In Defense of Traditional Seminary Education
R. Scott Clark comments on the Distributed Education (DE) seminary model, which instead of having students come to a campus sends the professors to the students. It is primarily a response Tim Keller’s suggestion that the current seminary model is now inadequate and a different approach is needed.
Until parishioners are prepared to see physicians or surgeons who earned their medical degrees online, they should not accept ministers who have only an online degree. There is a reason why we send physicians to brick and mortar schools, because we know from experience that to do otherwise is to cut corners and we are not prepared to do that with our physical health. Why then are we willing to consider training the physicians of our souls with less care?…
Students traveled to them for a reason: education is not a consumer product that can be distributed by Amazon. Education is a process. It is a culture. It is a habit that is formed in community. It takes time in a community of scholars…Distributed education seeks to disconnect the outcome of education from the process: initiation into a culture and the formation of habits. It assumes that education is what happens when a prof travels to a church and delivers lectures thereby transmitting information. That is not itself education. The lecture is only a beginning of education for the student. Lectures are clues to a world of learning but they are rudiments, bread crumbs that invite the curious to continue learning.
Clark’s whole post is worth reading, and there are a few points I think are worth adding.
The first is that DE disconnects students from other students. The community aspect of education is not just student-to-professor, but peer-to-peer…
On Clinging to Guns and Religion
My business as a pastor is to point people to Jesus, not to put forth strong opinions on the specifics of our nation’s gun laws, though I may have strong opinions on that issue. But sometimes these two things intersect.
I was in a conversation with a Christian friend right after the Sutherland Springs shooting, and we started chatting about firearms. Living in Michigan and growing up in Texas I have been constantly surrounded by a strong pro-gun culture. My observation has been that pro-gun conservatives in these areas generally have made their commitment to own and carry guns functionally sacred. To infringe upon these rights would be the worst possible thing to happen to them, and the question of gun control legislation is a question of attacking their personal identity. I was worried that this was also the case for this friend…
On The Unraveling of Cultural Logic
The debate over religious liberty and abortion, as it relates to Satanism, is an indication of the weakness of a cultural attempting to legislate and rule on the basis of secular, that is, neutral, principles. Sociologist James Davison Hunter, who coined the term ‘culture wars’, has this to say in a lengthy, but valuable, article…
On Counting Baptists
In a previous post I reflected on Philip Jenkins’ work showing that Baptists are the only Christian denomination not growing globally. His followup today at the Anxious Bench deserves highlighting. If religious group X is well known in a society,…
On Baptists in the Global South
Philip Jenkins has a fascinating article at the Christian Century on Christianity in the Global South. Christians living in the Global South are the largest demographic of every Protestant tradition, except for Baptists. Part of Jenkins’ explanation points to the…
