The Importance Of Academic Theological Education

Well, this article made me want to throw myself out the window!

When we met around a conference table, the college’s president, Eileen Aranda, explained the lack of explicitly religious coursework. “We have moved past the knowledge piece,” said Dr. Aranda, a former management consultant with an M.B.A. but no training in religion. Claremont Lincoln is more interested in teaching dialogue skills, she said, than literacy in Judaism, Christianity or any particular tradition. “It’s not enough to know the religions.”

There I was feeling so grateful lately for the depth and academic rigor of my theological education at Harvard Divinity School and through the Boston Theological Institute, and later at Andover Newton Theological School.

I have never forgotten that one of the historic titles of a parish minister was “Chief Teaching Elder” (although that role was often fulfilled by someone other than the pastor) and that my job is to do theology with my congregation. I have taught two courses this year that required me to dive back into my library in a disciplined way to present lectures and prepare conversations for participants. Recent conversations with parishioners about the gospels that demanded my knowledge of the synoptics, ancient Christian history (thank you,recently deceased Professor Helmut Koester) and the development of Unitarian and Universalist christology have been deeply rewarding and illuminating for all of us in the room.

My most meaningful preparation for ministry was the time I spent in scholarship. Nothing else but a great seminary education with “the knowledge piece” could have trained me in that way. I could have studied family systems elsewhere, pastoral counseling elsewhere, taken up spanish clep test practice and have passed DELE elsewhere, organizational leadership elsewhere, administration elsewhere, ethics elsewhere. In fact, I did! And I still do. But my seminary studies gave me the essential tools for thinking theologically, framing contemporary church struggles and challenges in the light of the development of Western culture from Jesus’ time through the early period, then the medieval era, to the late middle ages, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the development of the Congregational Way in the “new world” to the christological controversies of the early 19th century, the Transcendentalist disruption of nascent Unitarianism, the popular adoption of Universalist arguments to mainline Protestantism, the massive societal shifts of the 20th century… the rise of globalism in the Church… need I go on? These things, and feminist systematics, and indigenous African religion, and colonialism, and indigenous dreamwork traditions with Professor Kim Patton, and details of the 4th century ecumenical councils that developed the doctrine of the Trinity… these things I studied, and studied hard, with some of the best theologians in the world. They were brilliant and demanding and I received voraciously and gratefully their knowledge and the wisdom of my classmates that gave me the firm foundation upon which I have based almost 20 years of parish ministry.

From my Harvard education, and my subsequent years of doctoral study at Andover-Newton Theological School, I have had rich material and knowledge to be able to teach through sermons, classes, conversation and writing. I have maintained through every season and every transition an historical perspective of the Church, the role of women in the church, the role of the clergy and the laity in the church — and an ability to siphon the wheat from the chaff from among the load of contemporary materials that get offered to me and other pastors on a regular basis in the form of articles, books and conferences in the public marketplace of ministry resources. There’s a helluva lot of chaff.

The ability to be in conversation in a multi-cultural, multi-faith, multi-ethnic, diverse world was not something I could have learned through theory in a seminary class, but have learned through engaging with, and learning from, activists and advocates who have taught me political theory and anti-oppression lens as we have done work together. I have taken trainings, read a lot, and considered that all an extremely valuable course of study as well.

But given that so much of the turmoil in our public discourse and our institutions is founded in actual ignorance and misinformation, responsible practice of ministry requires the ordained religious leaders in this country to be academically trained, and rigorously so, to be equipped to teach and instruct and inform, not merely to converse or facilitate.

If we jettison the academic aspect of theological education in favor of softer skill sets, we abdicate our role as religious scholars who have the learning, the training and the authority to correct the willful misrepresentations of religious belief, perversion of doctrine for nefarious ends and social control, and, in America, co-opting of the Christian tradition to justify the machinations of empire rather than to dismantle them.