Announcing Traditional Model Seminary; Article up at Ref21
I have an article up at Ref21. It begins,
How I wish seminaries described themselves in press releases (let the reader understand):
Our approach to pastoral preparation is time-tested, rich, and rigorous.
The university has been the handmaiden of the church for over a thousand years. The model of pastoral preparation of devoting years of one’s life to study under specialized masters has produced generations of competent and faithful ministers who have lovingly shepherded Christ’s church. Here at Traditional Model Seminary (TMS), we are committed to continuing this great tradition of pastoral preparation with a successful track record literally millennia long…
This was a fun one to write.
Fundamentalism, Evangelicalism, and Modernity in the EPC
This year marks the 100th anniversary of Henry Fosdick’s “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” The past century, and especially the 93-86 years since the founding of Westminster Seminary and the OPC, has seen an almost cyclical effect.
Beginning with the Portland Deliverance in 1890, the PCUSA no longer regarded the Westminster Standards as a necessary summation of biblical teaching, but instead pushed for a reduced set of 5 “fundamentals of the faith.” Following Fosdick’s sermon of 1922, a number of pastors in 1924 issued the Auburn Affirmation in which they argued that requiring conformity to the fundamentals violated their liberty of conscience. These modernists argued that this was imposing an interpretation of the confessional standards on the church, instead of the standards themselves, which went beyond the power of the church’s courts.
So a doctrinal system was reduced to a smaller set of foundational beliefs, whose authority in turn was rejected as violating liberty of conscience. As Lefferts Loetscher documents in The Broadening Church (1954), his history of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy centered on Princeton, the modernists themselves were a tiny proportion of the PCUSA. It was the moderates, who agreed with the fundamentalists in doctrine but disliked their militancy, who set the course for the church. The argument for conscience made by the modernists was also persuasive to the moderates, but only because the Standards were no longer the standards…
2022 Reading Project: Majority World Theology
Much of my reading project over the last four years has been devoted to targeted reading in the deep and diverse well of the Reformed Catholic tradition. I’ll continue to do so in other avenues, but in 2022 year I wanted to intentionally read outside my tradition. Specifically, I want to read outside the white, European-descended Presbyterian tradition. Instead of focusing on the works of an individual author, I am going to read a variety of works mostly representing theological perspectives of the “Majority World”. The Majority World is a term used to describe the majority of the global population that resides outside of the Western World (Australia, Europe, New Zealand, North America). I also be reading a few books on the African American Christian experience; of course Black Americans are part of the Western world and tradition, but the African American church represents a distinct theological approach within that tradition for which I have done very little direct reading, to which I want to devote time.
The most important work in this reading is Majority World Theology: Christian Doctrine in Global Perspective. It has six parts, each containing a series of essays, with each part having been previously published as individual volumes. Below is the rough schedule I plan on following…
