Tensions in the Seminaries

Theological seminary education is in trouble and in transition. The predicament is summed up neatly by Dean George Peck of Andover Newton Theological School: “The man who isn’t confused about today’s developments in religious education and its many implications just doesn’t know what he’s talking about.… You’re not in the swim just now unless you’re way out of your depth.”

Seminaries face a formidable array of problems. They are confronted with a crisis of “image identity,” a faculty “brain drain,” increasing tension with new undergraduate and graduate programs of religion in the colleges and universities, recruitment and enrollment nightmares, and above all secularized Christianity and theological vagary. And, in addition, many pre-seminary and seminary students, adrift in a world of change, are searching for a firm anchor of certitude. (See editorial on page 28.)

Although the “identity” crisis is an old and recurring one, it has reached an acute stage in recent years. The seminaries are on a seesaw that has at one end the professional-school concept and at the other the graduate-school idea, and they teeter with the pressures of the hour. In an address to Harvard Divinity School last year, President Nathan M. Pusey said:

It is a truism that a professional school that is not a graduate school is always in danger of being little more than a trade school or a school for technicians. On the other hand, a professional school that is a graduate school is always tempted into pursuit of scholarship to the neglect of the practical needs of the profession it was established to serve.

It is virtually impossible for any institution to maintain perfect balance on this seesaw; one side or the other almost inevitably ascends while the other declines. In contemporary society the graduate-school idea is higher, although the seminaries are reluctant to admit this.

Perhaps the American Association of Theological Schools has unwittingly supported this notion. In setting down its accrediting requirements for schools offering the Th.D. the AATS says that “it is desirable that a school that gives a doctoral degree in theology should have an active working relationship with a university where its standards will be subject to objective scrutiny by representatives of other graduate departments.…” Since university graduate schools would not deign to subject their scholarship to the scrutiny of seminaries, the AATS’s statement seems to denigrate the seminaries and enhance the universities.

Many changes have taken place in this time of fluidity. The University of Southern California eliminated its seminary and started a graduate school of religion. Oberlin closed its divinity school. At present there is great friction between the divinity school and the university at Drew. One Jesuit seminary, Woodstock, is reaching out, according to reports, to relocate itself in some kind of university complex in the New York area.

But Gary Gerlach, writing in the National Observer, forecasts the wave of the future in this struggle: “By the end of the century, experts say, 100 of the nation’s 150 major seminaries and dozens of smaller ones could be eliminated—partly because of the action on the [university] campuses.” Seminaries are engaged in a battle with undergraduate and graduate schools of religion in private and state universities. Despite the polite, scholarly dialogue between the contestants, unpunctuated with overtones of jealousy, the competition is a real one.

The universities have a number of impressive advantages over the seminaries. The first is financial, though this factor in itself may not be determinative. Universities are able to pay their faculty members half again or twice as much as the seminaries. A report from the American Association of Theological Schools shows that the average salary for a full professor in a divinity school is $10,800. The American Association of University Professors lists the average salary of a university professor as $18,720.

The faculty “brain drain” from seminary to university is increasing. When the universities have developed full-scale religion departments, one can look for a substantial exodus of men from the divinity schools. Already Robert McAfee Brown has gone from Union of New York to Stanford, Sidney Mead from Claremont to Iowa, Elwyn Smith from Pittsburgh Seminary to Temple, Nels Ferré from Andover Newton to Parsons, and Charles Pfeiffer from Gordon Divinity School to Central Michigan University.

A second attraction of the university over the seminary is the absence of creedal tests. Although most seminaries do not enforce creedal standards rigidly, they do have them. The university atmosphere is better suited to the ethical standards, if not also to the theological views, of one who wishes to avoid tongue-in-cheek adherence to doctrinal statements.

Moreover, the university allows untrammeled academic freedom, which is more difficult for a theological seminary tied to dogma (though even the death-of-God school has had seminary spokesmen). The university can employ agnostics, atheists, Hindus, and pantheists as readily as Protestants, Jews, and Catholics. It is interested in pure scholarship, not in religious commitment—and the wide diversity of theological views tends to make modern theologians academically suspect. The seminaries must look to men who are at least purportedly Christian and who maintain some semblance of theological conviction—even if, like William Hamilton of Colgate Rochester Divinity School, they abandon certain cardinal tenets of the Christian faith.

Another vexing problem for theological educators is the desire of the clergy to be “doctored.” Walter Wagoner, of The Fund for Theological Education, Ernest C. Colwell, of the School of Theology at Claremont, and Jerald Brauer, of the University of Chicago Divinity School, are among leaders of a movement to make theological education more attractive by granting four-year professional doctorates for those who expect to enter the pastoral ministry but are not interested in an academic doctorate. Claremont and Chicago have instituted professional doctoral programs. So have other schools, such as Fuller Seminary. The theory behind this move is that pastors, like physicians and dentists, should be granted the doctorate after four years of professional training.

The larger and better-financed institutions can handle the new assignment, but the smaller ones with limited faculty, minuscule libraries, and little money cannot. They fear that prospective students will be attracted to institutions where, for one more year of work, they may wear the golden tassle. Since the small seminaries cannot compete with the more affluent ones and since a move toward a professional doctorate without adequate faculty, library facilities, and financial support would jeopardize their accreditation, their plight is indeed unenviable.

All seminaries share another disadvantage in the recruitment battle. At a time when students are deciding whether they will enter the ministry and when they must choose a seminary, they are under the influence of the college or university religion department, which can turn them from the pastoral ministry into secular channels or toward the university graduate programs of religion that are not church-related. Men like Brown at Stanford attract hundreds of undergraduates to their courses. Last year at Western Michigan University, eight faculty members in the department of religion offered more than forty religion courses and taught more than 1,200 students out of a student body of 16,000.

The seminary recruitment enigma comes at a time when critics inside and outside the institutional church seek to bypass the church and call for new forms and structures as yet undevised. Religion students quickly fall in line and decide to work in secular rather than church structures. This fits neatly into the university outlook. The Iowa catalogue states: “The School of Religion is not a theological seminary. It does not prepare students for ordination as clergymen.… It is designed to help students gain an understanding of the history and literature of religion and insight into its nature and meaning.” Thus acculturated, students either take no work beyond that offered in the undergraduate programs or pursue the Ph.D. without even enrolling in a theological seminary. If they take the Ph.D., they can join a university faculty and, unordained and serving outside the institutional church, help to repeat the pattern in the students they themselves teach. In this manner religion becomes secularized and divorced from the church.

The predicament of some of the small seminaries can be seen in the experience of four in the American Baptist Convention. In 1956, Berkeley, Central, California, and Crozer seminaries—all accredited—enrolled 497 students. In 1965 this had dropped to 288. Four small schools duplicated faculty members, libraries, and buildings and offered similar courses. According to the latest catalogues, the four schools support sixty-one full-time faculty members. In comparison, Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1965 enrolled 641 students and had a full-time faculty of thirty-eight. There was no duplication of courses, or faculty, library and plant, and degrees were offered through the doctorate.

While it would be premature to hold university religion programs chiefly responsible, no one can overlook the fact that seminary enrollments either are remaining stable or are dropping. They certainly have not kept pace with the population increase. The 1966 enrollment report of the American Association of Theological Schools states the case plainly: (1) from 1958 to 1964 there was a decline; (2) since 1965 there has been a slight turn upward, but the enrollment increase in 1966 compared with 1965 was only eight-tenths of 1 per cent; (3) “there has been a noticeable decline in the number and percentages of students in the B.D. (or equivalent) program”; (4) “there is growing interest in teaching ministries and most of the 1,425 students in doctoral programs in religion look forward to serving in the expanding faculties of colleges and universities.” One can only conclude that these seminary graduates who man teaching posts in colleges and universities will help diminish the influence of the seminaries in the days ahead.

The supreme problem of the seminaries is theological vagabondage. Few institutions have remained wholly true to their original creedal commitment. Many of them are an unartistic blend of incompatible viewpoints that negate one another and leave the student bewildered and distressed. President Pusey caught this note in his address to his own seminary:

A new kind of humanism seems to be engulfing even recently updated formulations of the faith. To many no creedal formulation now seems possible because, it is insisted, there can be no supernatural reference to undergird such a creed. And if creeds go, what then becomes of the Church?

This is not the opinion of an anti-intellectual exponent of theological ignorance. It is the measured and perceptive view of a mature churchman.

President Pusey identified the condition that is at the heart of the seminary problem: doubt and unbelief.

Uncertainty and doubt remain inside and outside the School, inside and outside the University. Men continue to scorn the older formulations of belief—and rightly so, now as in the past; but now belief itself—professedly—is consciously eschewed. We have all become doubting Thomases.

Wistfully he asked:

Can we not now … undertake to be a little less luminous in our doubts, to be a little more ready to receive than to resist?… Can we who have erred in spirit not come to understanding? Can we who have murmured not learn doctrine?

Dean Walter Muelder of Boston University School of Theology presents another side of the coin. In an address to the American Association of Theological Schools in 1962, he exclaimed: “Theological school faculties are so engrossed in their specialties that each faculty member assumes the other is presenting the Gospel.” What he might have said is that faculty specialists are so busy trying to decipher what is written over the Cross that they fail to see or heed the Man hanging on the Cross.

Titillated by every “wind of doctrine,” trying desperately to be “relevant” and to spark new ideas, faculty members appear greatly confused. Walter Wagoner wrote in Bachelor of Divinity (Association Press, 1963):

Add to this confusion in critical matters of biblical interpretation the related critique of linguistic analysis with its distrust of theological language; add to this also the fact that the theological situation in seminaries today is, at the best, wide open and, at the worst, characterized by a lack of precision. In contrast to the days or to the places in which Barthianism or fundamentalism or liberalism was dominant and well defined, there are now no sharply delineated and all-compelling theological traditions.

Satirically Wagoner pointed to the effect this has had on the seminarians who look to their theological mentors for guidance:

That the seminarian scarcely knows which direction to look for a favoring wind is equally obvious. As in Beckett’s plays, the seminarians often resemble those anonymous characters who pop their heads out of garbage cans to see who or Who is coming next.

The tragedy of much seminary training today is the tendency to emphasize the transitory and neglect the eternal. Too many students are familiar only with the “gospel” according to Tillich, Fletcher, Bonhoeffer, or Robinson. The theology of Matthew, Paul, and Jesus they do not know. The sure word of prophecy has too often been replaced by “the ground of being,” a “demythologized Jesus,” the “secular city,” the “situation ethic,” and the “creedless church.” Some have gone far beyond doubt to a new certainty—the certainty that the faith of our fathers is old hat. In doing so they have lost sight of what their forebears thought the purpose and the function of the ministry to be. Unitarian Sidney Mead in his chapter in The Ministry in Historical Perspective (edited by H. Richard Niebuhr and Daniel D. Williams, Harper, 1956), quoted the nineteenth-century clergyman Albert Barnes as saying that the chief end of the ministry is “the conversion of souls—to save souls and to labour for revival of religion.” He quoted from Baird’s Religion in America that most nineteenth-century Americans “have been taught from childhood that the preaching of the Gospel is the great instrumentality, appointed by God for the salvation of men” and “hence, even though not church members, they quite generally respected the church and the clergy.”

Caught in the vortex of vexing and perplexing problems, the seminaries are in trouble. There is no doubt that the shape of things to come will be different. How long the struggle will continue before relative peace descends again no one can prophesy. What new forms will be devised and new approaches developed only time will tell. It is no easy task, however, for the institutions that supply the Church with its ministers to stay alive and vigorous. They will survive; that is sure. But how and under what conditions we do not know yet.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.