The word 'seminary' is related to the Latin word for 'seed plot' in the sense of a nursery nurturing young plants carefully so that they are strong enough to be planted and bear fruit elsewhere.  The big debate is always over what it means to 'nurture young plants carefully.'  My contention, and one that was once long been held in Protestantism, is that this first and foremost means to nurture them in the Scriptures.  While many or even all seminaries would agree that a knowledge of the Scriptures is part of what a seminary's purpose includes, there are any number of ways in which seminaries understand this and, in fact, undermine this very purpose.  Five will be noted in this post. The first way in which a seminary might decentralize teaching the Bible is by only requiring a minimal number of courses in the Bible in the seminary curriculum.  In the 1980s (and perhaps still?), Duke Divinity School required students to take Old Testament Introduction and New

  What Are You?   What are you, That hates children? That dismembers them in the womb? That sends them bruised to hospital beds? That acts out distortions of womanhood in their libraries And destroys our daughters’ sports with your fake identities? That proudly parades your perversions in our streets? That invades their private spaces? That sexualizes our little ones And teaches them your deviancies and abuses? That sells them deadly drugs And the lie that they should have butchers cut them into the opposite sex, Then pumps them with more drugs and pseudo-psychology? That captures them in the bubble of social media’s echo chamber, Ever weighing themselves and being weighed by others? That hides their struggles from their parents? That ridicules their ethnicity, sex, and religion, Then tells them they can choose any identity? That tells them they must not appropriate another culture Then that their own culture has been cancelled? That traffics them in bondage to fulfill your lusts? That

 One of the gifts that the Roman Empire gave to European civilization was their legal system.  They helpfully differentiated three types of law: natural law, the law of nations (international law), and civil law (the law of a particular people).  Similarly, one of the major characteristics of Mesopotamian civilizations (Babylonians, Akkadians, and the Medes and Persians), was their legal system--a 'characteristic,' but not necessarily a gift.  The Jewish law, however, stood out as a significant contribution to civilization.  Like the Roman law, it understood that certain moral laws were established in God's creation for all people: the sanctity of life and wrongfulness of murder, the establishment of two genders equalling biological sex--males and females, the goodness of marriage between a male and a female, the commandment to be fruitful and multiply upon the earth, oversight over and responsibility for the flourishing of all creation, and the commandment to live by God&#

Forgiveness, reconciliation, and love can dominate discussion of Christian ethics, whether personal ethics, family ethics, or communal ethics.   These values for the way of our Christian life, or virtues for Christian character, are crucial for believers.   Discussion of Christian ethics, though, needs to go beyond saying that one should respond in certain ways to others; we need to understand and address certain sinful challenges from others and in our own hearts that make forgiveness, reconciliation, and love towards others so challenging.   If we do not, these values and virtues will simply be superficial.   A related challenge (one among several) that we regularly face in Christian discipleship is anger—our own anger and the anger of others.   Christian ethics involves dealing with life characterized by anger.   The new covenant righteousness foretold by the prophets envisioned a changed heart and life in the Spirit.   Practical advice from the Scriptures, such as from Proverbs, is

Introduction Labelling groups in order to denounce them outright is a feature of societies.  This was a problem faced by early Christians in its pre-Christian, European context, and it is once again a problem in the post-Christian, Western context.  Early Christians were sometimes persecuted for wild accusations based on willful misunderstandings.  Christians used the familial terms of ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ for each other.  They held their meetings before or after work hours, which, in typical homes, were behind walls without outfacing windows and, in winter, would have been in the dark.  This led some to believe that they practised incest and orgies.  Rumors of their Eucharistic services were misinterpreted as cannibalistic.  Early Christians were also the scapegoat for anything that went wrong—a flood or earthquake, for example.  After all, they did not worship the ancestral gods, who required sacrifices and devotion for their protective services.  Imperial religion connected religi