that he could find more nurture for his soul at a Christian Church than a Church of Christ. He would have to resign from a liberal arts faculty because he started going to church somewhere else!

In one respect, however, ACC is justified in having a graduate program for ministers with an all-Church of Christ faculty. The intention is to make Church of Christ ministers. So it is with seminaries: they create men after their own order, to preach their own brand of orthodoxy. If you are making priests for a particular ecclesiastical point of view, then there is no need for cross-fertilization of ideas or a dialogue of dissenting views.

Dean Horton spoke of the Restoration Movement while advising ACC (I just can’t get over it, the dean of a divinity school on the campus of one of our “Christian Colleges” advising our “Christian educators” how to train “gospel preachers”! It is almost too much for me to bear all at once!): “I see no reason why the program should not become a spearhead for the Restoration Movement in its intellectual dimension in your part of the world.”

I am unimpressed, though Dean Horton does sometime impress me. I would remind the dean that the Restoration Movement had its greatest impetus during a period when it had neither seminaries nor clergymen. The seminary at ACC is more likely to serve as a spearhead for a new clericalism in the Churches of Christ than it is to promote the interest of a real Restoration Movement. If, as the historian Mosheim observed, the first theological seminary in Alexandria, Egypt was “the grave of primitive Christianity,” I am at a loss to see how the latest seminary to be established at Abilene, Texas can be the spearhead for the revival of primitive Christianity.

It is not theological seminaries that our Movement needs, but we can use many congregations that are dedicated to the idea of the priesthood of all believers, that will provide training programs for all believers. Every Christian is to enter the ministry, and in this sense I favor every congregation becoming a “seminary” for the development of the talents of all.

It is in this context that I commend these words from Harry Emerson Fosdick to Dean Horton and the brethren at Abilene:

“In recovering Christianity as a layman’s religion we are getting back to the place where Christianity started. Neither Jesus nor any of His disciples were members of the priesthood or the clergy. They were laymen, all of them. The Master, a layman Himself, talked nothing but layman’s language. Moreover, early Christianity was spread across the Roman Empire, not by the clergymen, but by laymen who translated the gospel into terms of daily life.”

As for “the intellectual dimension” of which the dean spoke, we have noble instances in the pioneers of our Movement. The Campbells, Stone, Scott, Richardson, Raccoon Smith, and Milligan were men of intellectual grace without being intellectualists, and they were devout biblicists without being bibliolatrists. They rose above intellectual pride and gave themselves humbly to the foolishness of preaching. Seminaries just don’t produce men like those old pioneers. A seminary is a professional establishment designed to produce a professional clergy. The Restoration Movement does not need such products. As one who has had considerable experience in seminaries it is my conviction that they produce more pride than they do piety. They would be better if they were not clerical. I would be more sympathetic with a seminary for “laymen.” I agree with Elton Trueblood when he points out that one of our greatest inconsistencies is that Protestantism does not have a single seminary for laymen while claiming to believe in the priesthood of all believers.

In my graduate training I took two seminary degrees, a B. D. from Princeton Seminary and the S. T. M. (Master of Sacred Theology) from Harvard Divinity School before going on for a Ph. D. For the sake of the record, if anyone happens to be interested, I would not choose “the seminary route” toward the Ph. D. if I had it to do over. I would spend all the time in the university itself. I mention this to show that there is some background on my part for these evaluations. I am a great believer in a university education for those who plan to serve in the kingdom of God, though I now have serious misgivings that seminaries make any real contribution to Restoration principles. I oppose the underlying philosophy more than the curriculum.

I do not intend that this editorial be a judgment against seminaries as much as a warning against our own self-righteousness and intellectual pride. We must not deceive ourselves into believing that we are not now doing what we have for so long condemned others for doing. Integrity is more important than orthodoxy. When it comes to things like seminaries, missionary societies and organs, that which matters most is intention. Are we motivated by a desire to build the kingdom of God on earth or to promote the interests of our own party? Do we condemn others for practices that we find ways to justify when we want to do the same things? Is it a matter of what God wills or what we want?

One of the ancient manuscripts, codex Ephraemi I believe it is, has Jesus saying something that seems to be relevant to all this. Jesus sees a man working on the sabbath and says to him: “If you know what you are doing, blessed are you; if not, you are a wretched man and cursed.’”

— The Editor