Different pressures on Christian institutions to conform to an ever-changing culture need to force those hoping to continue to do what they have been doing to rethink what they are doing. That statement could be affirmed by the enemy of Christian institutions, but it is meant as a prod to get the deer (Christian education) in the headlights of culture to move for its own good.
What have we been doing? Christian education in Europe led the way for colleges and universities centuries before the Enlightenment. During a time when theology was the queen of the sciences, the Church affirmed a need for quality in education, training for ministry and professions, the preservation of knowledge, research, the articulation of truths, and certification. The Enlightenment carried these concerns on, but with science replacing theology at the head of the faculties. God was packed off to a sub-faculty of the university and told not to meddle with objective research and teaching. Even so, Christians could find considerable overlap in their pursuits of knowledge on the Deist or even Atheist campuses because the Enlightenment, like Christianity, believed that there was such a thing as truth. The God who made the universe was the God of logic, mathematics, nature, etc. He was also the One God of all, and so the 'universal' in 'university' pressed ahead with an agenda of extending knowledge to all cultures and nations. Just as the early Christians could find considerable agreement over similar matters with Greek and Roman philosophers like the Stoics, Platonists, and Aristotelians, so Christians during Modernity could find agreement in the pursuit of truth.
What is now going on? Postmodern education removes science to a faculty housed on the outskirts of the university, just as divinity was removed over two centuries ago. We now witness the social sciences in control of the university, and particularly those areas of the social sciences that deal with perceptions, feelings, experiences, reader-responses, political power, cultural diversity for its own sake, and the like. Marxism is revered: it classified people into good and bad groups, analyzed reality through economics, and sought to bring about change through the politics of power. It was, through and through, a social scientific ideology. It has now reappeared in the form of Critical Theory to storm through the institutions of society, cancelling culture, denying science, making everything about race, and attacking Christianity. If Christians and Enlightenment agnostics and atheists could agree that there were two genders, biologically determined, the geniuses of postmodernity deny science and oppose religious teaching on this. Their goals are not research oriented but the restructuring of power. Mathematics is considered oppressive if it is claimed that people must show their work, come up with a 'right' answer, and maintain quality, standards, and advance to high standards. Sexually disoriented men show up in women's bathrooms to change into their running gear to compete against women in track meets, only to be applauded by postmoderns who care nothing about science and are horrified by the thought of there being a 'right and wrong'. Now we have a university doing scientific research that takes the scalps of babies (perhaps from partial birth 'abortions'), cut off and attached to lab rats to see how long the skin can continue to live. The denial of science about the unborn or the meaning of life of the divinity school allows such horrific experimentations.
What needs to be done? I would propose three things going forward for Christians living in such post-Christian societies. First, more and more K-12 schools need to be started by churches. Children's education needs to be understood primarily as a matter of formation, secondly--but importantly--as education. This means that the 'Bible classes' at such schools need to be taught by well-educated ministers, not the coach who needs an extra class and has taught Sunday School. What about chapel? Hymn singing is educational--it teaches the theology of the Church--and so worship in chapel should not be about singing the latest Christian music to evoke feeling but the best Christian songs to feel thoughts (learning the orthodox faith through song). As E. Y. Harburg said, ''Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.' Modernity would have us use words to think. Postmodernity would have us know the world through feelings--rather like a Paul Simon song that is high on feeling and without meaningful words. Christian music is often--and has been for several decades--fairly postmodern: weak on words, using music to feel worship more than anything else (if you like the music). Chapels at Christian schools need to teach theology through worship songs. This is but one example of what it would mean to reformulate Christian education around Christian formation. History needs to be a far more robust subject in the Christian curriculum--to give another example. Postmodernity's interest in socio-political power rather than truth takes a great interest in rewriting history for current power politics, as seen in the ludicrous 1619 Project or the teaching of Critical Race Theory in public schools in the USA. History taught as the boring past with no significance for kids who are interested in the present misses the profound challenge from postmodern journalists posing as historians. History must be taught as the story of 'us', especially of the Christian Church--our tradition, our mistakes, our resources in Scripture, Church, and theology for change, and our goals.
The second thing that needs to be done is the establishment of Christian 'houses' off campus around universities. This is a call for something more than Christian ministries on campuses and something different from Christian colleges. Christian colleges are folding under pressure from the culture, with faculty being approved to teach because of their academic credentials more than their commitments to the Church. The notion of a Christian college is somewhat a thing of the past, despite valiant efforts by some to continue faithfully in this form of education. Students are admitted who have no interest in the Church and, often, little interest in Christianity. The hope is held out that they will be formed in the faith. Their Christian parents send them there in the hope that they will turn out to be Christians and marry someone who is a Christian. A lukewarm Christianity, however, undermines the faith. That a Christian college would have a homosexual group operating on the campus, e.g., says it all about such places that once produced a mission force in the early to mid-20th century that was admirable. Moreover, starting Christian universities in countries that need universities may provide a service for half a century, but there is little doubt that these educational institutions will not maintain a robust Christian identity any more than that there is a hope of there being a Christian nation. To think Christianly about education is to think like Jesus did: a tightly formed, minority community that interacts with but is not shaped by the world. Instead of only having Christian meetings on university campuses, or one-on-one discipleship with campus ministers, what is needed is tightly formed Christian community led by highly educated (in the university curriculum, particularly the humanities and social sciences, as well as the Christian faith) ministers who can engage critically with what students are being taught and encountering at universities. The Church should put its money into founding Christian houses like this off-campus more than trying to save Christian colleges. The latest news about the current American government's administration forcing Christian colleges to allow men claiming to be 'women' into female dormitories, showers, etc. demonstrates what the Church is up against. If this latest ruling (see the story: https://www.theblaze.com/
The third thing that needs to be done is to rethink seminaries. During the modernist period of the West, seminaries developed increasingly as academic institutions where the mind was trained theologically for Christian ministry. This worked fairly well as long as the Church received seminarians into their ordination processes and further shaped graduates in ministry. The last 70 years have seen both the numerical decline of the mainline denominations and their rejection of Christian orthodoxy and orthopraxy. This left Evangelicals with a choice: start your own denominations or have independent churches. Those that started Evangelical denominations have essentially affirmed the seminary as it was, and a number of these denominations have outsourced their seminary training to academic seminaries that are not part of their denomination or even much in dialogue with it. Evangelicalism itself no longer has much meaning, except internally within denominations, or historically. The result is that the non-denominational, Evangelical seminaries no longer really know what they are supposed to do, and the teaching is typically for the curriculum and for the academic degree, not for the Church and not for discipleship in any identifiable tradition. Lacking a robust theological core, the vacuum is easily filled by professors' own academic interests and by the culture's agenda. Those who decided to take the independent church approach simply have no vision for the mission of the Church. They are forever rethinking everything about Christianity and doing so through the primary filter of their own worship service (3 songs and a sermon) and programmes. There is no agreed tradition to answer questions about baptism, the Lord's Supper, ethics, culture, and theology, and the theology is forever 'theology-lite'. Such churches often came out of a 'seeker-service' movement that intentionally jettisoned the ballast of belief for some smooth sailing in the culture's chaotic currents. They state an interest in missions, but they do not understand the history of missions and the need to work together to accomplish what is actually needed in Christian missions. Even mission agencies often lack this understanding, becoming conduits for people who want to do 'something overseas'. These independent churches love short-term 'missions'--opportunities for people to have a couple weeks in a different culture. To make matters even worse, the seminaries have turned their mission programs into studies of culture, intercultural relationships, and demographic studies--and the latter often include cults and theologically unorthodox groups in their statistics. All of this relates to the problem of Evangelicalism, the problem of ecclesiology ('the Church'), and the problem of the seminary.
The churches need to be reconnected to the historic Church (of different denominations), the Church needs to reconnect to orthodoxy, and the seminary needs to reconnect to and be a ministry of the Church. The seminary that makes 'diversity' its guiding goal has lost its moorings in the historic Church and tethered itself to a current agenda of Western culture, for example. It prioritizes a postmodern, social science agenda over against the Church's universal ministry through international missions and the Church's unity in Christ. Instead of understanding theological education as passing on the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3), it values teaching that looks at the personal identity of the instructor, not what is being taught. This is but one example. The problem of the seminary has grown over the years, and there are multiple examples of its failure. Under modernity, it became an academic institution that looked down on the Church as the ignorant brother that clung to its faith without understanding. Its job was to educate these people and to guide the Church into the light of reason. Under postmodernity, the seminary has (often--there are some very few exceptions) become a place to share experiences, express feelings, and celebrate diversity. The social sciences are often the lenses to interpret the Bible, the Church, theology, Church history, ethics, and mission. Pastoral counseling was once taught in seminaries because pastors, it was believed, should form parishioners struggling with life by the ministry and teaching of the Church. Now seminaries teach therapeutic counselling, thanks to the intervention of the social sciences. Seminaries used to teach Christian education because education in the faith was valued for every age group in the Church. Seminaries used to teach evangelism because it was held that ministers needed to lead people to faith in Christ. Only those seminaries that are part of a clearly defined, historic faith tradition will survive with a purpose--or worse, those that are not will survive and do untold damage to what is left of the Church in the West. To make matters even worse, growing Churches in other parts of the world, realizing the need for theological training, turn to the West for guidance as to what they should do. To be sure, much good and not all bad has been done through the seminaries for many, many years. The challenge we now face, though, is that if we keep doing what we have done or what we have become, we will fail. The Church, in the form of a robust, orthodox denomination (and not necessarily something under the now confusing label 'Evangelical'--reader beware!) needs to take responsibility for its own formation of people for ministry. This can be done by having its degrees offered through universities (in the British system),thereby gaining university validation, but the degrees need to meet the Church's needs for ministry and be controlled by the Church, not the academy.
These brief thoughts are incomplete. Much has been said, some in writing, along these lines over the years. The purpose of this article has been to highlight the need for some radical rethinking about Christian education from K-12 to college to seminary. The challenges of culture and within existing educational institutions have been outlined in brief, and a few suggestions have been offered. The hope here is that Christians, already discussing such matters, will be willing to come up with far more radical alternatives. Window dressing is not an option.
Comments