Remediation for those unfamiliar with the faith becomes part of a master’s-level education
When Richard C. Beaton steps into his classroom each week to teach the New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary, he is careful not to make assumptions. He can’t assume that his students have been active Christians for more than a few months. He can’t assume they know church history. Most of all, he can’t assume they know anything about the Bible.
“Biblical illiteracy,” he says with a rueful laugh, “is rampant.”
Blame it on the decline of the liberal-arts education, the marginalization of religious instruction, or the changing role of the seminary. Whatever the reason, seminary students today are not the bookish, church-raised philosophers of yesteryear. They are more familiar with balance sheets than the Book of Job, and more interested in a spiritual quest than in sorting out the authorship of the letter to the Ephesians.
An updated profile of the modern seminary student might look something like this: A successful, 40-year-old lawyer decides that she wants to do something more meaningful with her life. Her interest in religion has waxed and waned since childhood, but in recent years she’s been heavily involved with a particular church and thinks that the ministry might be her calling. Although she has only modest familiarity with the Bible and little knowledge of theological concepts or church history, she enrolls in a graduate divinity program part-time to test the waters.
Such students present enormous challenges to the country’s 179 accredited schools of Christian theology, which effectively act as gatekeepers for their respective churches. The Roman Catholic church and many Protestant denominations require their ordained ministers to hold a master’s degree in divinity, to ensure that they are well trained in theology, philosophy, and church history. Roughly 27,000 students are currently enrolled in a divinity program at a seminary, theology school, or divinity school in the United States.
Yet, as Mr. Beaton and other seminary professors have discovered, a growing number of students are coming into these graduate programs with little or no preparation, either academically or personally.
In a study of Roman Catholic seminaries, for example, Sister Katarina Schuth, a professor at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity at the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota, found that about half of all seminarians are converts to Catholicism or had not been active in the church for much of their lives (Seminaries, Theologates, and the Future of Church Ministry, Liturgical Press, 1999).
Still, for all the concern over theological ignorance of many incoming students, a growing school of thought has it that administrative and social skills are, in the end, nearly as important as theological training. And that, some say, is what these older, second-career seminarians bring with them.
Aside from offering more evening and weekend classes for part-time students, seminaries have been slow to adapt to these changes in the student body.
“‘Radical change’ and ‘seminary’ don’t often appear on the same page,” notes Barbara G. Wheeler, director of the Center for the Study of Theological Education, at Auburn Theological Seminary. “The changes are much more changes of form than they are of content.”
One reason for this conservatism is that a three-year master’s-of-divinity degree requires, like the J.D. for lawyers, a highly structured professional program. Whatever the religious affiliation of their divinity school, students are expected to take courses covering theology, church history, ethics, social analysis, professional development, and personal formation. That leaves little room for new courses.
The curriculum hasn’t changed much -- but what takes place inside the classroom has. Professors say they are increasingly met with blank stares as they toss off once-familiar theological terms or names of 19th-century philosophers. They bemoan their students’ inability to write a simple essay. Lengthy research papers are not often assigned until the second or third year. The growing number of students for whom English is a second language also poses a challenge.
“When I went to seminary, teachers could use words like ‘eschatology’ and ‘hermeneutics,’ and students knew what they meant,” says the Rev. Roger W. Ireson, general secretary of the United Methodist Board of Higher Education and Ministry. “Now you can’t assume any of that. You’ve got to go back to a more basic level.”
Mr. Beaton, a Cambridge-educated assistant professor of New Testament at Fuller, puts it more bluntly: “We have people who come in and are brand-new to the Christian faith, so they don’t know diddly. And we have to teach them.”
How to educate this new breed of students is the biggest topic of conversation in theology schools today. Should the faculty add remedial classes for students who don’t know the New Testament from the Old, or Aristotle from Thomas Aquinas?
Some institutions have said yes. At Andover Newton Theological School, in Massachusetts, a course on basic Western philosophical traditions introduces students to the works of seminal thinkers. Several years ago, the Evangelical Theological Seminary, in Illinois, introduced a mandatory class, “Contexts and Methods of Theology,” to give students a grounding in philosophy and social criticism. Louisville Presbyterian Seminary even has two tutors come in three times a week to help students write papers.
But remedial classes can’t always fill in the gaps. How do you teach church history to a student who has no deep roots in a particular denomination?
“We can no longer assume that a student who says ‘I’m a United Methodist’ really knows what it means to be a United Methodist,” says Elizabeth C. Nordbeck, dean of the faculty at Andover Newton. “We only assume that when somebody says ‘I’m this’ or ‘I’m that,’ that’s what they are right now.”
There’s also the nagging question of whether any of this matters. Even seminary faculty members agree that a minister’s effectiveness rests primarily on his or her organizational and personal skills.
“I don’t think grades have ever been a good indicator of whether a student will be a good minister or not,” says Cecil Robeck, a professor of church history and ecumenics at Fuller.
In fact, plenty of professors think that many new seminarians have a leg up on their predecessors. They understand work, money, and family pressures. They can empathize with parishioners who have drifted in and out of the church. They are comfortable operating in a racially and culturally diverse world. More than half of all divinity students today are over 30, and one-quarter have undergraduate degrees in social science, business, or education, according to the Association of Theological Schools.
“They’ve lived and struggled and know more of the sufferings of their parishioners than many 23-year-olds straight out of college,” says Harold C. Washington, a professor at Saint Paul School of Theology, in Missouri. “Maybe they don’t have the liberal-arts background that gives them the framework for the historical and literary work. But in terms of what they’re preparing for -- to be ministers -- they’re often in a better position.”
Virtually every theology school in the country has seen a radical change in its student body, but Fuller has felt the effects earlier and more fully than most. An evangelical, multidenominational seminary founded in 1947, it appeals to students -- Pentecostals, ethnic minorities, women -- who historically have lived outside the mainstream of ministerial life. Its location in Southern California, where street evangelists and 5,000-seat megachurches are common, has helped keep it aware of the latest trends in ministry.
What’s more, Fuller’s 3,800 students represent 125 denominations and 80 countries. Because of its enormous size -- the average seminary has fewer than 200 students -- Fuller is able to offer specialized programs, like classes taught in Korean and a master’s of divinity almost entirely in Spanish. Its highly respected faculty -- about six times larger than the average seminary’s -- offers a broader range of classes than at most schools, including “Theology and Film” and “Ethics of Everyday Life.”
In Mr. Beaton’s New Testament class, students have been business owners, lawyers, and nurses. Some are recent graduates of church-related colleges with several semesters of philosophy and theology to their credit. But it’s not unusual to find a seminarian who underwent a recent conversion to Christianity.
If there is a typical nontraditional student in Mr. Beaton’s class, Ezra Han may be it. An eldest son in South Korea, he had assumed that he would one day take over his family’s telecommunications manufacturing company. But in business school, he underwent what he describes as an intense religious experience. He had, until then, been a nominal Christian. Soon after his experience, however, he quit drinking and smoking, and he began studying the Bible. In the middle of a job interview, he recalls, he was asked about his “viewpoint of life,” and he began talking about Jesus.
Two and a half years after earning his M.B.A., Mr. Han decided that what he really wanted to be was a pastor. He quit his consulting job in South Korea and enrolled in Fuller without having taken a single course in history, theology, or philosophy. He estimates that he had opened an English-language Bible only three times. Theology school has been hard, he says, but not nearly as hard as the M.B.A. program, in which he had studied 90 hours a week.
A generation ago, there would have been little room for students like Mr. Han in a seminary. The average student had been groomed for the ministry since childhood. Singled out by a church pastor, he -- divinity students were virtually all male until the 1970’s -- had been indoctrinated in the church through Sunday school and youth groups. He probably selected his college based on church affiliation, and continued to prepare for the ministry through his course work. He entered the seminary confident that he was somehow “chosen” for the profession.
In today’s more egalitarian world, seminary students are less intimidated by their lack of credentials, and they place more faith in their personal experience of God. “My competency relies on his grace,” says Mr. Han, “not on my ability.”
But this democratization of the ministry is a double-edged sword. Students frequently consider themselves “seekers” and enroll in divinity programs to develop their faith without a clear plan for their life after graduation. “The downside of the older student is, well, this is just the next thing,” says William A. Dyrness, dean of Fuller’s School of Theology. “And sometimes they have trouble making the deep and lasting commitment needed.”
The common phrase at Fuller for professors’ trying to reach students in the classroom is “Aim for the middle.” Faculty members say they typically move more slowly than they would like through course material, as students like Mr. Han are asked to think critically about the Bible for perhaps the first time in their lives.
Marianne Meye Thompson, a professor of New Testament interpretation, has taught at Fuller for 15 years. Once, she was comfortable assigning her students papers on the authorship of Ephesians. Now she asks them to write essays on “What is the Gospel?” -- a topic she remembers examining as an undergraduate majoring in literature at Wheaton College in Illinois.
“You’re almost doing catechesis rather than graduate-level reflection,” she says.
The lack of preparation isn’t limited to older, non-traditional students. Professors see it as a failure of undergraduate education as well, in which students can pass through four years of college without writing so much as an essay. “I’ve gotten students who have never written a research paper in their lives,” says Mr. Robeck, the church-history professor, “and have no idea how to go about doing it.”
Unlike some seminaries, Fuller does not offer remedial classes -- but that, too, may change. It has a small program in English as a second language, and is considering a course that would improve students’ writing skills.
Mr. Dyrness, the dean of theology, says that some faculty members have suggested developing a noncredit, CD-ROM-based course for students who lack fundamental knowledge of the Bible, while others resist it, arguing that such students would be better off enrolling in a junior college.
Mr. Beaton, who began teaching at Fuller last year, says he hasn’t decided whether such remedial classes would be appropriate. Some students clearly don’t have the ability to survive the seminary’s rigorous pace, he says, and would be better off elsewhere. Others lack the credentials, but make up for it with drive and basic intelligence.
Within theology schools, there has always been a tension between scholarship and practical instruction. Scholarship has dominated, in the belief that students can learn the practical side of ministry once they start working.
But some educators, including Fuller’s president, Richard J. Mouw, think of that as a mistake. Yes, it’s important to understand the relationship between, say, Gnosticism and early Christianity, but you also need to know what to say to the kid who argues that the New Testament doesn’t say anything about premarital sex. Today’s student, impatient with theory and eager for practical knowledge, is helping to push theological education in the right direction, he argues.
“Theologians at university-related campuses seem to struggle more with the challenges of postmodernism posed by lit-crit deconstructionist types,” says Mr. Mouw. “Whereas at seminaries like this, we’re dealing more with postmodernist challenges posed by Marilyn Manson and Seinfeld.”
At Louisville Theological Seminary, older students have helped move the curriculum from the abstract to the concrete. Dianne Reistroffer, the dean, notes that in a class she teaches in child advocacy, students are now required to develop projects to help needy children in their own parishes. “Twenty-five years ago, seminary students tended toward abstract learning,” she says. “Today, people tend to learn through work.”
The future of ministry may, in fact, look a lot like Tracy Porter, a student at Fuller. After more than a decade working in dead-end hospital jobs, she earned a degree in social work last year, at the age of 35. Now in her first year at the seminary, she is interested in a “social justice” ministry, encompassing the mentally ill, the drug-addicted, and the spiritually adrift.
“I’m a single mother. I have been abused. I had the guts to apply for welfare because I had small children,” she says. “I’m not just talking. I’ve lived many of the things that make people feel hopeless and helpless.”
Ms. Porter is eager to immerse herself in scholarship. But that’s only half of what she believes will make her a good minister.
“It’s kind of like being a car salesman,” she says. “You can’t have theory without practice.”
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